Twas The Night Before Christmas....

So what is there to say on this, the eve of a history-making election, that hasn't been said already? Probably nothing. And just this...

It's been a long, exhausting two years of politics. It actually feels like this campaign started the second the 2004 one ended. We're tired. We're sick of seeing the same people on t.v. night after night. We're gagged by the personal attacks. We're tired of hearing the same, boring words over and over: change, maverick, my friends, socialist, redistributionist, Joe the Plumber, George Bush, 90% of the time, tax cuts, 250,000, health care, Iraq, community organizer. We're tired of McCain's forced smirky smile, of Biden's tangential rants, of Palin's chopping off the "g" in a present participle, of Obama's teachery, preachery explanations. We want it to be over already. We want a break. We want to enjoy Thanksgiving and Christmas in peace. It's hard to keep fighting, keep debating for one candidate, one party over another for so, so long. I, for one, am burnt out.

It should be said that for many of us, The Liberals, the anti's, it's been eight years of political misery. We simply could not believe the results of the 2000 election that elevated George Bush to the Presidency. That was tough enough. Then his surprising reelection in 2004. We knew Kerry was a tightass with no sense of humor but still, we couldn't believe people went back to drink from the dirty Ganges a second time. So we suffered, yelled often, and endured. But now, with Bush as a lame duck, it seems that most people finally understand that the election and reelection of a man who was not intellectually curious, who relied on the counsel of others out of insecurity, who preferred "yes" men and women to an opposing point of view, and who allowed cronyism and unfettered loyalty to infect his administration like a swarm of termites, rotting it from the inside out, has brought the United States to its knees.

9/11 was a bitchslap to the face, a shock to our system. George Bush did not cause it, obviously, but he certainly is responsible for how he chose to use our military to respond to it. Everything that's happened since has been on his watch. A war that he started under false pretenses, on the basis of what history will one day show was an intentional lie to the American people. A war that's lasted five years and counting, cost us $600 billion and counting, and shows no sign of abating. A war with no apparent military objective in sight that's created more terrorists (or terrorist sympathizers) than existed before Shock & Awe and opened the floodgates of influence for Iran, our competitor in the region and a thorn in our collective American ass for almost three decades now. A war that's being fought every day while most of us don't see and don't care what's going on over there. It's happening in a different world that doesn't exist for most of us. Because the Bush Administration doesn't want us to see it for ourselves or think about it too much. So we don't.

Afghanistan, where all of our military resources should have been devoted, is a war that we're losing. Now they're talking about negotiating with the Taliban to finally resolve the conflict. The Taliban! So let me get this straight. We overthrow Saddam Hussein, who didn't attack us, who was Iran's sworn enemy, who was contained in a no-fly zone, but who we didn't like for a variety of reasons (in 2003, not 1988 when we supported him), and now, five years later, we're considering signing a peace treaty with the people who protected and collaborated with Osama Bin Laden on 9/11? The people who gave him, and are likely still giving him, safe haven? As Kevin Costner said in the movie JFK: "We're through the looking glass, people. White is black. Black is white." Could our foreign policy be more fucked up?

On Bush's watch, Hurricane Katrina embarrassed us and made us look like a Third World country. Floods and floating corpses. Normally you'd see that in places like Bangladesh. Nope. Happens here too. Hugo Chavez offered us relief supplies. That was nice of him. A couple of years after that, our runaway, debt-based capitalist system, the one that helped us all run up our credit cards so we can enjoy our toys NOW, finished the job, by delivering a deathblow to our soft, capitalist nether regions, where the credit chickens finally came home to roost. Massive, iconic corporations like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stears, Merrill Lynch, companies who'd been around a long time and whose names were as American as the Super Bowl, went under. Others, like AIG, we saved with the biggest public bailout in U.S. history. Now they're all standing in line with open palms waiting for their (our) money, so they can squander it again. The biggest irony of ironies, however, is that Bush, the oil man, the capitalist, The Decider, the fiscal conservative, has overseen and promoted the greatest American experiment with socialism since FDR's New Deal. You can't write this shit.

In short, the man nearly half of this country voted for twice because they thought he had a better personality than Al Gore and John Kerry (he does) has fucked this country up royally and set his own party back at least 8 years, maybe more. He has the lowest approval rating at this point in office of anyone since they've been measuring it. I think it's below 20%. No one, including McCain and virtually every Republican running for elected office, will be seen with him. Now, maybe you think Bush is not responsible for all this, I do for most of it, but maybe you don't. Hopefully you'll at least agree that he's fairly incompetent and has some atrocious luck. George Bush is the Presidential Cooler. (See The Cooler, starring Alec Baldwin, William H. Macy, and Maria Bello).

What can be said on this eve of a history-making election is that Americans across the board despise a lot of things Bush and Cheney et al. have done in office. We are ready to take another, more peaceful and pragmatic path towards our future. We want to talk to our enemies. We want to get rid of the orange jumpsuits and close Guantanamo. We want to stop allowing our intelligence agencies to torture prisoners. We want to end these wars sensibly. We want to take the lead in an energy economy and create the industries that are going to lead the world in the next century. We want to show the world we can still do some pretty kick ass things besides blow shit up with state of the art stealth bombers and laser guided missiles. It's not just Liberals who feel this way. Many conservatives do too. Really, it's not that hard when you look at the sorry state we're in right now and how low we've sunk.

And after all of this, this clusterfuck, this total mess we're in, we're going to elect a black man as President. I don't think people understand how improbable what's about to happen really is. A black man as President in THIS country, with its history of slavery, the KKK, the civil rights movement, racial incidents from lynching to the L.A. Riots, to the O.J. trial(s). I can honestly say I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. I thought we'd see a woman as President, maybe. Not this. But it's about to happen. And that blows my mind. If you think of it purely in racial terms, it's pretty shocking. When you look at the man though, it really isn't. He's the smartest, the most savvy, the most inspiring, and the most unlikely candidate out there. He attracted white voters, young voters, new voters. He gave Chris Matthews goosebumps. He reminded the Kennedys of Kennedy. He beat the Clinton machine. He survived the Republican Swift Boat. And he did it all with a Muslim name, two parts of which echo the names of two of our greatest foes in the past twenty years.

Barack Hussein Obama. Fucking unreal.

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even an excited and extremely motivated electorate.