Insomniac thoughts

This is written very early in the morning of election day toward the end of a sleepless night. I hasten to add that one has nothing to do with the other; I just suffer from insomnia. But because it is election day, still hours before the polls open, I have been thinking about the election. Just various thoughts.

- I'm voting for David Cobb of the Green Party. I've made clear that if I was in a swing state I'd very reluctantly cast my ballot for John Kerry. I wouldn't respect myself in the morning, but I'd do it in the perhaps forlorn hope of putting some brakes on the destruction of our environment and our civil liberties but in the full awareness that a corporatist "non-redistributionist" Democrat with a foreign policy that is in a number of ways to the right of George Bush is hardly a choice I can be happy about or even comfortable with.

But I'm not in a swing state and the Greens have a ballot line here and I'm a Green Party member and I want to help them keep that ballot line. So that's that.

- I'm wondering if my prediction proves correct and it turns out that Ralph Nader has no effect on the outcome, if any of the people who have spent the last six months calling him a destructive, egomaniacal asshole and busily alienating people whose help, win or lose, they will want after today will offer any apologies or at least admissions of error. I don't count on it. I do, on the other hand, count on the Nader-haters to expect that help anyway and to increase their divisive vituperation if they encounter any reluctance, even though such reluctance should be expected considering how Nader supporters have been regarded and treated. They - I mean the Nader-haters - are self-defeating idiots.

- I noticed a piece by Drew Johnston at PoliticalStrategy.org. He cited, among other things, a Washington Post article from October 30, which opened this way:

Amy Morrison is noticeable at Saturday's rally in Michigan because of her red hair, and because she is shrieking and crying. Lately she's gone from worried that Bush might lose to terrified.

"I just want to touch him on the shoulder," she says, "I just need to see him in case I won't see him again. I'm so scared for him." She cries when she sees the first lady, she cries when she thinks the unthinkable - "President Kerry."

It ended this way:

Nana Young agreed with the Rev. Rod Parsley, from the Center for Moral Clarity. "When we pull the curtain on the voting booth, let us remember that you, Almighty, are still watching," he'd prayed before the event. ...

But Young is not blinkered; she reads the newspapers, knows how hair-thin a margin Bush has in Ohio. Only this week she began to consider the impossible, that Bush could be right and still lose - and put that together with her conviction that God knows what He's doing.

"If that happens, the Lord must want Kerry to be in there," she says. "If that happens, it must be the Lord is telling us we're living in the Last Days, and we'd better prepare."

As Johnston says, "To hear these folks talk, a vote for Kerry is a vote for terrorism, oppression, and old fashioned sin." We have to face it: Some of these people are dangerous. Literally. They are fanatics who are not afraid to cry havoc because they know that God is on their side. Which leads to my last thought.

- Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc), wrote last week that Israel was "On the Road to Civil War." He made clear he didn't mean another political manipulation or a new threat from settlers. "But the real thing on the ground." The source of the worry, of course, is that Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" plan, because it involves dismantling a few settlements in Gaza and hints, just hints, at the possibility of withdrawing from some part of the West Bank, has enraged the fundamentalists. Enraged them so much that the possibility of Sharon being assassinated is taken seriously.

When I look at our own situation, when I see and hear and read what some of our own home-grown fanatics spout with their talk about the election being a choice between good and evil, between holiness and sin, with their talk about the "last days," I have to say that if John Kerry wins (which I think he will in a squeaker; we'll see how my prognostications pan out) the Secret Service had better be on extra rations of caution - because there are those among "red" America who would willingly shoot him down with the idea they were doing God's work.

We are in deep trouble. Deep trouble.