After the Fall

Despite our manic rate of posting of yesterday, our sense is that the thousands of BOBW readers still await our definitive statement and reaction to the US election results. In the short-term, it has simplified our lives, because there are now huge sections of news coverage and analysis that we don't have to bother with. Sure, the pundits have lots to say, but we don't -- not when 58 million people knew what they knew about Abu Ghraib and civilian deaths in Iraq, voted for Dubya, and then told pollsters and reporters on the way out that they were "values voters."

And when we complain about civilian deaths in Iraq, we are saying that the US military's legalistic formulation "we don't deliberately target civilians" is not enough. Dropping bombs on urban areas may be strategically and tactically rational, but there is no moral veneer that can be attached to such a decision.

So as far as we are concerned, the political analysis going on right now is essentially beside the point in the face of a very selective definition of morality. As a pointer to the future it has been interesting to watch the emerging uncertainty amongst people who were once some of Dubya's biggest boosters. But they have a long way to go. For instance, Josh Marshall catches an amazingly naive Andrew Sullivan asking for Dubya to be given a fresh start for his second term, the antithesis of what having run and won on one's record is supposed to mean.

Sullivan also has found a dodge to avoid fully confronting his realization that gay people like him are the new Rovian wedge issue -- FEDERALISM WORKS. But he seems to be confusing the US with Switzerland. One doesn't pursue central government power the way the Republicans have just for the fun of a minimal state foreign and defence policy while letting 51 flowers bloom domestically. Dubya's federal courts are going to be coming after state autonomy in social matters sooner rather than later.

And while we're on this topic, we're willing to bet that somewhere in the bowels of the Justice Department, there is someone taking a look at whether the Federal government can fight California's approval of state funded stem cell research. To engage in amateur lawyering for a second, the interest on the state bonds to fund this research is presumably a tax deduction from federal income -- therefore contravening Dubya's ban on federal funding of stem-cell research. Although that argument would require Dubya to acknowledge that a tax cut is a form of government expenditure, which would open a hornet's nest.

But such Kerry-style nuanced analysis is for later. For now, we are devoting ourselves more fully, via the wonders of television, to football and music videos, especially those from the urban contemporary genre. Political thoughts still intrude on the latter -- for instance, watching the side-splittingly funny video for Kanye West's The New Workout Plan, we wonder, during the Anna Nicole Smith sequence -- would her character be a moral values voter?