We wake up to a different world this morning, one not of our making. We like to say, “Those Texans deserve what they get when they vote for Ted Cruz,” or “Those Minnesotans deserve what they get when they elect Michele Bachmann,” and so forth.
But the 2014 Midterms have come and gone, and I can tell you right now, having woken up to Scott Walker as governor of Wisconsin, I don’t feel I deserve what I got.
Which is a reverse Christmas. One where they come and take all your gifts away from you. The simple fact is, as Jason Easley wrote here last night, that the Republicans conned America.
They did so with corporate money, with the money of the wealthy who love their tax cuts, with the complicity of the mainstream media (for example, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd claiming during last night’s coverage that both parties had equal amounts of money to spend).
And they did it by lying, almost nonstop, for the past six years, using fear to overpower reason and logic, to disregard facts and obscure them with doubt.
Oh sure, there are a few bright spots. That perpetual carpetbagger Scott Brown was sent packing – again – by Jeanne Shaheen, but he will almost certainly resurface in another state, and run for office there. Gary Peters won the senate race in Michigan, and David Ige won the governorship in Hawaii, but there is not much to be happy about this morning.
There is simply no getting around the fact that today, November 5, 2014, the world is a lesser place, a bleaker place, a more hopeless place, than it was last night.
We had hoped for a Democratic wave. Instead, Reuters is calling last night a “rout,” and David Axelrod a “Republican wave,” but it is not the kind of wave you surf. Rather, it is the kind of wave that ruins lives. It can only be destructive with victories by the likes of Joni Ernst in Iowa, Rick Scott in Florida, and Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback in Kansas.
You might remember that Pat Roberts is the guy who said if we go left, we go National Socialism (never mind that National Socialism is a right wing ideology), and that Sam Brownback drove the Kansas economy into the dust and wants to take that devastation nationally. And the Palinesque Joni Ernst…well, with her hard-core Tea Party line, she will no doubt soon enough give Iowans reason to rue dodging their polling places on Tuesday.
So no, we did not get what we deserved. The NFL can say of its teams that they are what their record says they are, but we are not what we voted, not when our votes were overridden with dark money and corporate-funded propaganda.
You have to remember the great efforts Republicans went to suppress the vote, both by legal and by extra-legal means (intimidation). You have to remember the voter fraud (though if you look for examples of voter fraud this morning, all of it accuses democrats rather than Republicans). These days, you can’t even count on your vote registering for the Democrat you voted for, or that your vote is being counted at all. That is how corrupt the GOP has become in 2014.
And many of us understood that these midterms represented a vote for or against Barack H. Obama, though he was not technically running. Some Democratic candidates cowardly distanced themselves from Obama, and my personal thought on that is that these people have earned their reward in defeat.
While I take no satisfaction in their karmic example, I do get a laugh at Reuters’ headline this morning: Tough road ahead for Obama after Republicans seize Senate.
What, he had an easy road before? Six years of obstruction and nullification and endless, racist attacks, and only now the road gets hard? Where has Reuters been hiding all this time? There is no hiding the fact, however, that as Reuters says, last night was a “sharp rebuke” to President Obama.
And a vastly undeserved one.
In the end, those who did not vote – and on the left, there were many – failed not only themselves but the rest of us. The millennials who failed to vote surrendered their hopes for prosperous careers; the elderly their comfortable retirement, and the working class their jobs, healthcare, and possibly, any hope of putting food on the table for their family.
Some Americans opted for economic ruination. Others had it thrust upon them. We have been sentenced to two years, hard labor. And there will be no escaping the results. Only 2016 can save us now, and the realization that only in presidential elections does the liberal and progressive electorate really shine.
We will have to tighten our belts until then, America. I will take heart from Alison Lundergan Grimes’ defiant speech – one can hardly call it a concession – her heart-felt rallying cry for tomorrow. A promise to be made good on.
Going forward, remember this, and take heart, and don’t forget the cowards on MSNBC who called her ungracious:
I, for one, like Grimes, am not in a forgiving or a forgetting mood, and though I don’t intend to grin, I will bear it. We all will, deserved or not.
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