A final post-election post:

What a long, strange trip it’s been, to quote Jerry Garcia. This election… matters. In 2000, it really didn’t seem like that. It seemed like a choice between the cowboy and the tree trunk, both of whom were running as centrists, at a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity despite the best efforts of both sides (depending on who you ask). Before that—well, I’m only 22 so my knowledge is very limited, but in hindsight it seems like for most of the past 50 years either the choices faced by the president were very clear or the race was very lopsided. (And yes, I realize that I’m just advertising my ignorance here by making sweeping generalizations like this. Bite me. There’s no law against it.) But now, this time… it’s fucking weird.

The party that stood up for states’ rights for the past 40 years tried to amend the U.S. Constitution to include discrimination in it for the first time ever. The U.S.A. launched one of the only pre-emptive wars in its history - the Mexican-American War was a de facto pre-emptive war, if I remember my history correctly. Hey, wait a second, that's how we got Texas. Coincidence? Well, in a year where the Democratic candidate is a JFK from Massachussetts and the Red Sox won the World Series, I don't want to write anything off as coincidence.

Well, I've done enough pontificating about the election in general, so I'll turn it over to people more qualified than me. Andrew Sullivan explains some of the paradoxes in this race much better than I could.

I'm often annoyed by the College Republicans here, so it was a lot of fun reading about this College Republican Gone Wild. Every time some "reasonable" person tells me that both sides are equally bad or that the crimes are the result of a few bad apples rather than being connected in any way to a party's official leadership, I find something like this. (Follow-ups on that from the same blog here and here. And a ton more could be found elsewhere online.)

And finally, for those three of you out there who still don't think there's an appreciable difference between the candidates, here are two things to keep in mind: only one of them demands personal loyalty oaths, and only one has supporters who act like this.

Okay, that should do it for politics for a while. At least until the legal challenges to the elections begin. And eventually I plan to write a post about how crazy right-wingers must have to be to see themselves as a marginalized minority, as some do.

Non-political stuff: *WHEW*, I finished my Take Five application with 30 seconds to spare today. Well, I still have to ask another professor for a letter of recommendation, and I shouldn't really breath a sigh of relief until both recommendations are in, but still - it's on track. Despite yet again putting it off.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: this is pretty cool.

UPDATE: I had meant to include this with the political stuff, but I forgot, so here's one last link for the moment. I really liked reading this post.