The Five Stages of Grieving For George Bush's Re-Election:

The world is too fast-paced to sit around and piss and moan about the election. The Rude Pundit is ready to move to . . .

Stage 5 - Acceptance:

Yesterday, in his press conference or, to use the proper term, gloatfest, George Bush threatened the lives of all Americans who didn’t vote for him. Said Bush, "Americans are expecting a bipartisan effort and results. I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals." And later, when asked if he felt free, he said one of the most nakedly power mad things anyone's ever claimed in a so-called democracy, "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." He may as well have said, "L’etat, c’est moi" and renounced the Edict of Nantes. It was a chilling reminder to anyone who believed that "bipartisanship" is even remotely possible. He is King Kong, Bush said. Let New York City cower beneath his giant balls.



What does it mean to accept what’s happened this week? It doesn’t mean that we roll over and say, "Here, our anuses are yours to abuse freely." It doesn't mean that we abandon this fallen America for the sundry lands of more democratic societies (yet- the Rude Pundit always keeps his options open). Do not accept your marginalization or forced exile. As much as the Republicans are crowing, 51% is awfully tenuous (although we won’t torture out the numbers to "emphasize the positive" as others have – fuck emphasizing the positive, fuck silver linings – it’s like saying, "I was sodomized in my prison cell, but at least my white supremacist rapist didn’t beat me when I cried.")



Acceptance means we accept that we lost. It does not mean (despite all the fucking letters the Rude Pundit received) that we accept George Bush as our leader and knuckle under. It means we stop falling back on such pussy liberal statements like "In the days ahead, we must find common cause, we must join in common effort, without remorse or recrimination, without anger or rancor." That means you forgive the tactics of your enemy. When Bush said, in his "look-at-me-Daddy-I-won" speech, "And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America," all he was saying was it’s my way or the highway. That's what his press conference yesterday demonstrated. Ass, gas, or grass, motherfuckers, no one rides for free. And the sooner the non-right (because, let’s face it, centrism lost on Tuesday) learns that lesson, the sooner we begin our crawl back to power.



So where do we go? There will be more advice in the days, weeks, months to come before the midterms, but here's a few suggestions: Let’s start with the Senate. Lincoln Chaffee has already spoken about leaving the Republican party. It is time to bribe and threaten Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins into at least going independent. No, that doesn't mean a majority in the Senate, but it's a fuck of a lot closer than it is now. And, you know, Barack Obama's gonna need some back-up.



If George Soros really wants to do some good (and really, truly put his billions on the line to defeat Bush's agenda), he can buy CNN or MSNBC (considering their ratings, they’ll come cheap) and transform it into the oppositional force the media is supposed to be. The non-right was crushed by the conservative media. Air America is a good start (and it'll grow), but we need so much more. And, fuck it, since so much of the media that's called "liberal" will be called that unless they have daily updates of who Hillary killed today or a pray-for-George-Bush show, the New York Times, CBS, and others really are free to go whole hog on the opposition.



There’s a certain level at which we need to think about ourselves as insurgents in an occupied country. And, as we all know, no one likes to be occupied. That doesn’t mean violence. It’s a mindset: you are either a collaborator or an insurgent. That's what we need to accept, at the bottom, at the end of this long goddamn stomach churning bipolar week. It's what the Democrats in Congress need to realize: to collaborate is to be a traitor to a cause. The administration wants to steamroll for the next two years. It will treat all opposition as it's about to treat Fallujah: it doesn't matter how much shit you blow up, how much collateral damage is done, as long as its goals are met. What is the goal of our insurgency? To take back our country from its occupiers. And that's a hard, long slog of a battle. When we accept that there's no quick fix, like electing a President, we accept the chore of the next couple of decades.



As reader Ty put it, "As a negro, all i keep thinking about is the negroes in the south who [were] mired in an awful world before the civil rights movement and even after and how they were strong and alone and mostly unsupported at first. how their sacrifice and blood and washing the floors of whites who hated their guts allowed me to do all the shit i do every day, and be in my cushy tax bracket, and laugh and smoke cigars with my negro buppie ivy league friends, and how i owe it to them to fight the assholes in the capitol for every inch they wanna take off that sacrifice



"fight and fight and fight. i owe history and precedent. fight and fight and fight. i owe my grandmother and my grandfather and his father and his mother who was a slave...



"and if one more liberal friend tells me (even jokingly) that he's moving to canada or europe, i'm gonna kick his fucking heart out for my grandfather and grandmother and her mother who was a sharecropper and never had that choice...



"it's on!"



Fuck yeah.