I prefer this condensention in the new “Blue V. Red” “Urban V. Rural” Cultural Wars to this condensention. There’s a lot of that going around these days… enough that you begin to suspect we’ve lost sight of the very purpleness of our daily encounters.

Still, I think the people of New England the West Coast oughta hold their Moderate Republican Senators hostage, until the vast Flyover Country is willing to elect moderate Democrats.

But then again, Vermont is a rural state. And it is firmly in place in the calculation here (though I wonder if he arbitrarily worked his way up to 25 states.) Vermont, home of hippy ice cream, Socialist Congressmen, and the birthplace of gay civil unions. Though, keep in mind that Howard Dean was an accidental defender of gay civil unions… he didn’t take the lead, but when the tide rushed in, he stepped out of its way. And, barely survived in his 2000 re-election bid for governor. (The 2000 presidential results show the state further down in Gore’s slate of state’s than Kerry’s slate — then again, Dean wasn’t a national figure yet.)

“Back to the Land” fades into memory.

Perhaps it’ll seem that the government is going to start acting like the schemers behind this Blimp Enterprise here…

But you know, I wasn’t really kidding about the “Satanic Revival” bit. Scoff at MtV: it’s not about to broadcast 24 / 7 Christian Rock.

I don’t know. Here’s your next president, the Democratic governor of the one Southern state that is trending the Democrats’ way. He should be shoved down our throats in a few years, never mind what or where he stands anywhere… he’s… Southern

Tonight’s newspaper front pages are plastered with those Pentagon-delivered green-image photographs of troops running into Fallujah. Like we used to see back in March of 2003. The kind that belong next to similarly unreal Playboy Centerford Pages, enhanced breasts and all.

The Thomas Friedman maxim from post-Triumphalism Iraq rings in my mind. It’s time to re-re-re-re-invade.

The defenders of the Vietnam War can always attest to the fact that the Americans won every battle. To which, the detractors will point out that the Americans “won” every battle. I don’t know if “we’re” going to “win” or win, or even what it means if we win, or what the difference between a “win” and a win are.

I’m watching the World Series with a group of guys. Someone says “Al Qaeda would love to strike at the World Series.” Perhaps true, though it’s not keeping me up at night. Then he says, “And just as dangerous the Iraqi Cells that are in the US.”

This is a Laurie Mylroie / Oliver North fantasy. I desire to smack him around, but there’s really nothing I can say to him.

This man is standing outside by the street waving a “Bush / Cheney” poster. An exercise in gloating, I suppose. He also has a second sign that he doesn’t have completely up. I go up to try to make out what it says, squinting and moving my head sideways. I gesture to him to raise the damned thing, but he doesn’t. What I make out: “I Believe” list of crossed-out terms “Whatever You Call Yourselves Are Pro-Terrorist.”

I feel insulted. Not by the political expression, but because this is simply the meekest display of inflamatary political speech imaginable. Display Yourself, Asshole!

It occurs to me that the conspiracy theory (and there’s nothing wrong with conspiracy theory, since the world runs off of conspiracies) that a process of Diebold Computer scamming in Ohio and Florida, provisional balloting nonsense, and such stole the election for Bush, which ties in with the discreprency between the initial exit polling and the vote tally — the sort of official explanation for the discreprency that the Bush faction were more weary of talking to the pollsters for some reason starts to make a bit of sense here. It seems counterintuitive to imagine the “redneck voter” is afraid to share his vote, but here it is: this guy is not waving his inflamatary sign.

A man sitting in Pioneer Square waving a sign to “blackboxvoting.com, and another guy waving a sign saying “Bush Is A Terrorist”. Someone walks by, turns around to gesture at his shirt and give a thumbs up sign. The shirt says “Dumb And Dumber” with pictures of the elder and the lesser Bush.

I defend the elder Bush, as these things go. Listen to how Bush reacted in Act Two of this program. Compare that to Bush’s last press confrerence (seemingly the first in a month), where he extorts the press on “the will of the people” to “enforce the one-question rule.”

And so it goes…

Two comics seem appropor right about now.

From Dennis Eichhorn’s “Real Stuff”, we have this story that opesn with a large panel showing Muhammad Ali raping Dennis. Frightened expression on Eichhorn’s face. He wakes up thinking, “What a weird dream.” Shoot to his office-job, where his coworkers are discussing their weird dreams. “You think that’s weird, last night I dreamt I was butt-fucked by Muhammad Ali!” The co-workers fall into awkward slence, and then say “Well, back to work.” Dennis is left mulling over the meaning of his dream. “Maybe I’m a latent homosexual?”

The next day we see Dennis Eichhorn at a party, talking with a black woman he doesn’t know. She snaps at him in so many words, “You white men have had it easy for so long… but you’re about to have your day. Trust me!” and leaves laughing.

Eichhorn is puzzled for a couple of panels, and then the punchline: “Oh! Now I get it!”

The second story comes from an early 1960s Archie comic. Mr. Weatherbee and Mrs. Grundy are walking around, watching various students give inspiring Kennedy-esque speeches before crowds of students, running for student president. Weatherbee can’t hide how impressed he is: “They seem to have matured overnight! My children — they’ve arrived!” We see Jughead lurking in the background, lackadasically crunching on an apple. He’s running too. Weatherbee shows nothing but scorn to Jughead, who’s not doing anything to win the campaign. We then see Weatherbee talking with candidate Archie on how impressed he is on everyone’s new-found maturity, and Archie jumps right into a stump speech “Yes. It is high-time my generation grabs the world from your generation’s faltering hands. I look forward to generations yet unborn who will look back and comment ‘THERE Was a Man!” Weatherbee smiles, leaving saying “I wish they could all be President!” Before noting Jughead again “Except him…” and asks Jughead, “Are you still running for president?” Jughead says something like “Golly gee, yes, sir.” “How do you expect to win if you don’t even give any speeches?” To wit, Jughead responds “I was just about to do that”, and runs into the intercom room and announces over the loudspeaker “Free Coffee and Donuts at the coffee shop! My Treat!” Next panel, crowds of students are running over Weatherbee to the coffee shop, and we flash to the next day with Weatherbee talking to Archie. “I can’t believe you all lost to Jughead.” Archie: “He was just too clever an opponent, and he was the only one with campaign funds.” Weatherbee: “He practically bought the vote. How’d he get all that money?” “From us…” And the punchline, “We paid him to write those campaign speeches.”

So, in summary, what happened in this election was a hybrid of those two stories. As it always seems to be, actually.

2006.

The only thing I can say is Rick Santorum is a Senior Senator of the God Caucus (a caucus that has been expanded with this last election), in a state that just went to Kerry. Easily Target #1, whatever the polls suggest about Santorum right now.

Other than that, Lincoln Chaffee is extremely uncomfortable with his party right now. I have the highest sympathies toward him. Olympia Snowe is a “moderate Republican” from deep in the blue Northeast, and must be made to feel equally uncomfortable — though, since she’s largely a standard political hack, for different reasons…

It’s interesting that the two (Bi-Partisan, in this case) chairs of the “Committee on Present Danger”, aka “The Committee to Make You Shit Your Pants”, are up for re-election. Both will win re-election, depressingly, and more depressingly one is, quote-in-quote “on my side” — so I “want him to win”. (That’s Jon Kyl and Joe Lieberman.)

I wonder if Robert Byrd will retire. The King of Pork, and a pork that doesn’t really help West Virginia that much, and a man you can occasionally see his KKK past slip through. But he’s everyone’s hero for providing a batch of opposition to the War in Iraq and stark criticism to Bush Administration.

Other blogs more serious than I and a bit more attuned to the Donkey — Elephant Game will no doubt have better focus on this matter than I.

#1: Gay is the new Black.

#2: Lincoln Chaffee must is going to hate sharing a Majority Caucus with David Vitter, Tom Coburn, and Jim DeMint. He voted for George Bush’s father, incidentally.

#3: The Democrats’ electoral stranglehold of the Northeast and West Coast seems to have hardened. The Republicans’ stranglehold of the South and vast West seems to have hardened. The Democrats’ hopes of a Return in the South ride through Virginia. The Democrats have stemmed the tide in Colorado.

#4: The “Flyover Country” Problem is confounded by the inequal balance of the Senate. Every state gets two Senators. If not for that, looking toward the Southeast States and the upper MidWest states would look desirable.

#5: History may well regard Howard Dean as the Democrats’ Goldwater. Take it from there. His influence thus far: early backing for an obscure state Senator from Illinois running an insurgent primary campaign against the picks of the Democratic Party machine… who would then go on to a 20 point poll lead over the Republican candidate who would bow out due to a sex scandal, and who would proceed to defeat his replacement by 40 or so points.

#6: The Oklahoma Senate race was a race between a Republican and a member of the Constitution Party.

#7: I don’t know if there are too many obscure Southern Democratic governors for the Democratic Party to choose from…

#8: On the Senate level, the “Conservative” or “Moderate” (ie: Southern) Wing of the Democratic Party is largely decimated. The ironic thing being if the Democrats had done well, it would look a bit like “Zell Miller’s Revenge”. Alas, the new Republican Senator from Georgia is a peg or two to the left of Zell Miller, so it’s probably moot to begin with. On the other hand, this is sort of good: Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose. (Note the sorry Tom Daschle, stuck in dualing roles, is gone… meaning the caucus is no longer compromised by constituency interests of supporting South Dakota.)

#9: I don’t know where I’m taking this blog now. Suggestions? Do I continue something akin to the “Good Fight”?