Can someone explain this to me?

English: In January 2009, President of the Uni...

English: In January 2009, President of the United States of America, George W. Bush invited then President-Elect Barack Obama and former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter for a Meeting and Lunch at The White House. Photo taken in the Oval Office at The White House. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Color me super confused.  President Obama won reelection this week (yay!) and the GOP is running around claiming things like voter suppression, trickery and basic malfeasance.  This after he won most swing states.  This is coming from the party of George W. Bush.

Let me see if I get this right.  Republicans win and it is democracy while if Democrats win, it’s blasphemy.  They didn’t “win an election” they ushered in the “end of days” from the bible. (Can I point out the wins for same sex marriage? Kind of proves the point that the electorate wants Barack Obama to be in the White House.)

Good lord this is tiring.  And I am not kidding about that bible stuff.  I know people who think that.  And none of them are Donald “I cannot let the birth certificate thing go” Trump.  Nor are they Ben “JFK stole the 1960 election” Stein.  And no, they aren’t even Karl “Megyn Kelly has to school me on my crappy math and remind me that the president won because I just hate that maybe I suck” Rove.  Yeah, Karl, you do kind of suck.  Good luck with the super pac, how’d that work for you this year?

In 2000, I worked on the Gore campaign.  By the time election day rolled around, I had been on it for nearly two years.  In my life I have called my mother crying once.  It was when the initial reports were that Gore had conceded and I called sobbing, How did people vote for him?  

I was, in a word, devastated.  DEVASTATED.  Yet, irony alert her — Karl Rove talked about Teddy Roosevelt‘s comments about getting into the arena.  The thing about getting in to that arena is sometimes you lose.  It sucks.  It sucks a lot.  My one consolation was that this is what happened.  I worked for Gore but the country wanted W.  It was years before I would even entertain the idea that the election was stolen and I am not convinced either way.  I never, not for a moment, questioned George W. Bush’s legitimacy as president.  Even if Al Gore should have fought harder with the recount, at the end of the day, he didn’t.  Oh, while I am at it, I didn’t protest the beginning of the Iraq war, which I think was a terrible thing for our country to do (fight the war, I mean). But I didn’t because I don’t believe a, a decision like that should be dependent on current public opinion (Twilight remains popular, do we want that mentality deciding our military decisions?), b, the president has access to more info than me so if he thinks we need to go to war, we do (think FDR in WWII, that wasn’t popular either) and c, I support the president of the United States.  (No, I am not a DINO.)

Note to GOP:  It’s just an election.  There will be another one in four years — though I wish we could wait until after the holidays to talk about it.  You need to focus on better candidate recruitment, get that we are no longer a “Mad Men” country (we are so much more “Modern Family”), and deal with the fact that pissing off big parts of the electorate (women, Latinos, gays) is bad for winning elections.  You lost because you didn’t think that, not because of random conspiracies or anything else.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.