Last time, Bush lost the popular vote, but in Stalin's style won the clincher that was counted by a Bush campaign manager presided over by Bush's brother.
This time he's won the popular vote. He's proven that people will rally behind their leaders in times of war, even if their leaders are power-crazed maniacs actively inventing wars.
And invent they have. The facts don't have to fit for the fear to work. The constant repetition of the idea of evildoers single mindedly attacking our goodness has paid off.
Most Bush supporters believe that the Bush-appointed and Bush-accepted report into Iraqi WMD which said there were none actually said the opposite. Less than a quarter think experts say there were no WMD.
The Bush-accepted report of the US government's 9/11 Commission said there was no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Again, not only do most Bush supporters believe there was such a link, but most believe the evidence has been found.
Most Bush voters believe the world favours his re-election despite the opposite being emphatically true.
(poll source: Program on International Policy Attitudes, 21 Oct 04 - get a pdf of it here)
The fate of the world for the next four years, and undoubtedly some time beyond, has been chosen by people whose judgement is based on their belief of lies, and seeing Bush as an individual doing God's will against the evils of gays, Arabs and a habitable environment.
The team that Bush is mascot for are far more cavalier and daring about taking power and security from the people and handing it to the rich than any US administration in living memory, and quite possibly ever. The victory today tells them that what they have done so far isn't just get awayable with, it's actually popular.
The religious element was essential to garnering such support. We know what this will mean for issues such as abortion, contraception, gay rights, single parents and Palestine.
The Bush team see themselves as being on a wholly different mission, able to do whatever they want with whatever they want, not having to yield to anyone or anything. Their refusal to admit the fact of climate change shows they feel there aren't even biological limits to their power.
So although the last four years have seen terrifying things performed at an equally terrifying rate, it seems like it will get even worse, even faster.
As evidenced by Ron Suskind in the New York Times:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'
I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.
He cut me off.
'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'
Four more years where they speed their process up is unimaginable.
It starts today.
In the words of Jello Biafra, embrace the red white and blue reich.
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