I wrote this note in Comment on a post by Nora Ephron on Huff Post.
We Coulda Had Gore .. Eighteen-letter words
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I used to use a variety of expletives along the way in my life, most of which, except for Balderdash! are recognizable to the profane-sailor crowd. But since 2000, I often wake up in the middle of the Bush-et-Ilk nightmare-ridden night hearing myself cursing at full the-horror the-horror yell, scaring the cats and waking the neighbors, that eighteen letter word, “FloridaNaderVoters!!” as if the sky were falling.
Well, the sky is fallen, & I can't forgive the self-indulgent ignorance of the FNVs, the Florida Nader Voters — HOW could you be SO STUPID, all 90,000 of you?? If only a thousand of you had woken up that day with a supple brain. “'All the same' are they? Really? Do you still think that?”
And after the 'election' in 2004? I now rent a rubber room for weekends so when I'm not blindly feeding the best years of my life into the slavering corporate maw during the long crepuscular cheneylurks week, I can bang my head against the wall with less injury because I ain't got healthcare to cover major concussion.
9/11 sucked. It killed 3000 people. It was not a national threat requiring the [re-]election of George Bush. 465,000 people a year die in our USofA of tobacco causes — let's bust the Philip Morris bunker, get Morris' 18.13 million-dollar-annual-compensation CEO Lou bin Camilleri dead or alive, put a Green Zone in Winston-Salem, and occupy North Carolina if we really want to “protect the American people.”
We are not serious or smart people, we USofAians. We flaunt ignorance as if it were evidence of more-balls, the sine qua none. We vote with our adolescent hearts rather than our adult heads. We want the kind of romance that Hallmark sells.
If our own state is a lock this Fall, we can write letters to out-of-state on-the-cusp voters in crucial districts through mmob (Mainstreet Moms) and phone out of state with mmob or moveon. (I just say that 'My vote in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />California doesn't mean anything — you're voting for me too.')
The eloquent elegant wistful wail is not enough. I beg us to DO something besides bitterly bemoan — though bitterly bemoaning cannot be overdone, lest we forget 'the inconvenient consequences.'
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11 Wind . Ik . Whirlwind . North . tzol 100 05.29.06 mon
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the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..
.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military Budget on education instead
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Mr. Pogblog,
I did think the Kerry campaign had a very good idea in 2004 to let people in heavily blue states help in a more personal way in the cliffhanger states. The phone bank was a good idea, but I'm not sure they had it fine-tuned well.
the lists of folk to get out to rallies wasn't well tended.
it wasn't clear that there was any feedback to see if anyone out there was being especially successful.
I'm not sure getting people to “events” was necessarily the best use for the phone call database in any case.
Still, I think it could potentially be very effective when they fix some of the problems.
I agree, Nader should never have campaigned in any state's that we're genuinely close. His nostrum that there was no difference between Bush and Gore was ridiculous then and in retrospect was tragic.
The phoning I did was to get people to walk precincts & to register voters and then on Election Day (GOTV/Get Out The Vote) to get out and vote even if it was hard or inconvenient.
Many people don't realize how much their one vote matters. And most people don't realize than if they don't have sufficient info to vote intelligently on propositions or judges, they can just cast their vote for the president or a senator. I told dozens upon dozens of people where their precinct voting place was and how much their vote mattered. Just thanking people for voting can make so much difference to their bothering when they are tired and the excuses not to go out again set in.
I agree there are refinements possible, but given that Mr. Gore needed about 600 votes more in Florida even in their crooked terms, one's effort can be utterly essential.
The thing that's so irritating and/or tragic about us Democrats is that we're going to pointlessly squabble about Hillary and Al. Should we do this? Should we do that? There is no Democrat who draws breath who would not be sensible and marvelous compared to this current crowd.
ofdroll,
Amen!
Or rather because 'men' are not doing so well in this benighted time frame, Awarthogs!
Only 961 days left .. Keep your heart bright. Like the bursting of a Boil, it gets better very fast after then.
Pogblog and others,
I guess now that I am leaving the Voice I can out myself (as if the Nader sticker on my bike wasn't enough evidence). I though Al Gore, like John Kerry, was a damn fine senator. Then suddenly he decided he wanted to be president and stopped standing for anything. I have nothing but admiration for Ralph Nader and the work that he has done, but I might have voted for Al Gore had he not tried to denigrate Nader's environmental record during the campaign. Of course, had I lived in a state that was polling more closely, I am not sure I would have had the cajones to vote for Nader.
of Evil,
I'm all for balls, but smart cajones v dumb cajones. There always was a yawning (eg chasmic) difference between Gore and Bush.
I love Mr. Nader's revulsion at corporate despoiling in each & every direction, but did we gain from Floridians so-called principled stand? Clearly it's been tsunamic in devastation. I like to think your cajones would have been wise if put to the Florida Test.
A friend said her 11 year old went to An Inconvenient Truth and dug and grokked it. That give an idea that it works for many kids too.