I have way more links on the election than I have time to put up right now but these two cover some important bases.

They voted for this mess

"My stepfather's mother, a northeast Nebraska housewife all her life, used to drive my mother crazy with her political views. A widow living solely on Social Security benefits and paying for her doctors with Medicare, grandma Elsie constantly spouted something along the lines of 'I'll never vote for a Democrat. They've never done anything for me.'" So here's the thing. We're wrong. We have to stop. We have to do something different. [...] And Elsie? She's just a willfully ignorant asshole. Who votes. And there's millions just like her. They want to take what we give them and then go to the polls and vote so that those things are gone forever. For everyone. I say, "hey, dumbass, you don't see your Medicare, your social security, your safe food and medicine, your right to vote and own property, all these rights and safeties liberals fought and died for. You hate liberalism because Sean Hannity told you to? Fine--give it all up--lose all your rights, your safety and comfort. Great. But don't drag us down with you." Why should I lose my rights because all the Elsies in the world go vote their hatred and delusion at their pastor Karl Rove's bidding? We can read Mark Ames' The Spite Vote , we can read Franks' What's the Matter With Kansas? We can think and discuss and argue and get angry with each other for various sins of political incorrectness all day long. And in the end, we're left facing the fact that more people than we thought possible are just plain assholes. They're mean. They're weak. They're cowardly. They're hateful. And they're fucking stupid. They just voted in their president. And they're marching us toward a fascist state . (And it doesn't matter if the election was Diebolded and robocalled and thwarted at the polls, either: it should never have been close enough to steal.) These people never vote for good government; they don't even believe in government. They're spoiled little toddlers who freak out when they're expected to share. They don't think they have to pay for anything that they take. And they're right--they don't. We do . [...] Let's secede. And for our first act of secession, Arios announces The Tax Fairness Act of 2005 : "I suggest the Democrats first major legislative proposal, complete with press conferences, laser show, hunger strike, whatever, is the "Tax Fairness Act of 2005." This Act would mandate that, within some reasonable margin of error, your state should get as much back from the feds as is sent to them in taxes. It's time to end this kind of geographic welfare!" We have the money. We have the skills. We have the knowledge and science and art and decency. We have the money. Blue state taxes go to red states. We subsidize their bigoted, murderous asses. All we have to do is help the Republicans stomp the federal income tax into oblivion and then crank up our state's income tax to cover our social programs. So, let's teach them evolution first-hand, and let them starve. No more Blue State funds to Red States. Write them off, because their culture war is more important to them than ethics, security, retirement, overtime, the house they live in, the food in their bellies or even the health and safety of their children. If red state voters want to vote GOP, let them live in the world they vote for.

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Sparta 286 Athens 254

We have just had the election of 1856 - and with it will come the radicalization of the liberal wing of American politics, on that will use its technological and social organization as leverage in a life or death struggle with the militarized oligarchy which is now in power. It's about rent versus capital, and money as a stock, versus money as a flow America, narrowly, voted for National Socialism - a system by which the industrial and technological sections of the economy are taxes and pillaged for the sinews of a militarized economy, while the hinterland is given access to land, social status and oil in order to hold on to previous value relationships. Nazi comparisons are facile - because they lead to the wrong conclusion. Americans did not vote for racism, bigotry, death camps or any such will o the whisp. They voted for an ossification of the social structure, and placing a certain nationalist mania in a privileged social and political position. The army cannot be questioned, and those traits which make it possible to fill that army are national imperatives. The campaign hinged on this - the Swift Boats and marriage attacks were not distractions, but encapsulations of two simple points. The first was a way of saying that Kerry would betrayed the military, and therefore he would cut the military to balance the budget. Simple terms: make the cost fall on someone else. The second was a way of saying that the social changes that come with a high production, high value added economy - namely a cosmopolitan society - would happen under Kerry. That is Kerry was presented, accurately, as being a threat to the social and economic hierarchy to the land owning classes. Land, which holds its value through having cheap gasoline, demands a military machine to obtain the oil and to maintain the social inequality should it come to that. Kerry was, accurately, presented as someone who would not go to war for oil.

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For those not up on history — the election of 1865 set the stage for the Civil War.