Distress over "the Bush Business"

Isn't it just like a friend who has known you for many years? He or she can sometimes tell better than you can that you're distressed. One of my Yale roommates wrote yesterday, "I am a little worried that you are taking the Bush business so much to heart, because it seems to me to be making you very unhappy." I thought of that this morning while reading a few more pages of Toni Morrison's Beloved and became aware that I was comparing myself to the character Sethe, who carried a huge burden of suffering out of her past as a slave.

I'm embarrassed to have compared my suffering (and the suffering of other Americans through these intolerable "Bush years") to the terrible suffering of American slaves in the nineteenth century. But who knows? Maybe the total amount of suffering now even surpasses that of those slaves. Think of the millions of Americans trying to live today on the minimum wage that the Bushevik Party resists increasing while fighting to free the wealthy from the estate tax. Think of the thousands of American servicemen and women who have died or been seriously injured in Iraq....

My roommate went on: "Obviously, the country made a mistake in electing Bush the first time¹ and even more so the second time² in light of the track record of the first term. The good thing about all this, I think, is that at this point Bush is relatively powerless and will have even less power as time goes on."

While I hope that this "good thing" is true, Bush is still in place, soiling our White House, worsening the terrorist situation, channeling contracts to greedy incompetents, favoring wealthy campaign contributors, perhaps putting another anti-progressive justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, not to mention the relatively minor matter of embarrassing us almost every time he opens his mouth and tries to remember just how it was Karl told him to word what he was supposed to say...For two and a half more years he can (and surely will to the extent that he has any power at all) exacerbate the mess that we already have to clean up after him.
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1. But did the country elect Bush in 2000? If the Bushevik Party hadn't disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters in Florida, then Bush, instead of defeating Al Gore by 5 electoral votes, would have lost by 45.
2. And in 2004, if the Bushevik Party hadn't disenfranchised even more voters in Ohio (possibly 350,000, according to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in his article, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" in a recent issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, including stealing thousands of votes by electronic tampering), Bush would not have defeated John Kerry by 34 electoral votes, but would have lost by 6.