Politics:

"Two nations, under Bush - very divisible...
with liberty and justice for only a chosen few."

Wow - that sums it all up, n'est pas? A week after the fiasco of 2004 I am still reeling from the realization that a significant proportion of American voters are so ignorant, and so immoral, that they could vote for more dishonesty, violence, inequality, arrogance, jingoism, hatred, theocracy, and destruction of the environment and the economy.

I keep hearing the fallacious argument that this election was all about "moral values" and "conservative values." That is utter bull feathers! To begin with, this election was all about fear, war, and greed; and wether each voter feels safer with Bush in office than they think they would with Kerry in office. The fact that roughly half of the voters who bothered to turn up feel safer with Bush is shocking, but can easily be fixed with education.

David Brooks says it pretty well in his November 6th Op-Ed artile in the New York Times: "The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's policy, not fundamentalism." According to that often poorly quoted Pew Research Center poll, there was NOT a large shift in the number of American's who based their vote on "values" (itself an ambiguous as phrased in the question). That roughly 20% of voters claim to vote on values should surprise no one who has been paying attention in America, it has been that way for a long time.

The really shocking facts are that so many Americans can believe that Bush's policies make them safer, that so many cannot clearly state the differences between Iraq and Iran or the differences between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, that so many cannot see that unregulated free market capitolism is what is destroying the single bread-winner family of the 1950s.

The whole "moral values" argument is offensive because it is being used as a cop out by so many progressives and liberals. Any voter who really has moral values will value human life and dignity, honesty, equal opportunity for all, social justice, economic justice, and religious tolerance. These moral values are what really make America a great place. Education is the way out of ignorance.