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COPYRIGHT 2004 Liberation Publications, Inc.
Everyone knows everything and yet here we are. This is a transparent election. The Bush administration is red-meat reactionary. We all know that; and we all know the Kerry administration will be as liberal as the senator himself has always been, more often than not inclined to be progressive, and what an inexpressible relief and joy that will be! At times Kerry will disappoint and behave like a "moderate," which means that he will on occasion pursue an agenda barely distinguishable from the sober-sided Republicanism of long-gone days of yore, when the GOP was an upper-middle-class white man's civic organization/chamber of commerce. That version of the GOP vanished after the Reagan counterrevolution shoved sobriety aside and initiated our current era of orgiastic reaction. Today gray bankers cast off their suits and behave like pit bulls let loose in a slaughter-house, and no one is surprised. Today the separation of church and state is plowed under, today the coherence of the Constitution is sacrificed to provide a gewgaw for fundamentalist bigots, today the lives of thousands are sacrificed to a half-baked adventure foisted upon the world by a man who slid into the White House with a resume stained by a ruined school system, gun control laws curbed so that people can carry concealed weapons in churches, and of course his nasty gigantic appetite for execution. Who would have dreamed anyone would ever feel nostalgia for anything Republican? But some of us remember when the party did not appear to be driven exclusively by ambition, meanness, and agreed you'd call swinish if pigs weren't undeserving of the association.
No one ever believed that the "big tent" GOP of George W. Bush actually intended enfranchising gay people or embracing the struggles of any minority group or community of the oppressed or anything beyond spewing balloon juice about "opportunity" and "ownership" and how these platitudes matter more than laws that protect minorities and courts that enforce
those laws. No one was ever credulous enough to that that "compassionate conservatism" was more...
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