I'm taking my family, and planning on spending the next four years (at least) in the Bahamas. I wrote this to explain to my friends why I felt it necessary to do this.
A huge number of Americans actually voted for George Bush, in spite of the fact that he took the country to war based on a tissue of lies and killed tens of thousands of innocent people. I chose to be an American, and for the first time in twenty years I am ashamed of that decision.
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Some politics is about the distribution of income and the role of government and religion in everyday life. Reasonable people can disagree on those topics without any of them being evil. Some politics is about dropping bombs which kill innocent civilians. If you are in favor of doing that for any reason other than saving a greater number of lives, then you are evil. I cannot be a party to that evil.
There are other things that made me proud to be an American, like the Bill of Rights and the respect for the rule of law. I see those being systematically demolished.
There are those who think it is better to go on fighting. If you have the heart for it, please do so. For myself, I'm afraid I don't see much hope. Kerry actually won the last election, but there was widespread and systematic ballot rigging in favor of the Republicans, particularly in the swing states, and that will only be worse in the next election. The evidence for this is statistical and circumstantial, but convincing none the less. If someone flips a coin and it comes up heads a dozen times in a row, then that could be a thousands to one chance coming up. But if they won't let you examine the coin afterwards, then it's far more likely that there is some trickery going on.
The Democrats, or at least the smart ones, know this, but there is nothing they can do. If they fight in the courts they will lose, because the Republicans control the Supreme Court. If they fight in the press, they will lose, because the Republicans control much of the press. The bits they don't control have be browbeaten into believing that they should give balanced coverage, where balance means that people who tell the truth are given the same coverage and respect as people who lie.
Good luck to those of you who are still fighting. It is still possible that America will come to its senses by such a huge margin that even vote rigging will not be able to disguise the result. I hope intensely that it does, and I'm not burning my American passport yet. But in the mean time I'm out of here.