Civil War
[link|http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/10023151.htm?1c|http://www.miami.com...n/10023151.htm?1c]
On the eve of the most important election in this nation since 1860, one gets the feeling the contest isn't about two men vying to be president, but about two passionate factions of the citizenry locked in a struggle for America's conscience.
Rhetorically speaking, America is engaged in its second Civil War.
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[link|http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/24/1098556297684.html?oneclick=true|http://www.smh.com.a...tml?oneclick=true]
At first I did not buy this theory of the growing Red and Blue gulf. It seemed too facile, a media fad about an old cultural fault line. Then I had a good look at the last presidential election. And I changed my mind. There is a divide between the Red and the Blue in America, and it is growing more pronounced.
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[link|http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_12763.shtml|http://www.axisoflog...ticle_12763.shtml]
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . ..
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[link|http://www.americanpolitics.com/20041025Weiner.html|http://www.americanp...041025Weiner.html]
If the Democrats lose, the political civil war will take place between those in power who are all too prone to tack to the center and center-right, and those liberal/progressives who are no longer willing to compromise like that, since such a strategy took them to defeat, twice.
In short, there will be wholesale realignments within both major parties, and I would expect a major expansion in popularity of the Greens and other alternative parties -- which might well be attractive to those in the 2004 electorate who are sick and tired of the lesser-of-two-evils option and who could not work up a passion for either candidate.
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[link|http://theedge.bostonherald.com/lifeNews/view.bg?articleid=50840|http://theedge.bosto...g?articleid=50840]
Time stops short of endorsing a candidate, but its cover, ``The Morning After,'' paints a scenario that seems more like an obituary for America's future.
Whoever wins the election, the cover story begins - if there's an early decision at all - won't matter because America is too divided to govern.
The package includes an exclusive on a Pentagon executive who's come forward to blow the whistle, with evidence, that a $7 billion no-bid Iraqi contract was awarded improperly to Halliburton.
The magazine's latest poll also says nearly half of registered voters, or 48 percent, think an illegitimate winner will capture the White House.
Newsweek skips politics on its cover in favor of another big crisis: the lack of flu vaccine and the chance the flu bug could hook up with the often fatal Asian bird-flu virus to create a deadly pandemic this winter.
On the election front, it says Ohio could be the new Florida and has ``the feel of a slow-motion Civil War for the soul of America.''
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That term sure is coming up a lot.
