Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
The dogwoods in Alabama are beginning to turn red, but the color of the nation on the electoral college map is trending mostly blue, blue, blue.
If the numbers hold up for another two days, Barack Obama will become the first half-black American elected president in history, only 146 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 44 years since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Judging by some of my hate e-mail of late, there are some right-wing militia nuts who can’t handle this possibility. They are threatening a counter-revolution if Obama wins.
| Glynn Wilson |
| The dogwoods turn red… |
It makes one wonder where in the fuck they have been for the past eight years as President George W. Bush just about destroyed this nation’s freedoms in the name of Christianity and “conservatism.”
It is almost impossible to know what they even think they mean when they call Bush a conservative and me a liberal these days, since Bush presided over record federal borrowing and spending and created the biggest federal government in our history, and since I have been almost the lone voice in the South trying to save our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures in the face of the FISA vote for Bush’s massive spying bill.
The only thing I can figure is that these people are either morons, or what they stand for is not the United States of America but the Confederate States of America.
Someone, and I can’t remember who now, wrote during the 2004 election cycle that what Bush basically represents in the White House is a back-door win for the American South in the Civil War. Perhaps that’s it.
I have puzzled over the question before as to why the radical right here still seems to support Bush in the polls, when just about every other demographic group in the country has finally realized what a lousy president the frat boy, royal family prince from Texas turned out to be.
His administration has been riddled with one disaster after another, from the overreaction to the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11 that led to the disastrous war in Iraq, to the failure to rescue New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to the financial meltdown in the waning days of Bush’s failed presidency.
The Washington Post is warning on Sunday that there are going to be some terribly disappointed people come Tuesday.
If they are actually as fired up for action as their warnings, there may be more bullets flying at perceived liberals in the very near future like the nuts who killed the head of the Democratic Party in Arkansas and the Unitarians in Knoxville.
What will the Bush Justice Department do about it? Will the administration just let them slide like they did the meth heads who were released without prosecution in the most recently disclosed plot to assassinate Obama?
We will see. I will be voting for Obama on Tuesday anyway, no matter what the risk.
Reluctantly, I will be voting in a church, which is not exactly where we should be voting in this democratic republic that is supposed to have an “impregnable” wall separating church and state, according to the former U.S. Senator and Supreme Court Justice from Alabama, Hugo Black.
That is one of the ways the South finally won the War Between the States by getting Bush in the White House in 2000. The movement of federal tax money to faith-based programs, and the Bush Federal Election Commission’s total capitulation to allowing voting in churches, was symbolic of the problems to come.
Even now, as Bush is about to finally reach lame-duck status for real, the corporate bureaucrats who took over the federal government under Bush are pulling their final Confederate coup. They are trying to gut every environmental regulation left protecting American consumers against corporate pollution, when we should have spent the past eight years beginning the fight for alternative energy and against the coming scourge of climate change due to global warming.
I don’t know for sure if an Obama administration can begin to fix our economy, our politics or our environment. But I can either go with the campaign of “hope” or give up and die. I choose to try.
One thing I know for sure. Senator John McCain, who knows nothing of economics or even how to use a computer, is not prepared to take on the great challenges we face. And neither is his right-wing nut running mate, Sarah Palin.
A vote for McCain-Palin is a vote for the Confederacy. A vote for Obama is a vote for the new Lincoln.
I like what Princeton University professor Cornell West said on the Bill Maher show Friday night.
“It’s the last gasp of the conservative era, where the economics of greed, the culture of indifference, and the politics of fear have been brought together in such a way that it hides and conceals the plight of the poor and working people,” he said. I hope he is right.
“We’re in a transitional moment,” he said. “The real question is, can we generate a commitment to fairness and justice in the face of greed, can we generate compassion in the face of indifference, and can we generate hope in the face of fear?”
He also said, and I agree, “We don’t need another Clinton. We need a Lincoln. We need a statesman.”
Hear! Hear! We recommend a vote for the Democrat, Barack Obama, on Tuesday.
As for local races in Alabama, the best thing you could do to turn back the clock on George Bush and his political guru Karl Rove would be to vote for Deborah Bell Paseur for the Alabama Supreme Court. If you know anyone who has tried and failed to collect money from an insurance company in the past few years, the Republican Supreme Court is to blame. A vote for the Big D, a straight vote for Democrats, is the way to go.
You can either vote to be a part of history on Tuesday, or you can waste your vote in the effort to stop American progress. It’s your choice.
© 2008 – 2016, Glynn Wilson. All rights reserved.
