November 05, 2010 05:11 PM UTC

Savoring the Losses

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• by: JO

Whew! Buck lost in a squeaker. Tancredo-Maes, not quite as close, but close enough.

How odd then to read headlines to the effect that Michael Bennet won his first contest, when the other headlines tell stories of Markey and Salazar going down by fair margins.

My opinion? Not at all! Ask Michael Bennet, he’ll tell you; in fact he spent a few million $s telling you: Buck is too extreme for Colorado.

Message: vote against the other guy. Over and over and over until the fund-raising pitches on public TeeVee began to look intriguing.

For those suffering post polls sniffles out there in the purple majesties and fruity plains, I understand the agony: What if Buck hadn’t said he didn’t support separation of church and state? What if he hadn’t attacked social security? O Great What If, Why? Why did Ken have to practically produce negative commercials for the other side? In a year when the winning candidates were Fear, Ignorance, and Megalies, how could Buckaroo have been so dim as to have fed Fear by making antiquarians worry about their Social Security checks? Repeal health care reform, absolutely, after which go onto what? Medicare? No, Ken, the winning pitch was Fear of Socialism, Tyranny, and a black man in the White house.

[Free idea for the GOP to reduce unemployment without violating your principles: invade a third country–Iran? nah, too big; let’s try Ingushetia; Putin won’t mind, will he?–to provide military jobs for all them lazy, ignorant, useless non-graduates of the 12th grade! Onward Christian soldiers!]

Quite apart from being stuck with the Man Who Won’t Smile for six years, there’s another downside to the outcome: A certain someone who was wrong about the size of the stimulus, past and future, will look in his mirror each morning and declare, “I must have been right! After all, I won the election, didn’t I?”