Mandate, Schmandate

The ink is hardly dry on the 247,000+ Ohio votes that, according to a Cleveland Plain Dealer report, are never going to be counted. Yet, our President has already begun gloating about his "political capital" generated by his so-called victory.Right-wing propagandists and hacks like Sean Hannity are pointing to the sea of red sprawling across the electoral map and claiming that this proves Democrats are becoming an endangered species. Some so-called "journalist" on the CNN Airport Network today, despite the fact that about 56 million votes were cast against Bush, declared that Democrats were a dying species that needed to be protected and cherished, noting that -- if nothing more -- Democrats should be preserved for "breeding stock."Setting aside for a moment the fact that the dingbat at CNN who though that report was cute should be surgically removed from the breeding stock with a rusty pair of garden shears, this whole fallacious idea of a Bush mandate should be similarly nipped in the bud with those same rusty shears.Squeaking out a victory by 136,483 votes, with untold hundreds of thousands of votes not counted, does not a mandate make.But don't tell that to our President, because he hasn't had a buzz like this since he stopped free-basing. For a man who prides himself in not reading very much, he certainly isn't shy about reading a lot into very flimsy facts. See, e.g., Iraq.President Bush to took his 5-4 Supreme Court "mandate" in 2000 and embarked on an extremist, scorched-earth policy, refusing even the mere idea of the pretense of "unity" and "bipartisanship" -- something he solemnly promised America on that same day in December 2000 that Al Gore conceded. Now that he has an actual, if relatively small, winning margin of votes, the right-wing pundits would have you believe that the only message to take from Bush's slim margin of victory is that America actually voted to repeal the Declaration of Independence and reinstitute an absolute divine-right monarch named George.We should not be surprised that this president owes much of his victory to increased turn-out driven by the American Taliban -- the fundamentalist, heretical Christian sects that believe Bush is advancing the onset of the Book of Revelations "end times." They preach, and he believes, that his administration has been anointed by God to do His work.But I have news for the mullahs of the American Taliban, the right-wing partisan hacks, and all the "journalists" of the so-called Liberal Media who wind up carrying oceans of water for the right wing: There is no mandate.Kerry lost Nevada by only 21,677 votes, so a splash of red paint across the vast tracts of Nevada desert represented on the electoral map gives a false sense of what happened on November 2. Similarly, Kerry lost Iowa by only 13,251 votes out of 1.4 million cast in the state. A "red" state where Democrats are an endangered species? Right... and I've got some WMDs in Fallujah to sell you.The electoral map is not a coloring book. You cannot judge the winner by which crayon gets used up faster. Coloring vast yet largely empty states in red does not mean you have a mandate.Bush can only have a mandate if those who oppose him acquiesce. In declaring victory on Wednesday, President Bush said he wanted to earn the trust of those 56 million people who voted for somebody else. We of that 56 million must hold his feet to the fire and demand that he represent the values, the ideas, and the agendas, of the near majority of people who think he is the wrong man, for the wrong job, at the wrong time.President Bush has demonstrated that his arrogance is rivaled only by his incompetence, but the screaming voices of 56 million Americans may well be able to jar him from his blissful delusions. That will only be the case, however, if we refuse to sit down and shut up as some partisan right-wing hacks -- or "pricks" for short -- have demanded.Today a commentator on The Majority Report suggested that if the inauguration isn't the scene of a raucous protest aimed at reminding the President that 56 million of his fellow Americans think he is a liar and a boob, it would be a sign that the opposition had gone spineless. Will the 56 million Americans who voted against Bush be so disgusted, disaffected, and disillusioned that they let the second Bush administration lay claim to a mandate that is as imaginary as those weapons of mass destruction?We shall see.