Giving the Match to the Arsonist

Seeing the results of tonights elections brings back the feelings that haunted me the night I watched the nationa re-elect George Bush six years ago. Why would you give the arsonist a match? but we did and the burning down of America continued. Now, just two years after the fire was put out, we do it again; we give the match back to the arsonists.

Thankfully, we have a president, and, evidently, a Senate that still believes in building not burning.

You should look at the exit polls: who voted for whom. Rich old white men carried the day. People who have lost jobs actually voted democratic in the majority. People who think they can make a lot more money voted Republican...they thought the same when they voted Bush back in and look what happened to their investments.

It is a night that proves what James Carville once observed when asked what he could make of the fact that there was an uproar from sectors of the nation in response to the news that President Obama would address children in an elementary school. Carver said, well we just have to get used the fact that we have a lot of stupid people in the nation. Indeed.

The question for the nation, by the way, is not the one that the news media seems to concentrate on tomight - what the election means for President Obama - but rather, what does the election mean for the American people, and, beyond that for the world in which we live because, despite Tea Party objections, we actually do need the rest of the world and they us for us all to prosper.

Well, I predict good things in the next two years, but not as good as they could be. While the Tea Party Republicans will treat the nation to a ton of Patriotic moralism, all of which amounts to nothing, the economy will grow and begin to prosper and we will end the war in Afghanistan, or at least take it down a notch or two in cost and we will make great strides in developing alternative energy like solar and wind and all our pension plans will get back more or less to where they were before Bush cut them in half with his half baked ideas of world dominance, unleashing the robber barons and tax cuts that bankrupted the nation.

This time, the firefighters will contain the arsonists so that they cannot burn the nation down again, so soon. Then we will see, in 2012 if the nation got any smarter.

For the moment it does not bode well on that front. To our credit, the voters didn't go for most of the really brainless canidates that the Tea Party servedu up to the nation, but they did go for the most dangerous ones like new Senators Rand Paul from Kentucky and Marco Rubio from Florida, both of whom gave special attention in their victory speeches to the fact that they believe that the United States is the greatest nation, not just now, but the greatest nation ever!!!! We could mention that that they provided no evidence and we know that they have extremely limited contact with the world outside of this hemisphere and that we lack clear criteria for what would qualify us for this accolade and that history demonstrates that most demagogues and dictators resort to this kind of jingoism to blind their followers as to what they really intend to do to the nation; but it would suffice to say that this statement is absolutely irrelevant to the the question of how to improve the current state of affairs in the nation in the world (they both agreed that there is something wrong in this greatest of all nations - this is called: having it both ways). I am quite sure that no one in the audience bought this attempt to manipulate minds and hearts and blind us to more pressing truths; becuase if they did, in any numbers, then we can see the real problem that we face: we have met the enemy and it us.