La victoria de Bush

Una Derrota Devastadora

Autor: Matthew Rothschild

Fecha: 3/11/2004

Traductor: Celeste Murillo, especial para PI

Fuente: The Progressive

A Devastating Defeat

My wife was crying in bed this morning as we watched the returns that showed a victory for Bush in the Electoral College and a baffling three-million-vote spread in the popular count.

How could this happen? We asked ourselves.

And we just shook our heads at all the damage that Bush will do in the next four years, now that he appears to be a legitimate President with even a wider margin in the Senate.

Bush will have more of a swagger today.

Cheney more of a smirk.

And Karl Rove will be a crowing.

He produced his millions of rightwing evangelicals by cynically manipulating the same-sex marriage issue.

But hold the applause for him.

John Kerry must take some responsibility for his own defeat.

While he had a good final month and performed well in the debates, he left himself too high a hill to climb.

After gaining the nomination, he squandered a full four months, doing precious little in public except flaunting his elitist credentials by going snowboarding in Utah and windsurfing off of Nantucket.

He took forever to find the right note to hit on the Iraq War--that it was making us less safe.

And his defense of his vote to authorize the war was incoherent and disingenuous.

On top of that, he gave Bush ammunition by saying stupid things like that $87 billion comment, and he failed for weeks to respond to the Swift Boat slanders.

Perhaps most unforgivably, he was too nice to Bush & Co. at the Democratic Convention. Kerry and other leading Democrats barely mentioned Bush's name at all--or Cheney's, or Ashcroft's, or Rumsfeld's, or Wolfowitz's, or Tom DeLay's, much less to spotlight the reactionary, crooked road of the Republicans.

And they never took Bush down two notches for being asleep at the wheel before 9/11. If Gore had been President on 9/11, you can be sure Bush and Rove would have ripped into him for it. Nice just doesn't cut it. By giving Bush a free pass on this issue, Kerry let him hoard the terrorism issue to himself. That was a fatal error.

Today, all the pundits are talking about the "moral values" issue.
Spare me that phrase.

What kind of moral values are they that justify the killing of 100,000 innocent people in Iraq?

Where in the Bible does it say to give alms to the rich and food to the gluttons?

The term "moral values" is bad shorthand for rightwing fundamentalist views.

Democrats, progressives, liberals, and leftists need to talk up our own moral values: advancing justice and kindness; providing for the homeless, and the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and those without health insurance; tending to the environment (an issue Kerry was oddly silent about); respecting international law; and not waging needless, reckless war.

And we need to defend the basic American value of the separation of church and state.

The survival of our secular government, so crucial to our founders, is at stake today.

Look back 44 years to JFK's famous speech about religion and politics, and notice how far we've slid since then.

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote, where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference. . . . I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish, where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source, where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials."

In this election, the churches threw their weight behind Bush and tried to impose their will on the general populace, and Bush asked for help from the Pope in bringing Catholics behind him, and Bush is providing public funds to religious schools with his faith-based initiative.

The separation between church and state is hardly absolute anymore today.

And it will become less and less so in the next four years.

Bush will cause great harm elsewhere, as well: He will despoil the environment, stack the Supreme Court, redistribute wealth upwards, deregulate corporations, jeopardize a woman's right to choose, deny the right of marriage to gay couples and lesbian couples, and continue to trample on our civil liberties. Social Security will be undermined, and Medicare and Medicaid restricted. On foreign policy, Bush will lead us deeper into the Iraq quagmire and perhaps on to even more lethal adventurism in Iran or North Korea.

This is a victory for reaction, for war, and for primitive capitalism.
Yet at this devastating moment, we must not resign, withdraw, or give in to the paralysis of despair.

W. H. Auden wrote in 1939, at another difficult moment, that "our world in stupor lies."

And I'm sure the rest of the world is stupefied at the choice Americans made on Tuesday.

But Auden also said, "May we, beleaguered by the same negation and despair, show an affirming flame."

And that's what we must do: We must show an affirming flame--and win people over by it.