Some More Election Thoughts: Failure is not an option.

Failure is not an option.
This is a longterm struggle and we will win some and lose some.  Our country is stronger for the give and take.  I just wish we didn't run crazy people for high office and didn't think it was necessary to lie so much.  If you don't like providing healthcare to children or don't want to pay for it, say so, but don't fabricate death panels to make your case.  And if you don't like Obama, don't vote for him, but don't call him a Muslim (hoping enough Americans share your religious biases to vote against him) or a Marxist-Leninist when he's not.  Don't make stuff up.  There is enough to argue about that is real without creating phantom arguments.
If this is the best the defenders of the large corporations can do - especially after Citizens United legalized the purchase of elections by those corporations - and with 10% unemployment that favors whoever is NOT in office with those headline numbers, whatever their ultimate cause or direction, then I am not as worried.
With Faux News and hate radio blaring nonstop, the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove pumping billions into every race they can find, with this last election, a non-presidential one, blowing out past records for money spent (many countries could be run on what ours spent on ludicrous, dishonest attack ads), I am surprised any Democrat got elected.  The fact that we control the Senate and won key elections in our largest, most prosperous and populous states (New York and California) is very hopeful.
Money can't buy you love and it can't buy you an election either (although it can come close).
I imagine after 2 years of Republican control of the House (assuming some Tom Delay or Jack Abramoff type of scandal does not lead to some game-changing turnover) people will realize you can't run a government on platitudes and given a choice between the guy who is convinced government can't do anything right (and wants to prove it by running it) and the guy who agrees with Winston Churchill that however imperfect democratic government is, it's better than all the alternatives, going with the guy who believes in what he is doing is the better bet.
If Republicans successfully abort healthcare reform before it is out of the first trimester, 50 million Americans will find themselves lacking both health insurance and any hope of getting any.  Then what?  Why is 45,000 dead Americans a year,  the body count from a respectable excess mortality estimate made by Harvard researchers an acceptable status quo?
We turned our society upside down, suspended habeus corpus, held people indefinitely without trial, engaged in torture, invaded and occupied two countries, in response, directly or indirectly, to the death of 3,000 Americans but forcing people to pay for health care before they need it to prevent many times this number of deaths is considered some Stalinist left wing plot.   Since 9-11, if the study's death rate remained constant (and it was written when the number of uninsured was much lower), then 405,000  Americans are dead now who would not have been had we had universal healthcare.
And before launching some abortion-kills-more-people retort, remember that this is not an either-or argument.  Not a single abortion is prevented, and many may be prompted, by the for profit status quo.  Insured women are less likely to have an abortion than their uninsured counterparts.  Countries with universal health insurance have far lower abortion rates than ours.  If you're pro-Life, you should be fighting like mad for universal healthcare.
If getting government off our backs means some of us will die of  preventable or treatable illnesses, others will go to crumbling schools, and still others will work in unsafe mines or drive over uninspected bridges or eat uninspected food, then I very much want government on my back, thank you very much.   I don't want government in my daughter's uterus, in my bedroom, or monitoring my telephone conversations (they are boring anyway), but I do want them making sure the car I drive is as safe and fuel efficient as possible and that our foreign policy is reality-based, not faith-based, so that my son will not be deployed in a war by a President channeling spirits instead of reading reports.