Regrettable Election

I am beginning to resign myself to what I have felt for the past couple of years was the inevitable, the re-election of George W. Bush. In some ways this reminds me of the Nixon re-election back in 1972. The American people somehow managed, under the looming shadow of Watergate, to believe that the best solution to the Vietnam problem, the war that wouldn't end, was to give Nixon four more years to settle it in some way that wouldn't be a disgrace to America. I'm sure that more than a few people who voted for Nixon that year wound up regretting their vote as the disgrace not of Vietnam but of Watergate and Nixon's resignation, and then of the disgrace of the retreat from Vietnam brought American confidence in the Republican Party to its knees.
To this day, I'm sure there are many people who would say that the problem was that America refused to trust its leaders. They say Watergate was no big deal, probably politics as usual. Wasn't that Nixon's perspective? And there are certainly many who believe that the US would have won the Vietnam War if the American people had just simply trusted their leaders to do whatever was necessary. The disgrace would have been avoided had we simply believed in President Nixon.
But I have a different take on that. I think the disgrace was brought on by the fact that the American voters believed in Nixon enough to vote him in as the President in the first place. When you choose scum to represent you in government, isn't it then your own fault that your nation is disgraced by that scum?
I think the same thing is happening to us again. 1972 was long enough back so we have basically forgotten all the lessons learned. We have scum in the White House again. Many Americans worship the President in exactly the same way that Americans worshipped Nixon before they heard the secret White House tapes. Those who don't worship Bush are still willing to re-elect him because of the ongoing "War on Terror," that never-ending battle to suppers the revolution against Globalization. The end result is going to be that Bush will win the 2004 election. Why? Because so many people are deciding their vote on one issue alone, terrorism. The American voter is afraid of terrorism with exactly the same fear that the 1972 voter feared Communism. The Bush team is capitalizing on that fear. Republicans are using that fear - remember the terrorist warning from Homeland Security for no known reason following the Democratic Convention - to frighten the voters into supporting Bush's war machine. Nixon did the same thing in 1972.
But in exactly the same way that the 1972 election led America into disgrace, I am convinced that the 2004 election, if Bush wins, will lead America back into disgrace. Bush isn't the shining angel that his supporters make him out to be. He is lying scum. Sooner or later he is going to run out of ways to keep that a secret from even the numbest of Americans. It happened to Nixon. It'll happen to Bush.