I see a lot of worried people around here lately...

[Curtland1015]

...and, really, I don't think you should be looked down on for it. The way we as voters have been jerked around the past several years would be enough to put a fear into anyone.

That said I just don't feel the same worry in the pit of my stomach that I had last election. No matter the polls, no matter the Palin puff pieces or McCain ass kissing by the media, I honestly do believe with every fiber of my being that Obama is going to pull this of. For a while, I wondered where this calm was coming from. The Repugs are up to their old tricks after all, and Palin is polling so well with the drones. So why the calm? Why the rock solid belief that we were going to take this one?

I think it is because of the man himself, Barack Obama. I'm thirty-one years old. I didn't grow up in a decade when I could see JFK speak live. I wasn't around yet when great men like Dr. King gave their amazing speeches. But watching Barack Obama, I think I finally know what it was like for those of you lucky enough to have witnessed those amazing men.

He's got that it factor working for him that so many others lack. He radiates confidence, intelligence, and charisma. While Al Gore and John Kerry are certainly great men, they don't have the power to energize the people of this country that Obama seems to. He has an energy about him that I have never witnessed in a polititian before.

Take heart out there lefties. We aren't done yet. Hell, we have only just started! Barack Obama, the next President of the United States of America!

[Olney Blue]

1. A chimpanzee is squatting in the White House because the GOP cheats.

That is why we are worried.

[Curtland1015]

4. Yes, a chimp who beat John Kerry. Again, Kerry is a great man...

...but he doesn't have the power to excite voters that Obama does. I really see this win happening for us.

[warren pease]

15. Our little Embarrassment in Chief did no such thing as beat Kerry, or Gore for that matter...

And oratorical skills won't have anything to do with this year's outcome either. The only real issue is election theft by the experts who put the whole scam together for the GOP/RNC and gave us eight years -- and possibly many more -- of the Bushies.

Issues, positions, debates, 30-second TV spots, media-created scandals, matters of global species extinctions, fair or so-called free trade, domestic repression, Gitmo and torture... This is all just the backdrop and scenery used to add authenticity to the play itself.

They're not intended as substitutes for the play, of course, just as all the speechifying in the world and the reverberation of the word "change" across the country can't equal the power of a few dedicated experts who understand how to flip millions of votes for the GOP.

Now they don't even have to mess with the machines; they can just tap into a few dozen or hundred ports on IP backbone routers and telecom switches and install some software they themselves developed. Then they can just sit back and watch the votes flip from dem to gop as they cross the port and continue on their way through the vast, GOP-owned telecom infrastructure.

Re Florida 2000 -- Read up on Greg Palast's thorough analysis of the various tactics the RNC/GOP used to suppress democratic voter turnout, remove many likely dem votes through illegal voter roll purging, simply lose a couple of crates of ballots from predominantly democratic precincts -- all to ensure victory for the right wing coup that took this country over on December 12, 2000 and, I submit with high confidence, will be going nowhere next January.

That they only stole enough to make the vote count close enough to justify a recount and not an outright victory was a small, correctable mistake with no consequences.

And for the Ohio 2004 version of the scam, read up on Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s highly detailed piece in Rolling Stone, circa 2006 I believe. Mark Crispin Miller has done his own research on Ohio 2004 and has a book out on the subject.

Miller also wrote about the 100 percent certainty that they'll try it again this year. And, as has been the case for the entire time the coup's been in charge, the only two organizations that could bring these outrages into the open with any credibility -- the democratic party and US mass media -- absolutely refuse to have anything whatsoever to do with the story. They not only ignore it; they run from it like I imagine people in biblical times used to run from lepers.

So it's nice that poll monitors and videographers will be out in force on election day. It's nice that armies of lawyers await the first whiff of GOP fraud. And it's nice that activists and other politically aware Americans are familiar with the issue and how it's inflicted the Bushies on us because of two stolen elections.

Now if we could somehow get the other 299.5 million apathetic, media-smothered, hyper-consuming imbeciles with brains that have atrophied from years of inactivity or TV-induced idiocy, we might have the numbers to overwhelm the wingers and remove the coup from power.

However, this being America, I'm thinking Miller is probably right and that mass American stupidity and refusal to deal with the anything political will result in president Combover McCorpse and his smirking fundie loon VP.

These rapture groupies will put the finishing touches on Amerika v2.0 and, just as the last lefty is assigned the last empty bunk inside the last internment camp, the first nuke drops on Russia or Iran or some enemy du jour to be named later. And that's that... Cockroaches and viruses thrive; mammals don't do so well.

That's why I think this election -- if that's what it is -- the GOP simply can't be allowed to claim victory. There's too much at stake, up to and including WW III, if these maniacs succeed the current group of certifiable psychopaths.

Of course, I'd be a little surprised if the Bushies actually pack up and leave next January. They might do so if McCorpse "wins," but certainly not if Obama's ready to assume all those executive branch powers the Bushies gave themselves the past eight years.

They would never subject themselves to the possibility of arrest, trial, conviction and life without parole. Fortunately for them, Biden's little hint about checking into their criminality was quickly retracted and so the public knows there are no consequences for mass murderers and thieves as long as they're named Bush.

For everybody else it's tough shit and five to life for an unarmed gas station robbery that netted this master criminal $47.23.


wp

[Nitrogenica]

2. This is not Kerry election campaign, and Kerry almost won.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. I was talking with my neighbor today,

and she said her 90 year old mom was going to vote Democratic for the first time in her life! Sarah Palin sealed the deal for her. It is much the same for my mom, who will be 90 be Election Day and only hopes she lives long enough to cast her ballot for Obama. Apparently both ladies have nothing but scorn for the Governor of Alaska.

[Glorfindel]

5. Worried? Not really. Concerned? Naturally - look at the Repuke record

of election theft, mendacity, and serving the interests of the wealthiest one half of one percent of the population. If we're smart, we'll expect the worst and strive with every resource at our command to defeat the Repukes in the November election.

[barbtries]

6. i'm confident that barack will win

but not that the republicans won't steal it. i am certain they will be trying to steal it...and i wasn't smart enough to have that feeling in the pit of my election last time around. kerry won. gore won. neither one ever served. see what i mean? nasty things go on. i will be glad when it's over, because i don't like this unease.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

7. You are young, and you are beautiful

I want you to keep that confidence, that strength of belief, that courage and hope. I want that to be what defines you, and I want you to hold onto all those things as long as possible.

Some of us who are older than you - old enough to be your parents, very easily - were once just like you, all those things guiding us and lighting our way.

Then we learned about loss.

We lost JFK. Then we lost MLK, Jr. Then we lost RFK.

And all this happened within a 5-year span, while we were also losing the boys we grew up with, the ones who went off to a place in SE Asia called Vietnam, wherever that was.

We learned about loss, and we watched as Watergate almost destroyed us, but some heroes - Sam Ervin, Sam Dash, Peter Rodino, Alexander Butterfield, Katharine Graham - saved us, and then we started to get back up.

Along came the Iranians taking our Americans hostage, and holding them for 444 days, with daily reports about them slowly, slowly breaking our spirits and showing us how powerless we were.

They were released just as Ronald Reagan was sworn in, and then began our true "long, national nightmare." The mentally ill were turned out of hospitals and into the streets, the rich began to get richer, and the poor began to disappear from the map.

After that, Bush The First, a slow decline, followed, thankfully, by Clinton, who then proceeded to run so fast towards the center, we of the Left who had supported him, couldn't quite believe it. Once he got caught getting blown in the White House by an intern, our hope was left, yet again, in a shattered mess on the floor of our lives.

Watching the election being stolen in 2000, and again in 2004 left people like me bereft and utterly without hope. Certainly with no more trust in the system. Still, along comes this charismatic and powerful young man, Barack Obama, and whatever hope and faith we still have rises up, and we remember quite well what it felt like to believe, to feel like you do, only without the weight of our decades of experience.

This is a long way of saying that there are those of us who have every good reason to despair and to be fearful. We have seen far too many ways that we can be robbed, that Republican operatives or madmen with guns or the cruel whims of destiny can steal from us the things we hoped for. I hope you never have to endure any of the kinds of losses we have experienced, and that when you are our age, you are still rather baffled by us, the ones who held it back and pushed down our hope and waited for the worst, all the while hoping for the best (with apologies to Mel Brooks).

I hope your confidence and faith will always remain intact because Barack Obama was elected President - TWICE! - and he did a phenomenal job. I hope I can share all that with you.

But, until then, I hope this lengthy screed helps you, my young friend, to understand the perspective of a generation that came before you and watched it all turn to dust and ash.

[iowasocialist]

10. Beautiful

Thank you for your words, Tangerine.

I am 54 and know what you are talking about...

[Tangerine LaBamba]

13. Thanks, iowasocialist -

and a hearty welcome to DU!

[Curtland1015]

12. Beautifully written, and most certainly taken to heart.

But as someone who had lost his mother by the age of eleven, and his last Grandparent at the age of twenty-nine, I learned very early on to focus on the fleating moments of joy over the long trails of despair.

Yes John F. Kennedy was taken too young. Dr. King was taken too young. But why despair over their loss when you can celebrate what they gave us? Why blush at Bill Clinton's trespasses when you can revel in the victories he has won us? Why cringe in fear over McCain's attacks when fear accomplishes nothing?

Hope isn't just a buzz word being thrown around this year it is a real and tanigible thing. It drives everything we do, to lose that hope, to lose that will to fight is to give in. It does no good, for any of us, to gloat only when our man is ahead and turn quickly to fear when he falls behind. Anyone can fake hope, indeed confidence, when they are the one on top. But honest to God hope is only real when you can keep it at the worst times.

I know we'll have our setbacks. The bad times always seem to out number the good. But when we let those bad times, those set backs and pitfalls define our character, we have truly given up. I refuse to let that happen. We, all of us here, are too good for that.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

14. Far too young to lose a mother,

and I regret that for you. I lost my last grandparent at the age of eighteen.

Those are personal losses, and we all have them. They affect our personal lives, and we somehow deal with them and go on.

There was no celebrating of what JFK had given us when he was assassinated, and there still is no such thing. There wasn't anything he had done that we could celebrate, because the proximity of his short time of his few accomplishments to his ugly and violent and shocking death left us with nothing but despair. A world stopped. It wasn't like anything else.

The events of 9/11 were shocking, but, for me, anyway, they were nothing compared to the days of JFK's death. Perhaps only the people who lived through it can possibly understand it. Perhaps your youth precludes you from being able to understand a country standing still, shocked into silence that eventually gave way to grief and then numbness that lasted for years. Lifetimes

You must understand that JFK was an incredibly young bright light coming after the dismal Eisenhower years of dull and repetitive Cold War rhetoric. He and his wife and his young children had the eyes of the world upon them, and, consequently, on us, and we were never prouder to be Americans.

And then Martin Luther King, Jr. drew us together in a time when LBJ, for all the horrors he was brewing in Vietnam, still managed to push through a Civil Rights Act of 1964. There was hope for integration and racial harmony. King was a power to be reckoned with, and, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, he was becoming a black leader like no other.

When he died, the riots consumed our country and left us more divided than before, which made no sense, but one must never underestimate the racial anger and bigotry that contaminate our country.

Bobby Kennedy stepped in, with a reversal of conscience from when he'd been his brother's AG, and began a march that surely would take us back to the glory time of JFK. Young people returned to the political scene with a newfound fervor. I remember landing at Miami Airport after a year spent in South America, and finding people standing, paralyzed, staring at the TVs throughout the terminal. We stayed there for 24 hours, until word came that Bobby was dead. I can still hear the shrieking and sobbing that echoed through that big place; some of them were mine.

All this was before you were born.

Today, people abroad still love Americans, but they loathe America.

You misunderstood if you think I wrote that "bad times define our character," because that was the exact opposite of what I believe. In fact, the good times were what kept us going, the slender hope that it might someday be like that again. But, years of loss, oceans of tears, they do put a constraint on the extravagant and carefree belief and blind trust that you seem to think we should all be experiencing.

They were not "setbacks," the things I wrote about, and the fact that you chose that word suggests you do not entirely grasp the import of the time. You might want to read more about the losses our generation endured, and then, maybe with a few more years on you, when you've worked to wrestle your kids to a safe adolescence and adulthood, when you watch your country march from a golden place to a dark place with no hope, maybe then you'll understand why someone such as I sees your approach as a sweet kind of Pollyanna world view, child-like, limited, touching, and, ultimately, unrealistic.

[sasori]

8. Everyone's panicking...

They think Obama's not fighting back enough.:eyes: Too many people are GIVING UP.Some even are voting for McSame because of that.:grr: It's starting to get hysterical.

[Matariki]

9. Why worry. This is NOTHING like the last two times.

Right?

[chicagoexpat]

11. Y'all should be worried enough to

quit blogging and go out & do some work for the CAMPAIGN!

The alternative is to be complacent and turn out like the Dukakis or the Kerry campaign

[Delphinus]

16. I love it!

I think you are correct - Barack has the charisma and intelligence and confidence that have been sorely lacking. I watched him (on TV) give his speech and sat there thinking things similar to what you mentioned.

Thank you for putting this into words - I agree with you so much.

[dysfunctional press]

17. aaahh the idealism of youth...i remember it well.

but i've seen two(well...almost) nixon terms, two ronbo raygun terms, poppy, and now two terms of jr...and then there's clinton- the only halfway decent repuglican we've had in the white house since eisenhower. jimmy carter was a democrat.

THAT's why i'm concerned about this selection year- history...the american people have a tendency to keep repeating the same mistakes, in hopes of a different outcome this time around. between the corporati media fawning and the kkkarl rove playbook still being used- i'll be surprised and relieved if barack prevails.

however- if he does, on their way out, the cheney misadministration will open the scuttlecocks that are keeping what's left of the economy afloat.

either way, interesting times ahead.