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Congratulations, America. Your way of life is safe, the 51% of you who make decisions for the rest of us. You did a fine job of weighing the issues and letting the candidates define each other. If the only true patriots are people who agree with you, you probably don’t care what I think. But I’m going to tell you.
The tax cuts for the billionaires are safe. Either you are confident you will be a billionaire some day, too, or you believe the folks at Halliburton and Carlyle will share their windfall with you, the way the top executives at Enron did. Maybe they will use that money to help you out with your health insurance. Maybe they’ll hire a few more of you to sweep out their offices, now that we’re sure the minimum wage rate won’t be raised for at least four years.
You must really like war, America, because you’re probably going to get more of it. With a mandate to fight terrorism even where it doesn’t exist, the powers that be can now go adventuring around the world, looking for phantoms. We can send even more of our young people off into dangerous lands far away. I’m not clear on what we’ll do if we run out of soldiers, though, since a promise was made that there would be no draft. But we all know what promises are worth.
Your isolationism is safe, too. You must not like foreigners, because you’ve fixed it so that you don’t even have to pretend to be friendly to them. I’m sure you won’t need them for anything important, like sharing the burden and expense of fighting all those wars. It’s a good thing you are making so many new friends in places where “freedom is on the march.”
The Supreme Court is safely in your control. If you’re lucky, three or four justices will take permanent vacations in the next four years, and you can pack the court with even more judges who hate the same people you hate. You won’t have to repeal the erosion of civil liberties, but you might get a chance to snatch back a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. Soon there will be no “choice” but your choice. That’s what a mandate can do for you.
Your vision of right and wrong is safe, too. Your definition of marriage is so safe you don’t even need that constitutional amendment we’ve heard about. You don’t have to worry about men marrying men or women marrying women. You might not be able to stop them from loving each other, but at least you’ve successfully chased them back into their closets. You don’t have to look at the deviants. If they happen to be your son or daughter, you can always disown them. It’s been known to happen. | 
