Discontented Soul

The following three excerpts also apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Australian election on 9 October, 2004

...Maybe this time the voters chose what they actually want: Nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, [the "security" stemming from Chicago School economics],"safety" through torture, [detention centres and macho posturing], backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway President [Prime Minister]... - Katha Pollitt, Mourn in The Nation, 5 November.


I'm sure millions of Americans voted for George W under the honest impression that he stands for moral values - family, patriotism, faith in God. I'm sure it's the Democrats' fault that such a silly ruse is allowed to stand. What Bush actually does stand for is nicely summed up by a rather common news story that got stuck on the business pages lately ... In September, Merck & Co., the huge drug manufacturer, pulled Vioxx off the market. Vioxx was a popular pain-killing, anti-arthritis drug, but Merck said it was putting patients' safety first. A new study from the Federal Drug Administration showed high doses of Vioxx triple the risk of heart attack and sudden cardiac death ... From there, the story bifurcates - it takes two directions. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa revealed that the FDA had tried to silence the author of the study, Dr. David Graham, associate director of science in the Office of Drug Safety. Grassley said the FDA first sat on Graham's study and that then he was "ostracized" and "subjected to veiled threats and intimidation." ... The Wall Street Journal followed the other fork, finding internal memos from Merck showing that company officials may have been aware of the dangers of Vioxx as long ago as 1996, including a memo apparently instructing its sales reps to "dodge" the question when doctors asked about the cardiac record of Vioxx ... In short, we have a toothless regulatory agency in the pocket of the industry it is supposed to patrol. We have an administration-wide contempt for science and plain facts. And the allegation against the folks at Merck is that they were making such enormous profits on a drug that killed people that when they knew or suspected it was killing people, they kept right on selling it. When the information that Merck had known for a long time about Vioxx and heart attacks became public, the company's stock fell by 9.6 percent ... That's the system George W. Bush stands for: where a corporation can knowingly kill people for profit and, when it finally comes out, everyone knows the penalties will be so light the company doesn't even lose a tenth of its worth. Hey, just a little bump in the road ... We sure don't want any of that terrible, burdensome government regulation to control that kind of behavior, do we? We sure don't want an FDA that listens to its own scientists and acts promptly, do we? We sure don't want anyone to sue these monster corporations, do we? I bet if it were possible to compare the odds of an American getting killed by a negligent regulatory agency and rapacious corporate behavior versus an American getting killed by a terrorist, it would turn out we need to be a lot more scared of rank greed and its enablers than we do of terrorists. - Molly Ivins, Don't Mourn, Organize in The Boulder Daily Camera, 5 November

The results were terrible. A born-again, right-wing religious fundamentalist promising four more years of war, repression and inequality has just won a second term as leader of our nation. Eight more members of congress are now Republican, including at least one senator who believes that doctors who terminate pregnancies should be executed. The democratic senate minority leader is out of a job. 11 states have made gay marriage illegal, and numerous progressive ballot initiatives, like the efforts here in California to provide health care for millions of workers or slightly reduce harsh three strikes laws have failed. - Roni Krouzman, Mourn and Organize published by CommonDreams.org, 5 November

Mr. Bush ran against reality and won. This is fairly astounding. It demands respect. There is something to be learned from it
Mr. Bush was, as he claimed, steadfast. You knew where he stood and you knew he wouldn't change. Mr. Bush also had a knack for identifying things that disturb people and promising clear, bold solutions to them:
Terrorism - War on terror;
Education - No Child Left Behind;
Taxes - It's our money, we should have it back. And now, let's simplify the tax code;
Social Security - Save it by giving you more control over your own money and taking it away from the government;
Astounding cost of medicine - Add a benefit to Medicare.
Each of these is, without doubt, a real problem. Mr. Bush's solutions (not as phrased, but as practiced) are terrible...

Will Left in America Get Its Say Now?
by Antonia Zerbisias
Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by the Toronto Star

`You can't say we weren't cautious," said CNN's Judy Woodruff shortly after calling Florida, with 98 per cent of the vote in, for President George W. Bush Tuesday night.
"I enjoyed how much I've heard `We don't know,'" her colleague Aaron Brown said at some other point in the long night, referring to how nobody was jumping the electoral gun on the states. "We're not ashamed to say that."
Yeah? So where was their sense of shame over the past four years? Where was the circumspection, deliberation and responsible reporting after Americans went to the polls in 2000?
Instead of waving the flag and waiving the freedom to criticize the self-styled "war president," the media should have been asking the questions that needed asking.

President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda...

Missing Miss Kitty Amidst the Gunsmoke
by Rosa Maria Pegueros
Published on November 2, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Back in the Good Old Days, we watched as television cowboys settled every conflict with a showdown at high noon outside the saloon — the one quickest on the draw was invariably the good guy; problems were settled in a television hour, and America could go to bed with an easy mind.
Cowboys always had a special draw on our hearts and minds. Television and its romance with westerns gave us two of the dominant trends in our country: A short attention span and the use of guns to settle any conflict. Is it any wonder that faced with a presidential candidate who told us that we had to curb our oil gluttony, Jimmy Carter, and a genuine television cowboy, Ronald Reagan, America chose the cowboy? Twenty years later, Al Gore, a brainy vice president who had written a book on the environment lost to another cowboy, George W Bush.
Dubya is a genuine Texas cowboy (albeit a scion of a New England blueblood family with an Andover-Yale-Harvard education) with a fondness for clearing the brush on his property, speaking forthrightly, and publicly practicing his born-again Christianity. To the conservative Americans who were very upset over the “moral decline” of the Clinton years, the tee-totaling, Bible-thumping Texan was a great choice...

Religion's Kidnapping of the Campaign
by John MacArthur
Published on Tuesday, November 2, 2004 by the Providence Journal/(Rhode Island)

It surely sounds quaint, but I've always taken to heart the old social dictum not to mix religion in conversations with people I don't know well.
As even my wise-guy atheist father recognized, few things could offend someone more deeply than a heedless remark, taken the wrong way, that calls into question the wisdom of the Lord God Almighty. Americans hold dear their articles of faith, and no one but the purest Enlightenment liberal truly welcomes having his belief system challenged, even when the sceptic is easily dismissed as a card-carrying infidel...

University of Michigan researchers find that for long-term relationships, women like dads, but for short-term relationships they prefer cads. Dads are men who are kind, compassionate and monogamous, while cads are the classic romantic dark heroes who are dominant, promiscuous and daring. "The dad versus cad distinction is intuitive to women and remains a key element of contemporary mating strategies," says Daniel Kruger, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. The study, in the journal Human Nature, says although cads don't make good dads, their genes will be passed to their sons, who will increase their mothers' eventual reproductive success by providing numerous grandchildren.

I think those of us who identify as "dads" rather than "cads" should tell women to go and take a running jump - no genes, no nurturing child-support!

One Day Left
by Michael Moore
Published on Monday, November 1, 2004 by michaelmoore.com

Dear Friends,

This is it. ONE DAY LEFT. There are many things I’d like to say. I’ve been on the road getting out the vote for 51 straight days so I haven’t had much time to write. So I’ve put together a bunch of notes to various groups all in this one letter. Please feel free to copy and send whatever portions are appropriate to your friends and family as you spend these last 24 hours trying to convince whomever you can to show up and vote for John Kerry.
Here are my final words…