Riba Rambles:
MORE Musings of a Mental Magpie

A kaleidescope of conflicting thoughts are going through my mind. Here's just a selection of some of the things I'm reading, often contradictory:

LadyThmpr is disappointed:

My fellow Americans...
I am deeply disappointed in you. You have voted in a President who has worked to reduce our civil liberties, sent us into a likely-to-never-end war on "terrorism," squandered a (budget) surplus into a deficit, and expanded our government like no other modern president. This president will now likely have the opportunity to appoint 2 or 3 Supreme Court justices, which will turn the justice system into a bastion of maniacal, "moral" conservatism. So long, Roe v Wade.
You also have voted in a Republican Senate and House of Representatives, who will likely rubber-stamp without comment the President's further actions to reduce our Constitutionally granted rights and freedoms, all in the name of national security. I can already hear the order "Papers, please!" echoing throughout the country.

Several others that I read have also pointed out that America voted for this administration with its eyes open. No blind promises here, we have four years' experience with what they've wrought.

Navrins:

But what really makes me sick is the fact that the American people have endorsed the Bush Administration's actions of the last four years. Until now, one could look at what America has done and say, "Well, maybe it's just the government. Maybe the American people are better than that. They haven't really had a chance to do anything about it - maybe the 2002 elections were an aberration; people still in shock after the Sept. 11 attacks and giddy from winning in Afghanistan."
Well, now we've had a chance to do something. And we as a nation have definitively said that we support the actions this administration has taken in the last four years. The stupid, the vile, the unwise, and the evil - we support it all, even now. Refusing the International Criminal Court. Reckless tax cuts, especially for the wealthy and the dead. We support that. USA PATRIOT Act, spurning the UN, pre-emptively invading Iraq on flimsy intelligence with no plan for the aftermath. Inflating the national debt. Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Defense of Marriage Act and state constitutional amendments against gay marriage and civil unions. All of it. America supports it.
I don't know that I want to be a member of the group of people who support those things.

Charlie Pierce:

OK, now I'm starting to feel the gorge rise. Let us content ourselves with this. The country voted for these guys with its eyes open. Let us hear no complaining about "bait and switch," and a "uniter, not a divider," and on and on and on. It even returned a national legislature consonant with the incumbent's agenda. There will be permanent tax cuts that will institutionalize a national debt that will force some sort of evisceration of Social Security and Medicare. There will be continued military adventurism in the Middle East. There will be Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Chief Justice Antonin Scalia. There will be more lying and more vengeance.
So let there be no whining when your husband's National Guard obligation leaves him under fire for six extra months, or when Granny and Gramps are eating cat food, or when it become increasingly impossible to meet the economic needs of the middle-class family.
No complaining. None of it.
You wanted this guy. Now you have him, unleashed.

This Knight Ridder article points out there really are two Americas, reality-based and faith-based:

For the 10 percent of Missourians who named strong religious values as the quality that mattered to them most, Bush beat Kerry by a whopping margin of 96-3. For the six percent who named intelligence it was advantage Kerry, by an equally startling margin of 97-3.

Steve Soto got a similar wake-up call talking to some distant relatives before the election:

Discussion about the wrongfulness of the Iraq war made no difference. Agreeing that more than eleven hundred American soldiers have been unnecessarily sent to their deaths in Iraq made no difference. Both husband and wife were deaf to all arguments and dismissive of all policy issues, even when they clearly understood the adverse effect on their own circumstances or even disagreed with Bush's position. They clearly understood the negative implications for their own lives of a Bush reelection. It didn't matter. For them, a vote for Bush was a religious act of self- affirmation, a way of proving to their god (or to their community of fellow worshippers) that they are "faithful."

Eric Alterman and Charlie Pierce also see the division, and are quite articulate in their anger:

The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the “reality-based community” say or believe about anything.
They don't care that Iraq is turning into murderous quicksand and a killing field for our children. They don't care that the Bush presidency has made us less safe by creating more terrorists, inspiring more anti-American hatred and refusing to engage in the hard work that would be necessary to make a meaningful dent in our myriad vulnerabilities at home. They don't care that he has mortgaged our children's future to give trillions to the wealthiest among us. They don't care that the economy continues to hemorrhage well-paying jobs and replace them with Wal-Mart; that the number without health insurance is over forty million and rising. They don't care that Medicare premiums are rising to fund the coffers of pharmaceutical companies. They don't care that the air they breathe and the water they drink is being slowly poisoned and though they call themselves conservatives, they even don't care that the size of the government and its share of our national income has increased by roughly a quarter in just four years. This is not a world of rational debate and issue preference.
It's one of “them” and “us.” He's one of “them” and not one of “us” and that's all they care about. True it's an illusion. After all, Bush is a millionaire's son who went to Yale and Harvard and sat out Vietnam, not even bothering to show up for his cushy National Guard duty, and succeeded only in trading on his father's name and connections in adult life. But somehow, they feel he understands them. He speaks their language. Our guys don't. And unless they learn it, we will continue to condemn this country and those parts of the world it affects to a regime of malign neglect at best -- malignant and malicious assault at worse.

Charles Pierce:
They showed up. The Republican base, that is. The people who believe that their marriages are threatened by those of gay people, the people who believe there were WMD in Iraq and that Saddam waved a hankie at Mohammed Atta, the people who believe His eye is on every embryo. They all showed up, and there are more of them than there are of us. This was a faith-based electorate and, for whatever reason, their belief was stronger than our reality. This is a country I do not recognize any more.

Kos takes that as a challenge:

Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the nation, yet Kerry was bad because he had "Massachusetts values" or other such nonesense.
We need to retake the language. We need to reframe the notion of "value".

and he points to Obama's speech at the DNC as a possible step in that direction. [Talk about uniter, not a divider...]

Several other people view the results in a different, more understandable, light:

Susie Madrak:

I think Americans are scared, frightened of making the wrong decision. When they're scared, they stick with the status quo - no matter how horrendous it is, no matter how ultimately harmful it is. Because at the exact moment of decision, the amount of courage, determination and resolve required to actually change something is too much for most people.

Miss Pince:

People are scared. And I can identify with that. Hell, I'm scared. I've been stopped from walking down the street because there was a high risk of terrorist attack. (In Prague)
We say we can't let fear govern us, but that's easier said than done - and that is the only thing that has been proved in these elections.
People are also ignorant. We can't look past that. I've spent a lot of time railing at the Icelandic nation for having no long term memory, but basically, it comes down to ignorance: People who believe they're right will act on what they think is right. This is the nature of the world, and this is a good thing, for the most part.
No, I don't believe there's anything fundamentally wrong with the millions of Americans who voted for Bush yesterday. I disagree with them, but that's not really relevant, is it?
What's relevant is that we shouldn't be combating people. We shouldn't be trying to label everyone who voted for Bush as stupid, homophobic or Christian fundamentalists.
The thing is, when you vote for one thing, you always vote against something else, and it's your responsibility to figure out what's most important to you and vote accordingly - even if you must vote against something you agree with.
What we should be combating is the apathy in this world. We should be combating the ignorance, and we definitely should be combating the overwhelming fear that carried so many to the polls yesterday, and compelled them to vote for Bush.
I don't mind that people disagree with me. My first reaction to someone who supports ban on abortion or gay marriage is "What is wrong with you?!" but if that is really, sincerely, their opinion, then by all means keep it.
The only thing I ask is that those beliefs are based on fact, that they're thought out, and that you have made a decision on every aspect of the issue. Don't ever tell me that 'it goes against your morals', or 'it's just the way I feel' or 'I've been brought up this way'.
I don't believe that all those millions of votes Bush got yesterday are based on fact.
I believe that many of them were based on fear. And that is just wrong. [Read the rest]

Wayfairer sees "us" vs. "them" coming from "our" side as well:

58 million American voters are not idiots. 58 million Americans are not radical right-wing conservatives, and even if they all were, they don't deserve to be treated like faceless monsters.
I know that everyone is hurting, god, don't I know it. But watching you guys rage against the people who elected Bush is by far the most painful part of this. No, I don't think we should come together and unite behind the president and be harmonious citizens. And I do think that anger is healthy right now, certainly much healthier than bleak despair. But. In your anger, please do your best to acknowledge that the 58 million people who voted for Bush are still people first, just like the other 58 million Kerry supporters. You cannot write them off as ignorant, homophobic, or madly religious, and the first step to achieving real long-term progress is for each of you to understand that. Ranting about how dumb/bigoted/insane/whatever the opposition is only further solidifies this nation into one big divide of Us/Them--and the furtherance of such division is the very thing we went to political war against Bush to try to prevent.

I suppose I'll just close with this post by autographedcat:

Bush isn't America.
Good, hardworking, decent folk all over the country are America. Honest, plain-spoken, determined people, both Democrats and Republicans, dedicated to the principles of freedom and justice are America. Helpful, compassionate, community-oriented people, in cities and on farms, are America.
When a neighbor reaches out to a neighbor, there you find us. When people pitch in together for the good of their families, their neighborhoods, and their communities, there you find us. When people do the right thing for no reason other than its the right thing to do, there you find us. When the law protects the individual from the mob, there you find us.
Bush and his crowd are just a passing thing, in the great wash of history. There are many ways, too many to list, where they are bad for us, and bad for the world, but they too shall pass, and the ideal that is America shall remain.
Because America isn't a man. It isn't a political party. It isn't an ideology.
America is a belief in a better future, in a rule of law, and in the idea that no matter how divided we become over matters of religion, race, or political ideology, we have the right and responsibility to peacefully work toward change.
Right now, the American Dream may be a bit tarnished. Sometimes its hard to see. Sometimes you can be so frustrated that you don't know how to go on.
But we will go on. We will go on working to ensure that the principles that made America an ideal do not vanish, do not falter, do not perish from the earth.
There's work to be done. And we will do it, no matter who sits in the halls of government. Because we are Americans. Even now. Even today.

And I am reminded that after all the evils were unleashed, the last spirit remaining in Pandora's box was that thin but powerful wisp known as hope.