Yellow Dog

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the most divisive president in recent history (even more so than Clinton) would play on people's hate, fear, and prejudices to win the election. Bush certainly couldn't run on his record.

In a pathetic attempt to "reach out" to all Americans, including the 55 million who voted against him (the largest percentage ever to vote against a sitting president), Dubya said yesterday in his press conference, "I will work with anyone who shares my goals." The unmitigated arrogance continues....

As one of my favorite columnists, Don Williams, illustrates, it is indeed a "sad day in America":

"Consider four more years of Bush. One thousand-four-hundred-sixty-one days and nights marching in like an occupying army, trailing a sick cargo of simplistic patriotism, false pride, incoherent pronouncements, cruelty, mendacity, destruction….

Bush thinks he has a mandate, you can see it in his eyes. So get ready for new nuclear weapons, aerial bombardment, innocents killed in the name of the Lord, impassioned and united enemies, broken treaties that'll make the world less safe.

Get ready for crooked dealings in the name of energy, for bills that'll deface the environment and sweetheart deals for polluters.... Get ready for national debt as far as the eye can see or else new taxes on the middle class and poor.

Get set for a continuing procession of heat waves, storms, droughts and more papered over with lies about the effects of global warming. Get ready for drilling in virgin wilderness, roads into forests that pre-date humankind's arrival in America. Get ready for mountaintop removal and destruction of our streams.

Assuming they all stay on, get ready for more lies from Dick Cheney, more false optimism from Donald Rumsfeld, more double-talk from Condoleezza Rice, more compromises from Colin Powell, and God-knows-what from John Ashcroft and ideologues like Paul Wolfowitz.

Get ready for fuel shortages and economic upheaval and unprecedented borrowing.

Someone described Nixon as “the darkness reaching out for the darkness,” and so it is with Bush. The prospect of four more years of that spiteful grin, that stuttering incoherence, that tendency to make grand and empty pronouncements and pander to our fears, dreams and patriotic impulses is almost too much to bear for thinking people, for reading people, for people who reach out for the light."

As Rethuglicans try to drag us into the darkness, it's up the yellow dogs to reach out for the light.

Don Williams comments - A sad day in America