News: "The number of U.S. citizens visiting Canada's main immigration Web site has shot up six-fold as Americans flirt with the idea of abandoning their homeland after President Bush's election win this week. "

Please go! If you are a disillusioned Democrat, and feel that the US is just gone nuts, please consider bailing. We don't want you here, anyway! Here's a county by county map of election results. Red is Bush, blue is your international man of chin, John Kerry. I grabbed this from newsmax.com.



If that makes you sick to your stomach, consider Canada, a beautiful country. They have mountains, miles and miles of land, polar bears, socialized medicine, and they speak French. Head on up to the Yukon and enjoy a croissant, tea, and a copy of the latest Canadian paper.

Not to put too big a point on it, but I recently received an email friend who sent me a rather long discourse from a demoralized Democrat. It was a long and rambling tirade, that really went nowhere. It did expose the fuzzy thinking, emotional retardedness, and snob mentality of these rich people who didn't get their way this time around. (I'll throw the email in at the end of this post. It's amusing and sad at the same time. This guy has kids.)

Last point before I go away for another three months. I live in the heart of Kerry country according to the above map, on the Left Coast where boys want to marry other boys and everyone else has no problem with that. I went down to Monterey, which is a beautiful town full of Republicans, and got a Bush/Cheney '04 yard sign. The lady actually gave me two of them. I didn't have the nerve to set it out in the yard. Around here, people with those yard signs get rocks thrown through their windows, and stickers on their cars get scraped off with a key by Democrats. Scotts Valley is supposed to be the conservative side of Santa Cruz County, but the Democraterrorists are in full force there. This is the same part of the country where Earth Day is celebrated by burning down an animal clinic or knocking down a power line. I made a comment about some parents getting their kids to skip school to protest the war in Iraq, and a guy I know immediately asked if I was a war mongerer. "Yes, I'm a war mongerer," I answered. I monger wars. In fact, I was out mongering last night, and accidentally nicked my self. I also monger wheat, fried potatoes, and occasionally, I monger African coffees. Once I mongered too long at car wreck and caused a traffic jam.

Usually, though, they're harmless, misguided, twits. They probably start out OK, but then along their path to nowhere they decide God doesn't exist. They've been convinced by their professors, who serve as their high priests, that people who believe there is a God are less intelligent than them. They want to be part of the intellegensia, so they can't believe in God, no matter how lame this makes them. Once absolutes are out of the picture, they are on the way to unhappiness. So if there is no absolute, and morals are relative, pass the dope. They coat their lungs and brains with bong resin, and the ability to think logically fades. They become miserable, yet defiant. Someone tells them that all life (except the unborn human) is sacred, so no more furs, meat, or leather. Don't eat anything with animal products. Soon they'll realize plants are sentient, and will stop eating them. All that's left is dirt. Eat that, hook up with your gay partner, and soon they'll be extinct. Dirt eating gay hippies. It's a sight to behold around here.

Onto the email from the rich Pansy. This is only the first half of it. This guy should have a blog. He's got more money and time than sense.

Everybody, Friends (well, OK, except Republicans):

Last night I was reading 'The Ugly Duckling' to the children and I started crying towards the end, just as the duckling discovers he's a swan. I just couldn't stop crying, and I couldn't explain to the children what was wrong with me, since I didn't know myself. I told them, between sobs, that I guess I wanted so much for fairy tales to be true. I've never cried in front of the children before. Marguerite said she didn't know grown-ups could cry, since she'd never seen a grown-up cry, certainly not her mother.

Ok, this might be a chick or a dude. It's signed Dave, but it's a new century. Maybe mom is named Dave.

I turned on the TV an hour or so later, about 9:30 pm, for the first time that day. It was at least an hour afterwards before I realized what I had been crying about. Subconsciously, I think, I knew what had happened, even though I wasn't thinking about it at all while I was with the kids.

Now, I feel like I -- and many of you, or us -- have been living in some sort of fairy tale world. We talk to people who are like us, and we listen to TV reporters who are like us. The tension and even anguish I saw on the faces of some of the mainstream reporters last night was palpable. Or, who knows, maybe I was imagining that too.

Here's the confession:

My children go to a very upper-class public school; it's almost like a private school, really. About half of their classmates are from Tiburon, half from Belvedere. Tiburon has been ranked the 13th richest city in the US; Belvedere, 6th richest. 50% of Belvedere is Republican, the highest percentage in the Bay Area. Yet in class-wide polls of the first graders, the vote for Kerry was 2 to 1! Even among all those Republicans! That tells me that the educated, establishent rich, who no doubt would pay far lower taxes under Bush, must think very strongly that the Bush administration is an unmitigated disaster all round. You have to feel pretty strongly about something to vote against your own self-interest

.

Am I misreading this? First graders voting for Kerry, 2 to 1! Now kids, get back to learning addition.

But I guess that's just not the way people think, outside of my own pretty little circle. Economics or not (and pretty soon, we're going to see that there's nothing prudent about Bush's economics) I guess there's a very irrational, visceral reaction that's happening in America, in the heartland. They're scared, they're vengeful, and they're very susceptible to ideologues who are in their own ivory towers with their own delusions of grandeur.

And yes, I do think that for a little while, things will get better economically. My prediction is that the stock market will do very well next year. I think that corporations -- the big ones especially, who domintate the market indexes -- will make very nice profits. And that will help me, since I've got a lot of stocks. But of course, it's going to be just as hard for me to find a job, since companies will push their current people even harder to produce more, instead of hiring more people. Under the Bushies, I believe, the 'haves' will get more, the 'have-nots' will get less. The spirit of squeezing more blood from the turnips will continue.

Yes, those bloody turnips they serve up there in the Marin County. Swerve the Bentley if you see them on the road!

And I think that the appearance of a rising economy is going to exacerbate the messianic zeal of the neo-cons. I think they'll be looking for other countries to become vassals. I think they could even go after Iran. They're sure not going to go after the countries that really harbor terrorists, like Saudi Arabia. They're going to be even closer to the greedy princes of the House of Saud than they were before, if that's even possible. And they'll continue to support Israel in its repression, and eventual take-over of the Palestinians. I feel very strongly that if the US just: 1) cut their financial support for Israel; 2) pledged to support Israel's security, but 3) insisted that Israel cut a fair deal with the Palestinians -- and gave them their own state, with viable, contiguous boundaries -- that: 4) Islamic terrorism would wane. And if the US would genuinely support self-determination for all the peoples of the Mideast -- fundamentalist, Islamic governments for those who want them; increasingly liberal monarchies (with a better distribution of wealth) for those who want them; and represesntative democracy for those who want them -- that the entire Muslim world would come toward us, and terrorism would become largely a thing of the past.

But I don't think that's going to happen.

I think, in the end,

Or is it, with the end?

that most of the Bush agenda is about oil, and the profits of a handful of companies and their shareholders. (Hey, you say, pretty frickin' brilliant, how long did it take you to figure that out?) I don't think that George Bush knows just how much his brain is soaked in oil. He's grown up with an assumption that oil companies are good. (And to be honest, I've grown up with the opposite assumption, so I know how he feels. I feel his pain.) Bush doesn't even know how biased he is toward Big Oil. I will concede to him that oil companies provide us with a valuable, necessary, product, upon which our whole modernization depends, and (hitherto) at reasonable prices, more or less. But the oil cartel's priority -- and, in fact, its duty to its stockholders --profit at any cost -- is the dominant theme inside Bush's brain. And Cheney and Rice, who do most of Bush's thinking for him, are representatives -- virtual lobbyists -- for the international oil industry. They really do believe that what's good for General Motors (or Standard Oil) is good for the country. And they're willing to kill lots of people for it, especially since they're not doing the killing, and personally don't know anyone who is killing or being killed. They justify it by pious claims of 'spreading democracy' (like in Kuwait? In Saudi Arabia? Go figure.)

Eh.

I saw a really interesting guy on the 'Book Channel' (ESPN 2, my favorite TV network) the day before yesterday. His name's Ted Rall, and he wrote 'Generalissimo el Busho'. Sounds kinda light-hearted (you know, comparing Bush to the Fascist dictator Franco), but Rall was one of the most logical speakers I've ever heard. I don't remember the specifics of what he said, but the gist of it was that the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were all about oil (or in the case of Afghanistan, the pipeline), since, one by one, he argues that none of the other arguments -- promotion of democracy and womens' rights, removal of the terrorists, ending the opium trade, etc. -- make any sense, or stand up to scrutiny based on what actually happened. I'm going to look into this further, in my copious free time. (Since a number of people think I must be sitting around goofing off instead of actively trying to re-enter the workplace, well, maybe I ought to just 'goof off' more, examining things that should be 'irrelevant' to me, like what the he**'s happening to our country.)

Gosh, I suppose I should shut up now, since, Lord knows, Ashcroft may be reading this. It really wouldn't surprise me at this point. I can only take comfort in the belief that there are so many people who think like I do -- well, about 47% in fact -- that the Bushies can't possibly have the resources to go after all of us -- that they'll have to tolerate some dissent.

Note: Forward to John A. 47% of the people think like you do? That explains the popularity of shows like Friends and the OC.

And they will tolerate it, because they know that in the end, we won't do them much harm. They've got it all now -- all three branches of governement. I don't know how long it's been since they've had this much power before.

Dave

See? They're just harmless little kitties. I'm going out to try out my new power, and see if I can fly.

To Canada.