Conservatism won! NOT

Get ready for this.  The Vichy Republicans and fifth column talk show hosts are now trying to claim that this was a Republican/conservative victory.    You just have to give these guys credit.  You could disembowel them and they'd still try to tell the American people that they had guts.   Their phony claim is based on a few isolated victories by moderate Democrats over far right Republicans, but in almost every case the winning Democrat was more liberal than his defeated Republican opponent. 

 

The people in South Dakota, a purported Conservative string hold, rejected a referendum that would have banned abortion for nearly every reason imaginable, including rape and incest. The People in Arizona (a border state)  not only proved surprisingly opened minded when it came to immigration, they also voted down one of those foolish marriage protection amendments.  If you want to see how the conservative virus has failed to infect the younger generation, just go to the most conservative area of the country and look at how young people dress.   This may come as a shock and a revelation but they aren't dolled up in school uniforms.   Ask them how they feel about mixed race relationships.  Ask them how they feel about Gays and Lesbians.  Ask them about the music they listen to and the TV programs they watch, and I can almost guarantee you that they are not watching reruns of the Lawrence Welk Show.   Despite a higher birth rate among religious conservatives, the truth of the matter is that those children are leaning towards  cultural liberalism.  

 

The fact of the matter is that the past twelve years have been an aberration in an otherwise progressive history.  America has accepted liberalism, and the irony is that it not only happened during a conservative hay day, it may well have happened because of that conservatism heyday.   By any standard this election was a repudiation of the conservative agenda.   First and foremost it was a rejection of a sociopathic administration that led us into an occupation of choice, a war that left us with more than 2,800 dead and more than 20,000 wounded/disabled.  To make the situation even worse, the reasons for going to war kept changing--as did the reasons for continuing the occupation.   The American people are not stupid.   They know a series of lies and excuses when they see one.   Secondly, the Republicans reverted to their true form.  Not only did they side with the upper classes and corporate masters who routinely fund their campaigns; they essentially declared war on the middle and lower classes--not to mention several laws--to guarantee that their corporate masters were paid back in full and with interest.  The voters figured out that while you may come across individual corrupt democrats the Republican party had in and of itself become a culture of corruption, from the financial to the sexual. 

 

I also suspect that one some level Americans rediscovered the concept of morality.   You can't claim to be a moral country--or a moral party--in one breath and then turn around and support sexually sadistic torture in the next breath.   Note that running a series of pedophiles, racists, homophobes,  wife beaters, adulterers, and corporate criminals didn't help the conservative cause either, but as we have said many times before, by transferring so much power to corporate interests while trampling over our Constitution, this country came as close to fascism as it has ever come.   So in a very real sense of the word, the elections of 2006 were not only a rejection of the Republican party--they were a rejection of totalitarianism in red, white, and blue clothing. 

 

As I mentioned before I suspect that the American people realized that there was a lot more to an expanding economy than an inflated stock market, an increase in service sector jobs, and low wages.  Health care and economic security became key issues.   When you're working two jobs, and trying to live within a budget and still struggling to keep your head above water, you know on a very real level that something has gone terribly wrong with the American dream.   As if that was an accident.   The current batch of conservatives view social mobility as an objective to be overcome, a trend to be crushed.  To some extent they really do believe that they are superior to others and deserve a disproportionate piece of the American pie.  But on a deeper level they view freedom and the middle class as the enemies of stability, and if these people believe anything they believe that a thriving middle class demanding equal opportunities and constitutional rights is a threat to the excessive stability to which conservatives are so hopelessly addicted.

 

All in the elections were a repudiation of conservatism, incompetence, corruption, and repression.   And if the Republicans can't leave their delusion based "reality" long enough to "get it" then I hope you won't mind my stifled laughter as they wallow in their own ignorance and self-deception.