I replaced my Kerry/Edwards bumer sticker with this one that I created via CafePress.com (you can buy one for yourself):

Matt Haughey summarizes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? as follows:

Frank uncovers how the GOP became the voice of the everyman while pushing law and policy that generally benefit the upper class most of all. It’s a vexing problem but I’ve always attributed it to language and the GOP controlling the debate. Frank goes a bit deeper and reveals a 30 year plan of campaigns that stress values, but that deliver economic law instead. So the game is to get people riled up over issues, but the GOP never actually does anything about the issues, instead concentrating on pushing laws that deregulate industries. He also goes into how the GOP exploits victimhood, since they never “win the culture war” and come off as the underdog, even though they control all three houses of the government.

Essentially, if the Republicans ever win any of the big social battles (abortion, gay marriage), that’s one less issue to use to motivate the social conservative base.
The proposed federal amendment to ban gay marriage is the perfect weapon for the Republican party: it gets the social conservatives all riled up, but it has a slim chance of ever being passed (and even then, it would take many years). Therefore, it’s a weapon that they can use to motivate their social conservative base for a long time to come, and as long as it never gets passed, they can continue to claim victim status in the culture war.
Which brings up the other big culture war issue: abortion. Getting a Supreme Court to overturn or limit Roe v. Wade is the Holy Grail, so to speak, for the social conservatives. There’s a very good chance Bush will get to nominate one or more judges to the Supreme Court in his next term. And if past nomination battles are any indication, the nominee’s (or nominees’) views on abortion will be paramount. And with a strong Republican majority in the Senate, an anti-abortion nominee stands a good chance of getting the appointment.
That would put the Republicans in a tough spot, as they would actually make significant progress on one of their big issues that they use to motivate the social conservatives. I shudder to think what next big ‘moral’ issue Karl Rove has up his sleeve.

An article in the Village Voice challenges the common belief that people voting for ‘moral values’ are responsible for Bush’s re-election win. Here are some relevant parts of the article:

The idea that last week’s election results show that there is a great silent majority of Americans who vote first and foremost on their moral values, which means that they vote for the Republicans, has become gospel on our nation’s airwaves by now. It is nonsense on stilts. Bush didn’t win this election on “moral values.” It turns out he didn’t do any better among strong churchgoers, or rural voters, than he did in 2000. What was it that actually put him over the top? It’s the wealth, stupid.
Among heavy churchgoers, Bush’s performance last time was 25 percent (turnout, 42 percent; percentage of vote, 59 percent). This time out it was also 25 percent—no change…
Where did the lion’s share of the extra votes come from that gave George Bush his mighty, mighty mandate of 51 percent? “Two of those points,” Klinkner said when reached by phone, “came solely from people making over a 100 grand.” The people who won the election for him—his only significant improvement over his performance four years ago—were rich people, voting for more right-wing class warfare.
Their portion of the electorate went from 15 percent in 2000 to 18 percent this year. Support for Bush among them went from 54 percent to 58 percent. “It made me think about that scene in Fahrenheit 9/11,” says Klinkner, the one where Bush joked at a white-tie gala about the “haves” and the “have-mores”: “Some people call you the elite,” Bush said. “I call you my base.”
So they proved to be. The two issues he mentioned in his post-election press conference had nothing to do with succoring God-fearing folk; instead he mentioned only “reforming” the tax code, and “strengthening” Social Security—issues of particular concern for the haves and the have-mores.

Opponents of gay marriage tend to take the moral/religious high road. But Fred Clark (a thoughtful, liberal evangelical Christian and darn good blogger) makes a persuasive case that opposing gay (civil) marriage is actually sinful.
Civil marriage is a legal contract between individuals that bestows certain legal privileges (and responsibilities?). Gay civil marriage is a civil rights issue, and as Fred concludes, “‘Civil rights for me but not for thee,’ is not a morally defensible position. And much of the language directed against homosexuals this past year has simply been morally odious and despicable — i.e., sinful.”

Throughout the 2004 presidential election campaign, I was frustrated with the mainstream media’s reporting (including NPR, which is generally much better than any commercial media in my opinion). The daily reporting on the presidential campaign typically consisted of: Today President Bush was in [insert swing state here] and said this [play 10-second sound bite claim about his record or Senator Kerry]. Meanwhile, Kerry was campaigning in [insert swing state here] and said this [play 10-second sound bite claim about his plans or Bush’s record]. End.
As a resident of a non-swing state, I couldn’t have cared less about where each candidate was and what group he spoke to. What I wanted to know was the validity of the claims each candidate made. Many times (as a Kerry supporter, of course), I thought Bush’s statements were pretty outlandish–both about his own record and about Kerry. But the mainstream news media hardly ever analyzed the claims themselves, thus allowing the candidates to say pretty much anything and get it broadcast as news. In fact, I had the impression that the more sensational a claim, the greater likelihood that claim would be the one featured in the news.
I found it a very frustrating situation, and it’s not very conducive to producing an informed voting populace.
A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Blinded By Science: How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality, shows that even when journalists do the hard-hitting analysis, sometimes bad data is presented in the interest of ‘balanced’ reporting.
I a concern for ‘balance’ contributed to why the mainstream media did so little analysis of the presidential candidates’ claims. The media felt the need to present each candidate’s statements evenly. Analysis of one candidate’s claims would have necessitated analysis of the other candidate’s stance on the same issue. And even such ‘fair’ analysis probably would have resulted in claims of bias. And in the sound bite environment, I think it is easier just to report what each candidate says and not analyze it.

As I’ve noted before on this blog, I’m a big sucker for well supported challenges to conventional wisdom. This article from the Boston Globe certainly does not disappoint (copied here in its entirety in case it disappears):

PRESIDENT Bush and Vice President Cheney make reference to “Massachusetts liberals” as if they were referring to people with some kind of disease. I decided it was time to do some research on these people, and here is what I found.
The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.
But don’t take the US government’s word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates.
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that “the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people.” The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
How to explain these differences? The following factors provide a partial answer:

• More couples in the South enter their first marriage at a younger age.
• Average household incomes are lower in the South.
• Southern states have a lower percentage of Roman Catholics, “a denomination that does not recognize divorce.” Barna’s study showed that 21 percent of Catholics had been divorced, compared with 29 percent of Baptists.
• Education. Massachusetts has about the highest rate of education in the country, with 85 percent completing high school. For Texas the rate is 76 percent. One third of Massachusetts residents have completed college, compared with 23 percent of Texans, and the other Northeast states are right behind Massachusetts.

The liberals from Massachusetts have long prided themselves on their emphasis on education, and it has paid off: People who stay in school longer get married at a later age, when they are more mature, are more likely to secure a better job, and job income increases with each level of formal education. As a result, Massachusetts also leads in per capita and family income while births by teenagers, as a percent of total births, was 7.4 for Massachusetts and 16.1 for Texas.
The Northeast corridor, with Massachusetts as the hub, does have one of the highest levels of Catholics per state total. And it is also the case that these are among the states most strongly supportive of the Catholic Church’s teaching on social justice issues such as minimum and living wages and universal healthcare.
For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry’s home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the “blue” states, led led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over time to foster the reality of what it means to leave no children behind. And they have been among the nation’s leaders in promoting a living wage as their goal in public employment. The money they have invested in their future is known more popularly as taxes; these so-called liberal people see that money is their investment to help insure a compassionate, humane society. Family values are much more likely to be found in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family life through the way they live their family values. William V. D’Antonio is professor emeritus at University of Connecticut and a visiting research professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

Greg Knauss has one explanation for the politics of hatred that I wrote about yesterday:

There is a divide in this country today, miles wide and fathoms deep. It has cleaved our great nation, and has only grown — and will only continue to grow. But it’s not a left/right split, or Democrat/Republican one. It’s lunatic/non-lunatic.
Our culture has been swept along in a tide of emotionally-resonant, steadfastly anti-rational entertainment, and politics is at the head of the wave. The course of our country, the future of our people, is being determined by lizard-brain responses to images designed to trigger sub-rational responses.
Michael Moore and Ann Coulter aren’t opposed to each other, they are each other: determined propagandists, using the language and mediums best suited to strike at the emotional core of their audiences. They do not work from a common set of facts, and would ignore them even if they existed. When they speak well, they’re Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day. When they speak poorly, they’re a spittle-flecked wacko with an “End of the World is Nigh” sign. But that’s just a matter of presentation: they’re all lunatics, asking us to stop thinking and start feeling. And to start feeling what they want us to feel.
This determined emotionalism — which is another way of saying anti-rationalism — is what drives us today. You can find it distasteful, you can find it depressing, but it’s most important impact is that we have turned over the direction of the country — our future — to the part of our psyche that doesn’t want to think.
It’s not about smarts. The lunatics aren’t stupid — just the opposite. It’s about the willingness to abandon the deductive process in favor of epiphany. It’s about the abandonment of the brain in favor of the gut.
Jon Stewart has said all this, of course, and said it better. But it hit home, hard, because I recently discovered — realized — that I am not immune. I edged up against the lunatic side of the divide the past few weeks. I went — close, anyway — mad. I was angry, irrationally furious, to the point of raging at the world — appallingly, my children included — that things were going they way they were. I stared into the abyss, from the wrong side, and it scared me.
A potential reason for my brush has to do with how I spend my time: on the Internet. The Web is a festering cesspool of lunacy and emotion: Free Republic, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Atrios, Instapundit, on and on and on. Facts only enter the picture when they’re favorable. Emotion rules. There is no common ground, nor a desire for any.
That’s a problem.
Left or right, Democrat or Republican, these labels don’t mean much in the face of the looming (or nearly complete) lunatic take-over. Dispassion and reason are qualities that need to be nurtured and promoted from every political viewpoint, even — or especially — in the face of spittle-flecked wackos.
The question is, where do we start?

I choose to remain on the side of carefully reasoned political opinions. If that marginalizes me in the current political wars, so be it. It saddens me greatly to know that the ‘mainstream’ has become so irrational, but I refuse to take part.

During the Clinton administration, many Americans united in their hatred of the president. In the process, they built a powerfully effective political machine. But the hatred always bugged me. The George W. Bush presidency has had a similar effect on a different group of Americans–among which I count myself. But again, I have instinctively shied away from the hateful ‘ABB – Anyone But Bush’ mentality.
In the last four years, the Democratic party has put together a political machine to rival that of the Republican machine (though not quite good enough based on Kerry’s narrow loss yesterday). Today, the expressions of hatred are especially strong from the left. In some cases, they are the very same words the other side repeated during the Clinton administration. “Not My President” reads the bumper sticker.
I have been thinking over this post for several days, but not found a way to express exactly what bothers me about the politics of hatred. Do we really want our political process reduced to this?

What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?
“WWADRD?
Dear Friends:
If the shoe was on the other foot, What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?
Get depressed?
Get down?
Feel defeated?
Go away?
Refrain from being an obnoxious pain in the ass, 24/7?
Temper his sense of righteous entitlement?
Mute his howls of indignation?
Question his convictions?
Hell, no!
Here’s what a Dumbass Republican would do:
Act like a winner in a world full of deluded losers.
Refuse to let the “facts on the ground” deter his belief in what he’s got coming.
Drown out polite civil discourse by braying his unshaken beliefs like a stuck pig.
Refuse to shut the fuck up.
Refuse to go away.
Wrap himself in the flag and impugn the patriotism of any who would question his moral superiority.
Wear a big shit-eating grin that gives the other side just a moment of pause as they lay their heads on their pillows at night.
Have a glint in his eye that says, “I may have a shit-eating grin on my face, but I’m just waiting for an opportunity to slip this knife in.”
See this not as a defeat, but as an inconvenient mistake.
Friends, join me.
Do not accept.
Do not waver.
Do not shut up.
Do not give comfort with your distress.
Be an unrelenting irritant.
Be a dumbass.
Right now, attitude is everything.
Together, we can help each other bear the present while shortening the time – and it will come – when we prevail.”

I can certainly relate to this assessment by Andy Lester on his blog:

Last night, while watching the first of the Kerry/Bush debates, I was struck by what a terrible programming project leader President Bush would make.
He kept repeating the importance of staying on the course that was originally set out on, even in the face of things not going as planned: “the way to win this is to be steadfast and resolved and to follow through on the plan.” He also said that changing course would be demoralizing to the troops: “What kind of message does it say to our troops in harm’s way, ‘wrong war, wrong place, wrong time?'”
I certainly know that that approach doesn’t work on programming projects. If there’s one thing that seasoned programmers know, it’s that projects never go as planned, and course correction is critical. Even worse, the programmers in the trenches know how the project is going, and aren’t inspired when things carry on as if nothing is wrong. For a project leader to act as if there are no problems is insulting to those doing the work.
If the war in Iraq was a programming project, Bush would need to be saying, regularly, “I know things aren’t going well, I know that you’ve had a lot of casualties on the team, but I believe we can get through this. Now, here’s what we’re going to do differently to make sure that we come out of this project alive.”
Of course, if the war were a programming project, it’d never have gotten management approval in the first place. What are our requirements? What are our milestones? How are we doing? How do we know when the project is over? What’s the timeframe for completion? What’s the success metric? Is the iRaq project really the best way to beef up the company’s security?
Over a year into the project, having lost over 1,000 employees, Bush The Project Leader would just be pointing at a handful of completed tasks: “We got rid of that old, buggy Hoo-Sane system. The company’s better off without it. We’re still having problems building the replacement, and a lot of programmers are burning out, because it’s a bigger task than I thought, but at least we got rid of the Hoo-Sane system that I’ve always wanted to replace.”
I doubt I’d be a good politician, but I know for sure GWB wouldn’t be any good on any projects I’ve been on.

Via Danklife:

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.

With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance — now Joe gets it too.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents becaus some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor. Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.

If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

Its noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.

Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards.

He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.

He is happy to see his father, who is now retired.His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to.

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.

Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”