Well, thank God at least that the 2004 election was free from bullshit and fraud and fuckups.

You know, if you can put people on the moon, you can certainly pay people to design a voting machine that will work.

If democracy were a sacred value in America, then it’d be far beyond states’ rights, it’d be beyond the petty infighting between parties. You’d have temples to democracy all over the country where people would go for elections. You’d have vote-tabulation machines running software that were free from the kinds of errors that undergrad software-design courses teach even mediocre students to avoid making.

Too bad nobody with any power actually gives a shit; it was a nice enough, if flawed idea. But democracy’s not the word for what this is.

Oh, but here are some good articles.

Oh well, Marvin at least can still make us laugh about it. That link is to a good post about the horror movies that Americans of different political persuasions are trapped in, and it says a lot. It’s really, really good. Here’s another link to the same place, that’s how much I think you ought to go look.

UPDATE Nov 18 2004: Yeah, okay, the mainstream press is saying most of the funny-looking things were overstated, and that’s why they weren’t widely reported. Then again, this is the same press corps that overlooked the insanity of what happened in 2000 in Florida—or in the Supreme Court’s chambers—which doesn’t buy them a lot of credibility if you ask me.

I stand by my assertion that democracy is not truly valued by American society. If it were, each State would have spent at least as much time, energy, and money building a reliable place for voting and a reliable system for collecting votes, as gets spent putting in a local Wal-Mart. Even just that much money, at least.

Profit obviously comes in way before democracy in American culture.