Watching the returns after the 2012 election was mostly a thrilling experience.
I'm so happy that the billions the Republican noise machine spent trying to discredit Obama were wasted! I'm very happy that the Website 538 was spot on with its meta-analysis of polls. I'm very happy that the members of the Rape Caucus lost and that Chuck Fuqua ("Parents should be able to execute their disobedient children") lost and that Michelle Bachmann almost lost. Women won all over the place - Warren, McCaskill, Baldwin. Paul Krugman has been nothing but right for years. Twitter was heavily overloaded and did not crash and burn Election Night. And Faux News was completely discredited as anything like a news source all night long. Millions of us already knew this, but I think millions more finally caught on last night,
Mostly, I'm glad we'll have four more years of President Obama. Like other developed nations, we'll have a more inclusive healthcare system. Yes, some people (and we might be some of them) will need to pay more taxes. The long "tax holiday" is over. Yes, I'm sure we'll still have some obstructionism, but I don't think the gridlock will be quite as strong as it was.
And, I do look forward to the coming civil war within the Republican party. The TPers are still as delusional as ever and think the American public wants them. They don't. More Republicans don't even want them anymore. For the next four years anyway, the country will progress and not regress. I think the TPers will try to start their own party, and will become increasingly less relevant. America voted for more women, voted for gay rights and legal pot, and re-elected a black president with both plenty of electoral votes and a clear popular majority.
The people who lost will continue to whine and cry - heard a few minutes of the Akin "concession" speech and it was amazingly juvenile. They can whine and cry all they want, but democracy and rationality basically won the day yesterday, and we can be very happy about that. Vote suppression and vote buying did not win - the voters won!
It looks like our country will finally not be involved in multiple wars simultaneously. While Romney and the hawks seem to want nothing more than a war with Iran, there are ways around that, and I'm sure Obama would not start a war with anyone unless absolutely necessary.
Perhaps our country will finally raise enough in taxes to improve crumbling infrastructure, improve the schools, contribute to science research and NASA. America can be a great country again, but it needs the tax money to do so.
Forward!
