SC on medical marijuana

This is a pity:

Federal authorities may prosecute sick people who smoke pot on doctors' orders, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state medical marijuana laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug.

The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug's use to treat various illnesses.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana.

...Stevens said there are other legal options for patients, "but perhaps even more important than these legal avenues is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these respondents may one day be heard in the halls of Congress."

Needless to say, this is politically naive (or deliberately obscurant); the judges know full well that nobody in congress is going to back this cause, as they would be terrified of the political opposition. That's precisely the reason why the states were dealing with the issue in the first place- cultures differ enough between the states that what is appropriate for one on this issue may not be appropriate for another. Yes, there are massive generational differences on this issue, but it's not enough to change the rules anytime soon.

While I'm not exactly a 10th amendment fanatic, Sandra Day O'Connor had a point when she said "The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens".

This does raise a good question, though: considering that Canada is developing a reputation for being fairly relaxed on this issue, I wonder if this is going to prompt a migration northward. British Columbia's climate may not be as nice as California's, but it sure beats jail.

Followup to Last Post

Well, it would appear that the Liberals stayed alive, 153-152. Couldn't be closer.

What's truly striking in the wake of this vote, however, is the reaction. One of the things that seem to seperate Canadian and American opponents to the current regime is that the former is perfectly willing to break up the country over it. There is an unsettling trend in the Canadian right to threaten to break up the country because their ideas are unpopular with the majority outside of a few western provinces: specifically the province of Alberta.

It might be more political economic than anything else, considering that Alberta is essentially a petro-state. Provinces already have a lot of power in Canada, though, and it seems to be little more than a direct assault on representation by population. Considering how close Stephen Harper's Conservatives are to the Republicans, this may not be accidental, but Canada is not the United States.

(Actually, there's a question. I'll assume that it isn't treason in Canada to advocate the seperation of a province, otherwise there'd be a lot of Quebeckers in jail right now. Is it so in the United States? If, say, a bunch of Californians with real power said they wanted to leave the Union and worked to have it happen, are they just activists, or traitors?)

Boring?

I never thought I'd be saying this, but Canadian politics appears to be a hell of a lot more interesting than American politics right now.

Look at what's going on up in Canada. You've got a government embroiled in a massive scandal, on the verge of defeat, defending its fragile minority government through legislative trickery that nobody had ever heard of 6 months ago. You've got a massive about-face on the federal budget, where 4 billion in tax cuts are turned into 4 billion in social spending, thanks to a deal between the ruling Liberals and the small (yet possibly decisive) social democratic NDP. That deal left the Liberals still a few seats behind...

...and then the most high-profile member of the Conservative party aside from its leader, Belinda Stronach, switches to the Liberals, giving them a critical boost that may keep their government together...

...if one of two independents, (one's a disaffected Liberal and the other's a former Conservative who lost the nomination and won the riding anyway and is suffering from cancer) goes along with it.

And the best part? Up until the announcement, Stronach was not only widely credited for being responsible for the creation of the party she left, she left her Conservative boyfriend, Peter Mackay, at the same time. He didn't even know what was coming.

(He used to be the leader of the Progressive Conservative party. He sacrificed it to join it to the larger, but far more right-wing, Reform party under the "Conservative" banner. He and Stronach were the best known couple in Ottawa.)

Oh, and the whole thing happened because the current leader of the Conservatives, Stephen Harper, is making deals with Quebecois seperatists to try to become prime minister, despite the boost that it gives to people that, were Canada like the United States, would probably be branded traitors.

Fun stuff, huh?

Newsweek

I hope it's as apparent to readers as it is to me that the flap over Newsweek is all about censorship and intimidation.

It's an attempt to discredit Bush's opponents, and also to further leverage the "tit-for-tat" technique of equating right-wing nonsense with the honest truth. Open support for White House talking points has always run into the issue of, well, their factuality, and the knowledge that sooner or later the truth will come out. The "balancing" game helps with that, but sooner or later people will notice that one side is getting all the flack, and the other isn't, and begin to make up their own minds.

If it can be reversed, however, then the admissions of fault on one side can be matched up against the hardheaded repetition of the other, and the conclusion will be that the latter must be correct. On individual issues, all it takes is one small mistake to open up a crack in credibility and the whole thing dies. That's what Newsweek provided, even though it's well known that torture techniques involving the desecration of the Koran take place. Torture will continue, but reportage of it is enormously weakened in the United States, because the media will be terrified of being burned again.

(Sure, Bush's arguments may not be credible, but a growing variation on the old Microsoft truism is in play: nobody gets fired for buying Bush.)

What's truly worrisome is the allegations that people died due to Newsweek's reportage. I'm smelling "more in sorrow than in anger" censorship here, a new and improved "loose lips sink ships" aimed at Wrongspeak. Every reporter who finds out how brutal the treatment of prisoners has become will be hounded by those saying that he could kill people. Some of those people will be editors. Others will be shareholders. Others will be winger bloggers, who won't care whether or not it's true or not if it contradicts the party line.

We all know where this is headed, including those who are backing Bush. I guess the question is whether it's really worth it. The question I'd ask of instapundit et al is this: What happens when it's the "libertarians" in the firing line?

"At first they came for the liberals..."

Edit: On the other hand, it's odd to see a putatively liberal Canadian like Warren Kinsella torpedo his credibility like this:

This is appalling. Not only they did they "get it wrong," they actually contributed to DEATHS of people around the globe. This is one of those rare instances where the Muslim community, and the U.S. military, have a shared interest in putting behind bars any of the journalists and editors associated with this extraordinary libel. But, thanks to the absurdities of the First Amendment, that isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

Needless to say, I imagine that most Canadian liberals are a little more sensible than this. Hate speech is one thing, but this is quite another. What is Kinsella thinking?

The Memo

It's funny... the "memogate" name was hoovered up for the attack on CBS, when it really should have applied to this memo, which shows that the decision to go into Iraq happened in 2002, and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

James Wolcott called it "devestating" and Media Matters has complained about how incredibly little attention its getting from the media. I imagine that most people believe that it's because they don't want to ruffle Administration feathers. Personally, I have a different take, which is that it's not being reported because, well, it's not really seen as news.

After all, at this point, pretty much everybody who is knowledgable and honest about the whole thing knows that Bush made the decision in early 2002. They also know that the Bush administration will rearrange their interpretation of reality for conveniences' sake. The majority of the American people know it (and the minority still probably believe Iraq was tied with 9/11), the media knows it, the Dems know it, the Repubs know it, and certainly everybody outside the United States knows it. It's just that nobody speaks up about it, because it's "ancient history" and the same old talking points will get trotted out on Fox.

(Of course, conservative media will gnaw away at anything indefinitely if it will benefit the cause, but the SCLM ain't that.)

This is, of course, exactly what the administration was shooting for. Hold off long enough that the media's quest for novelty pushes it on. It worked! Fancy that.

First they came for my comics...

Ed Kilgore on Censorship::

What, other than agitating the air about it, are some of us Democrats actually talking about doing, if it's not censorship? First, as already suggested, we think it's helpful to take the complaints of parents seriously enough to study the problem seriously. Second, we think entertainment corporations, and anyone who directly markets products to children, should admit some social responsibility, and work with public officials to (a) develop, to the maximum extent possible, parental information and control mechanisms, like a unified rating system for television shows, video games, and movies, and like technologies that are more effective and user-friendly than the V-Chip; (b) create a "zone of protection" for really young kids by eschewing direct and indirect (i.e., television and internet) marketing techniques aimed at children too young to distinguish truth from hype and crap; and (c) provide some transparency about the most egregious of those marketing techniques, such as the practice of hiring "alpha kids" to wear brand name products to influence their peers.

And if cooperative efforts to secure voluntary measures [from media corporations] don't work, then we can talk regulation--just like we do with other corporations--if necessary.

Um, no, Ed, we can't. That's censorship. That's the whole point. Regulation of targeting kids with the "alpha kids" tactic is fine, and advertising awareness education in school is fine. I would actually prefer it to trying to censor advertising to kids, because I think the kids are smarter than they're often given credit for, and they can learn that advertising is misleading. It may not work if they're too young, though.

That's not what this is really about, though, when people advocating censorship are talking about how bad culture is. It is about censorship, period. Whether it's by government or by private companies doesn't matter; these "voluntary" schemes are rarely anything but the industry forestalling inevitable regulation.

They are be just as damaging, too: witness the Comics Code's decades-long evisceration of the medium in the United States.

My real problem with all these arguments is that too much of the time it's misleading. Attacking Max Hardcore and his ilk is inevitably a proxy for attacking all erotica, just as attacking GTA is inevitably a proxy for attacking any sort of violence in video and computer games, just as attacking Bill Gaines' horror comics was a way of attacking any sort of controversial subject matter in comics. You go after whatever is most disturbing because that's what provides the shock, and then you enact policy that gets what you really want.

"Voluntary ratings systems" are only the first step: and all that they really need to do is simultaneously lobby for strict enforcement and then lobby corporations (like Wal-Mart, which is famously protective of its "family" image) to "keep that filth out", and you've got de-facto economic censorship. It's already happening with movies to a certain extent (seen an NC-17 movie recently?) and it'll only get worse if this continues.

Do liberals (or even New Democrats) really want to get in bed with this?

hat tip to Digby. Might as well set my homepage to Hullabaloo nowadays.

Digby and Religious extremism

There is, really, not much to add to this piece by Digby and one of his commenters on the totalitarian bent of far too many elements of American society right now. He points out that all of the remaining bulwarks against the dominance of right-wing memes are under attack right now:

-academe is being attacked for being insufficiently willing to allow the kind of Republican drone "academics" that infest think-tanks within its halls;
-the judiciary is being attacked for placing the law over the Commandments;
-and the cultural industry is being attacked for daring to not marginalize those who disagree with the right's consensus on acceptable discourse (witness Michael Moore and, yes, Grand Theft Auto, which is actually an example of the same kind of dark, ironic humor which drives the religious right NUTS.)

The only omission I noticed was that he didn't elaborate on this statement by the commenter:

let's forget that their path is toward a new form of totalitarianism harnessing religion as the Nazis harnessed nationalism

It's this that, I think, is the main reason why a lot of the arguments about the United States going "fascist" or not are a little off-base. Whether the link is valid or not, fascism is associated with overwhelming and irrational ethnic nationalism. While the "overwhelming and irrational" part is there, I don't buy that the totalitarian bent in the American right has that much to do with ethnic nationalism. It's there, certainly, but Thomas Frank was right in pointing out that you can have the one without the other. While Kansas is very much anti-racist, it still embraced all the right-wing arguments that characterize the modern religious right in the United States.

If anything, however, the theocratic variant is much more dangerous. The problem with fascism as a system is that it needs to see some sort of results in order to sustain itself. You can only legitimately claim that your race is superior as long as it demonstrates superiority. As soon as that demonstrated superiority is gone, the system is doomed.

Theocratic totalitarianism, however, doesn't suffer from this problem. The rewards aren't supposed to be seen in "this life", and thus visible results don't matter. If there are economic, environmental or political repercussions, they can be waved away with the promise of infinitely better results in the afterlife. The results don't have to accrue to the entire society, either; rearranging society to be more "godlike" may only spiritually benefit the rearranger and his religious allies, but that's a good enough reason to do it, so it is done.

Heck, look at the Rapture- a significant part of the dogma embraced by much of the religious right is that they don't even have to wait until death to escape any negative side effects of their "Godding" of society!

This is, of course, somewhat reminiscent of the ideology of the theocratic Muslims referred to as "Islamists". It's a term I've never fully accepted, as it limits the political bent to that specific religion, and I'm seeing that skepticism justified by what's been going on. The biggest difference appears to be the promise of earthly prosperity in Islamism... they argue that adoption of their religious laws will lead to a better society *right now*, whereas that claim in the US (where it exists) is much more muted.

In any case, go read Digby's piece.

More Delicious Neo-Con Treats

Wondering about what's propelling that pesky insurgency in Iraq? Greg Palast has the answer. Apparently one of the big goals of the neoconservatives in Iraq was neither to make big bucks off the oil, nor to "liberate humanitarianism". Nope, it was to:

The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas

Sadly, the insurgents put the "kibosh" on this deal, as they were able to elicit mass support by claiming that:

"Insurgents used this, saying, 'Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable,'" said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco.
"We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatisation is coming."

Fortunately for OPEC, the oil industry appeared to be somewhat unhappy about the idea of crashing oil prices, so the new plan is to let the Iraqis nationalize the industry. Unfortunately for everybody in Iraq, the damage was already done.

(Thanks to Juan Cole for pointing this out on Friday, and for authoritatively showing that the entire idea was rubbish to begin with. To me, it's reminiscent of Perle's crackpot plan to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan by setting up loudspeakers blaring pro-American propaganda. I wouldn't dislike the people running the world so much if they weren't so, well, stupid.)

Lies, Damned Lies, and the Bush Administration

(Hat Tip: Hunter at Daily Kos.)

Well, well, well. It would appear that the old "everybody agreed on such-and-such an intelligence issue" gambit ain't going to work anymore, at least not for the Bush administration.

Such an argument requires that information-sharing is going on, so that countries can vet their intelligence against each other. Even if no sharing is going on, at least that's something that can be trusted to be honest, and states can act with the full knowledge that while there may be knowledge being hidden, at least they know where they stand. You can't have both: you can't both hide your information and gain other's trust by sharing it.

Unless, of course, you're the current Executive. In which case, you LIE.

In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. That was a significant new charge, the first allegation that North Korea was helping to create a new nuclear weapons state.

But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction. North Korea, according to the intelligence, had supplied uranium hexafluoride -- which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium -- to Pakistan. It was Pakistan, a key U.S. ally with its own nuclear arsenal, that sold the material to Libya. The U.S. government had no evidence, the officials said, that North Korea knew of the second transaction.

Pakistan's role as both the buyer and the seller was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington's partner in the hunt for al Qaeda leaders, according to the officials, who discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity. In addition, a North Korea-Pakistan transfer would not have been news to the U.S. allies, which have known of such transfers for years and viewed them as a business matter between sovereign states.

Ok, if one wants to split hairs, one could say that this "cover up" isn't technically a lie of commission, but of omission. It doesn't matter one whit, because this isn't about North Korea. What it IS is the United States no longer being a trustworthy intelligence-sharing and -gathering partner, because its allies can no longer trust it to not lie to cover up a key strategic ally.

It throws one of the underlying concepts of the entire intelligence community into doubt. Without honesty in the sharing of intelligence, every ally of the U.S. must ask itself whether the United States is "playing" them to isolate a foe or protect an ally. They'll ask that question, and the answer will be "we can't take that chance". They won't trust the U.S., and (therefore) the U.S. won't be able to trust them, because the Americans must realize that nobody likes to play the sucker. The United States has just lost all credibility in Asia, and I doubt it'll return any time soon.

Considering that the core of the War on Terrorism is and MUST BE intelligence gathering and sharing, this literally couldn't be a more foolish act.

I've said it before, I'll say it again... somewhere in Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden is laughing his ass off.

Wolfowitz's World

Ok, the nomination of John Bolton for the UN ambassador job was one thing. That was a clear and understandable "fuck you" to the world community. It was disturbing and incredibly shortsighted, but in keeping with the predominant interpretation of the Bush administration's--and its backers--attitudes towards the body and multilateralism in general. It also drew a line in the sand for the Europeans, but there's nothing new there.

That said, Wolfowitz as head of the world bank?

What possible reason could there be for that choice? Anti-Europeanism isn't worth it. He hasn't demonstrated any significant knowledge or skills that would lend themselves to the job, notwithstanding the Economist's piffle about Wolfowitz somehow leveraging the (overrated) "Revolution in Military Affairs" to radically alter the World Bank. He has extraordinarily damaged credibility after the WMD fiasco. The developing world will cry foul, and the NGOs will become even more alienated from the US than now, defying the logical belief that that was no longer even possible.

The whole situation becomes more and more bizarre by the day.

anti-intellectualism

Someday, I'm going to understand why seemingly intelligent people enjoy taking shots at those who actually bother to think about the world around them (in other words, "intellectuals").

But not today.

Overreach in overdrive!

I hadn't expected luminaries of the right to go as regressive as they have, as quickly as they have. Still, now we're seeing variations on the "race-suicide" argument rear their ugly heads.

(This argument being variations on "white wimmins can reads and such, so they ain't going to breed as many babies, so we's gonna be overrun by them brown people!")

Bobo was pushing it (no link, NYtimes is pay-only by this point) and Stanley Kurtz is pushing it, so it is with great pleasure that I read somebody push back. I'd call it a fisking, if that term weren't useless and insulting.

Favorite line? (Italics are quotes from ol' Stan)

As Wattenberg shows, worldwide, the correlation between falling female illiteracy and falling female fertility is nearly exact.

Holy shit, I guess it is true that reading shrivels your ovaries. And here I was taking the pill all that time.

The crazy part isn't that this sounds an awful lot like the sort of talk popular around the middle of the last century in certain parts of Europe. The crazy part is that they think that they can get away with it. Demonizing gay people is one thing, but educated women?

Double

This entry was a double post of the "Heckling" entry below, but as there are a few comments relevant to the other entry, I'll simply leave this as a placeholder.

My apologies for not catching this earlier.

Heckling

On Bush getting heckled at the state of the union address:

In the vast, vast majority of healthy democracies, the head of government getting heckled, jeered, and booed during his addresses to the legislature is perfectly normal. Hell, in the UK and Canada, it's an artform. It's also at the heart of democracy- the difference between an autocrat and a democrat is that the latter expects to be criticized when leading, especially by the loyal opposition. His party expects it to, so playing silly games about "decorum" are a non-starter.

This might be why rather a lot of new democracies tend to be based on variations of that model. They've had enough of autocrats.

Off to Iran

Sy Hersh has pretty much confirmed that it's going to happen: the United States is going to strike Iran.

The only question is how badly things are going to get screwed up this time, and whether or not Coca-Cola et al will need to pretty much abandon non-US markets.

At least gay people can't get married.

"Ownership Society"

Don't let the label fool you. This has nothing to do with ownership- as Norquist hinted at in this story, it is simply a way of leveraging the enduring popularity of the New Deal and Great Society programs in order to push through bog-standard social Darwinism.

(Actually, that's a misnomer. Darwin explicitly denied that this worked in a sociocultural sense, for good reason.)

Whether you believe that gay marriage or the War on Terror (or both) motivated the 51%, it's clear enough that this nonsense wasn't what they were voting for. Nor is it necessary, as many, many people have been pointing out on the Social Security issue. We're just seeing the beginning of the process of the demolition of the New Deal taking place. This is happening just in time for record interest rates to brutalize a population of increasingly overextended debtors, just as soon as the shoe drops on the U.S. dollar.

This begs the question of the 51%: Was ensuring that God's boy Dubya beat the anti-American libruls, sodomites and terrist unbelievers really worth it?

No, I'm not gone

But I suspect that the American political system is. The Democratic party is thoroughly destroying itself by letting its opponents define it and having its elites leap at the chance to help, and the Republicans are preparing to run the country into the ground in order to kill the New Deal, just as Norquist always advocated.

(Yes, that's what "Social Security reform" is. They'll screw it up, exploit free market theology to say that it's the governmental control of it that's the problem, and get rid of the rest. Probably while drumming up some example of "social decay" to distract the public juuust long enough. Without Social Security, killing the rest is easy.)

On the Dems being "too soft": didn't we learn this lesson in 2002? Saying "I'll do what the other guy does, only better" doesn't work. Period. It's just the trailing end of moving the goalposts. The desperate flailings of the DLC in its attempts to explain its own ineptitude don't change that. Nor, for that matter, does the liberal hawks wishing that they could ignore reality as well as the Republicans (so they could sleep at night knowing that the rest of the world thinks that America just voted to torture Arabs).

CIA purging

One of the most unfortunate parts of this past election is that we're clearly never going to find out just how badly the prewar intelligence was subject to political interference.

The only thing we can surmise, however, is that things are just going to get worse.

The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources."

The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

The CIA? A hotbed of liberals? Compared to who, exactly? "Liberal" here must mean "apolitical professional", many of whom have looked at the ideological blinders in the White House with horror. The only people left will be true believers, people who have demonstrated (through the Iraq blunders and the Chalabi debacle) that they're singularly unfit to handle this issue.

And intelligence is the key weapon against terrorism. Straight-up warfare is of dubious usefulness at best without it, and coordination between intelligence and law enforcement is the best way of really stopping problems before they start. It's not like the U.S. can invade Spain just because Al Qaeda may have some cells there.

I'm reminded of Alan Rickman's famous line in Die Hard, when all his plans were brought to fruition. "You want a miracle, gentlemen? I give you the F...B...I."

Osama needs a miracle to succeed.

We gave him B...U...S...H.

Election Thoughts

Would have posted yesterday, but blogger was haywire throughout most of the day.

Don't have much time, so I'll just say this: This was not a victory for Bush's foreign policy, for his economic policy, or the war on terrorism... not really. It was his failures in those that boosted turnout on the left, and that should have defeated him.

Instead, this was a victory for social conservativism- specifically, the hatred and loathing of homosexuals that is bubbling under the surface of far too much of the United States for the rest's comfort. Forget Queer Eye, metrosexuality, lesbian chic and the rest... a significant minority (if not a majority) of Americans have shown outright hostility towards a group that consists of 10-12% of the American population. Rove was right about an aspect of American society that many, many people (including myself) had dismissed as too disturbing and outlandish to take seriously.

More broadly, it illustrates the dual nature of American society- that it is the fusion of the Enlightenment and of Puritanism. The latter was perceived as dying, as America moved in the same secular direction as the rest of the world, comfortably protected by the declared seperation of church and state. This was in error. Religiosity in the United States is very much alive.

The Republican party isn't going to forget this, and how useful it was. They'll milk this for as long as possible, and the Democrats aren't going to get around it by embracing the religious right. They'll be painted as faithless libruls, no matter what.

Osama Bin Laden won't forget this. Although I doubt he cares much about gays, he and his ideological brethren can easily spin this as proof that the "war of civilizations" is not between the "secular West" and "Islamic fundamentalism", but between American and Islamic fundamentalisms, differing only in which religion they assert is the One True Faith.

Moslems in general won't forget this. They'll see it as an endorsement of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and to the extent that it wasn't a repudiation of such, they'll be right.

Europe won't forget this. Every leader in secular Europe is going to array themselves against the American religious right, and benefit handsomely from it.

Canada won't forget this. North America just got a lot lonelier for Canada. Canadian and American values are diverging, but I don't think either Canada or the United States had fully realized just how much. Canada's past election was a repudiation of overt religiosity- the American one embraced it.

In the meantime, expect American gays to get the message, loud and clear... and expect the division between the United States and the rest of the world to become a gulf. Huntington may indeed have been right about the Clash of Civilizations what he didn't anticipate was that the United States would end up being its own.

The Election

I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, or who I'd vote for. My preference for presidential candidate is pretty obvious to those who have read the site over the last three years.

I'm not going to tell you who I think the winner will be; those sorts of projections are pretty much pointless at this point, although I do think that the high turnout that we're seeing (see Kos for that) does suggest a certain outcome.

What I WILL tell you is that this election may be taking place in the United States, but it has global ramifications; not only in its effects on those who are the targets (recipients? beneficiaries? victims?) of U.S. foreign policy, but on the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. The United States is divided, but the rest of the world isn't, not really, and if legitimacy is conferred on the victor that was lacking the last time around, it will serve as an endorsement, in the eyes of the world, of that victor's foreign policy goals.

There is no division between the people and the leader, not anymore. American politics does not stop at the water's edge and very possibly never will again. It's too outwardly focused, and if 9/11 did actually change anything, it's that.

In some respects, though, this election is also the culmination of my blogging career. (Bean pointed out in comments that I hadn't been commenting on the election much... that's not because I consider it unimportant, but because of the normal posting issues that I've been grappling with.) More that anything, this site has been dedicated to the effects that online "conservatarians" have had on American political discourse, and American foreign policy.

We've seen the growth of the so-called "Mighty Wurlitzer" and its ultimate expression in the policies (and spin) of the Bush administration. We've also seen the growth of a contrary force, largely based and built online, that has been key to the closeness of this race. Atrios called it the "mighty Casio"... it's smaller, tinnier, and quieter, but it kept on sounding dissonant notes that continually threw the Wurlitzer off. Both were really aimed towards this election, because the "Wurlitzer" is aimed at giving Bush a second term unconstrained by the threat of defeat and the "Casio" in repudiating and arresting the forces that gave him the presidency in the first place.

Thus, although I don't plan to go anywhere, this election is going to--by necessity--change my focus to documenting and analyzing the victorious force's rise and effects.

I think I know which force that's going to be.

I know I hope which one it will be.

Regardless, however, all I can do at this point is watch, and wait, and hope.