Today sucks. A crushing defeat, not because Kerry lost but because George Bush won. He has lied and denied his way through an outstanding centralization of power and a fundamental reordering of international and domestic policy. I had faith that people would see through this guy even as they accepted Kerry as less than perfect. This is, in hindsight, a difficult position to ask others to take and it is much more palatable to simply expect that the stories of Bush's shortcomings are all politically motivated and vote for the guy who seems to be in charge. But I am not going to waste too much time psychoanalyzing such an inexplicable phenomenon. Bush will be president for four more years. This makes me feel completely defeated and alienated by this country. There may be two Americas, but when a president consistently ignores the one you're a part of, it makes it hard to accept his leadership. There was no way for this election to be anything but divisive. I just didn't expect it to make me feel divided from my formally confident self. The difference between the way I feel today and the way I felt a week ago (after having watched the response to Eminem's new vid--foolish fantasies multiplying) is something I wasn't prepared for. And the gloating of the "other side" is incomprehensible. I can barely be angry at it because I have a hard time understanding how they can truly believe the things that they claim. It was just dirty politics for a while, but now it seems everyone should just admit that most of it was based on lies.