Living a life free of consequence

Those who chose bush were motivated by greed, fear, hatred, or a combination thereof. Those who would argue otherwise can only plead ignorance, likely the willfull kind, and that doesn't let you off the hook. Richard Cranium of the ASZ looks at Edwards' two America, theme and finds that in fact there are three America's:

In the afterglow of our most recent buggering by the GOP machine, what strikes me, given all of the GOTV work I've done in the past year, is how many people simply don't give a rat's ass. What's worse is that there is literally no way to engage these people. For every voter I spoke with or registered, there were five who just didn't want to be bothered, and no amount of talking or political prosthelytizing by me was going to change their mind.
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It's the "don't give a shits" that drove us off a cliff yesterday. I'm at a huge loss as to how to engage this missing bloc of the electorate, and I don't even know if there's ultimately an answer.

He does have a point. While i wait for the final numbers of the turnout, it seems that for now the number is in the vicinity of 113 million, an increase of 10 million voters. Now given that in one NC precinct, election workers were told that machines could handle 10,000 votes when in fact they could only tally 3,500, led to the irrefutable disenfranchisement of 4,500 early voters. Right down the memory hole.

Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, California-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.

I do have to say that a company named Unilect would be pretty appropriate in this case, and I would certainly be royally pissed if I have voted early in this county. Of course I think it is a legitimate to wonder how widespread this might have been.
Lots of ireegularities in FL and OH, suprise suprise.

Since between blogger and computer freezes eating this post up, I'll try to cover a couple of points. Given the media has been able to keep the wraps on an amazing variety of incompetance, many people live in an alternated reality, they do not see the ramifications of our foreign policy, they have been insulated from the true costs of war, or the disastrous economic policy. They are living in a reality where nothing has consequence, cost, and they are constantly insulated from the future impact. A PIPA report recently released (you can find it google PIPA) suggests that most bush voters were more likely to agree with Kerry on the issues than bush, strike one for ignorance.

I guess the last point I want to make, is that I realize that most of the people in the greed and hate groups, actually do not consider us Americans. I am not sure what the actuall representation of this particular group is but it is larger than I thought. Digby shares his thoughts here, and links to this bit of odious screed.

The left must be defeated in the realm of ideas, just as it was on Tuesday at the ballot box. The left hates the ballot box and loves its courtrooms, which is why it hopes to continue to advance its agenda through the courts. This must end.

The left bewitches with its potions and elixirs, served daily in its strongholds of academe, Hollywood and old media. It vomits upon the morals, values and traditions we hold sacred: God, family and country. As we learned Tuesday, it is clear the left holds the majority of Americans, the majority of us, in contempt.

Is this an accurate characterixation of any democrats that you know? I certainly do not recognize myself in this characterization, but apparently more people buy into this bullshit than I previously believed. I guess I can pull shit out of my ass like the last sentence, It certainly would be more accurate to replace left with right. Notice "the majority of Americans, the majority of us," I personally don't like a lot of things about the way republicans go about their business, but I would never suggest that they were not Americans.

In conclusion, I think that we won this thing, and all the handwringing going on about what we need to do is both good and bad, but two things we need to focus on are transparency in the election process, and reform in the media. Decrease the liklihood of fraud, decrease the number of the ignorant. Does our message and approach need tweaking, probably, and finding a way to reduce the number of don't give a shit's would go a long way toward building a coalition for social justice.