Middle Earth Journal

I'm very happy with the results of the election.

Howard Dean has demonstrated effective leadership by his pugnacious 50 state strategy of competing vigorously for every last possible vote in every possible district.

Nancy Pelosi has demonstrated her sagacity as a political leader by demanding the party stick together and not accept permanent minority status, and by recuiting conservative democratic candidates, and insisting they focus on local, and state issues.

I always stuck to what I have always been told is a truism in American politics, that a majority of Americans like their politics right down the middle of the road. This election demonstrates a return to a more moderate sensibility.

This election marks the end of the dominance, and relevance of Rovian fear mongering as a substitute for success. The shock and fear of 9/11 has now worn off.

Americans have seen the promises of progress and victory abroad and security at home turn into something sinister that threatens them with tyranny at the same time it threatens terrorists with destruction.

The Military Commissions Act is the deadest of all possible dead ends of what the neo-cons so optimistically refer to as "conservative thought", and threatens democracy infinitely more than terrorists ever could. The return of habeus corpus, due process of law, and reaffirmation of the Bill of Rights is now possible, and essential.

What lost the Republicans this election wasn't just their unsuccessful handling of the war and their phoney rhetoric of supporting the troops and honoring veterans, but the yawning gap between their words and the moral callousness of their actions.

The GAO says out of the 1.3 million service members deployed to Iraq, and Afghanistan one in five are at risk for post traumatic stress syndrome. Yet the VA only expected 2,900 cases of post traumatic stress, as of this past June Veterans Affairs has seen 34,000, and the numbers are still growing. In spite of this growing need the VA failed to spend $53,000,000 budgeted for mental health programs, and failed to inform medical officials of the availability, and intended purpose of those funds.

In 2005 the "Comprehensive Assistance for Veterans Exposed to Traumatic Stressors Act" was introduced only to be suppressed by the Republican majority. At the same time the Republicans slashed funding by 50% for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center in the 2007 Defense Appropriations bill. And the list goes on.

The "K Street Project" of contractors, lobbyists are still there undoubtedly already collecting phone numbers of the new incoming members of congress.

Offers of free golfing trips to Scotland, prostitutes of both genders, and opportunities for fraud, deceit, and money laundering will undoubtedly be just as tempting to the incoming Democrats as to the outgoing Republicans. But that is a bridge we can't cross until we get to it.

The one party state, dominated by the Republicans and their politisized evangelical financiers abandoned the very values they claimed to want to protect, and moved this country and its laws away from its legal and moral foundations and opened the door to tyranny cynically using security as an excuse.

But the children and grandchildren of the Greatest Generation know full well we can have both security , and victory abroad without tyranny at home.

Yes I'm very happy with the results of this election.