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livefree · #1 (**permalink**) 11-04-2004, 09:16 PM

In the aftermath of the Democratic loss of the election, liberals have been geting a lot of bad "advice" from some very smug right-wingers on what we did wrong and how we need to change to be more like them so we will be "part of the mainstream". Well, no thank you! We actually don't need your condescending BS right now or your braindead advice on what we can do to be more like you. We don’t want to be like you!

Bush may have won by a nice 3% majority but the fact remains that 55.4 million Americans voted against Bush and his record of failure and betrayal and voted for Kerry and the hope for a positive change in direction. Bush may have won but he is still wrong and is still doing great harm to our nation and the world.

Your smug claim that the Democratic Party is fast falling out of the mainstream is belied by the 55.4 million of us who voted and who are just as much part of "the mainstream" in America as the slightly larger number who voted for the Republican Party. These voter balances change and voter's priorities change and as the failures of Bush's policies on the economy, environment, foreign relations and the Iraq war become even more apparent and harder to ignore, the Democrats may be in the majority again sooner than you want to believe.

Liberals are much more in tune with the real core values of America, like equal rights, individual freedoms and government of, by, and for the people of America. We reject the perversion of this principle that holds that our government should be of, by, and for the corporations and super-rich. That seems to be the main "value" held by the corporate welfare queens of the Repub party.

Many of us on the liberal side think having moral values includes such things as not waging an unnecessary war of unjustified aggression or killing 100,000 civilians in the process. We think it includes taking compassionate care of the poorest and the weakest and the oldest among us. We think it means the opposite of the Repub business ethics and values displayed in the Enron collapse, the Halliburton no-bid contracts, and many other corporate ethics scandals. We liberals think moral values definitely must include a concern for the environment and the welfare of our grand-children and great-grand-children unto the twentieth generation. In our terms, Bush and his crew are very immoral people.

The Republicans convinced many evangelicals and Catholics that there were only two important moral issues at stake in this election. Gay marriage and abortion. "Moral values", in Repub terms, seem to begin and end with sex. The real Democratic Party challenge in the next four years is to bring the other dimensions of morality, beyond just sex, into the political consciousness of the sincerely religious people in this country.