All hail Bush!

As I watched the election results unfold from the unrivalled comfort of my deathbed, a pestiferous little reflection bored a crack in my mental equilibrium.

“Democracy!” I bleated to my oldest pal Jones, who was donning a black smock complete with veil, weeping like a widow at the end of the bed. “Isn’t it just the most splendid of pastimes? Just witness at all those daft Yanks tailing back outside those mock polling stations as if their worthless votes matter! A sight, I declare, of unrivalled hilarity!”

Jones, who is scarcely the sort of chap you’d turn to in a crisis, wailed like a seal and expressed a sudden desire to lay new roots in Myanmar.

“What’s the matter, Jones old bean?” I scoffed. “Lost your faith in the ancient art of electoral fraud?”

“On the contrary,” he burped, releasing an unwelcome gust of Stella Artois my way. “I’m just cheesed off with this whole western charade.”

“Well, safe journey,” I said, turning my attention back to Fox News. “And leave the nachos, will you?”

For sure, this was Freak’s Night Out. Rifling through the networks via several remotes, I was confronted by geek after nerd after weirdo, most of who looked like they’d forgotten to de-robe out of their Halloween costumes.

Politics, particularly popularity politics, always seems to attract a nation’s craziest collection of cranks. They pontificate, they deliberate, they prance about the television studios like diseased kangaroos, and they sport the most entertaining assortment of haircuts this side of a German metal concert. Most of them look so dead they could be casting votes in Florida.

Entertainment at its finest.

The election itself swung this way and that like the trunk of a stampeding elephant, causing Jones and I to switch our loyalties depending on minute-to-minute trends, slaves to the crushing enthusiasm of each and every hopelessly partisan pundit.

One minute we adopted Cheney snarls. The next we flicked our Edwards locks.

But overall, a few home truths spun their way into our alcohol-sodden subconscious.

First, the poor, stinking masses no longer vote in their economic self-interest, which saves the rest of us a fortune in taxes.

Second, nobody votes Democrat anymore, because Democrats are immoral, elitist New Englanders who support the Boston Red Sox, turn their noses up at chilli cobs and show a shocking reluctance to send American troops to die in foreign lands no-one can point to on a map.

Third, politics is all a matter of style. Not just in terms of the candidates’ appeal to voters, but in terms of the candidates’ approach to politics. John Kerry’s whole plan for Iraq and war on terrorism rested on his faith that he could be more polite in Paris than Dubya ever managed, and that the effete French would be helpless to refuse him.

Fourth, as a group, voters are grotesquely ill-bred ignoramuses. Americans, of course, are even worse. “I’m for George W Bush,” explained one Ohio gentleman spitting onto the floor of a local bowling alley, “‘cos I’m a hunter.” Some two-thirds of Yanks think God created the world in seven days (with no overtime on Sunday and no medical cover). “It is often remarked how worrying it is that half the people in America don’t bother to vote. I think I should find it rather more worrying if they did,” says Bill Bryson.

Fifth: well, this time they did bother. Record turnouts did anything but help the Kerry campaign, as everyone but Jones and I had falsely predicted. “I am confident in the judgment of the people,” said President Bush after voting for Kerry. And well he should be. Back in the 1980s, when W’s hero Ronnie Reagan was in the Oval Office, one-third of Americans thought the Nicaraguan contra were fighting in Norway. In the words of the Cato Institute: “A relatively stable level of extreme ignorance has persisted for decades, even in the face of massive increases in educational attainment and the quality and quantity of information available.” George W Bush, one-time cheerleader, simply does not need to think, all he desires is to triumph in the latest popularity contest.

Sixth, I’ll let P.J. O’Rourke explain: “When Iraq was stable, it attacked Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars. It attacked Iran. It attacked Kuwait. It gassed the Kurds. It butchered the Shiites. It fostered terrorism in the Middle East. Who wants a stable Iraq?”

Seventh, why do I persist in numbering my observations?

I wrote the other week about “The Curse of the Bushbino”. I am relieved to learn that the Bushbino has broken “the curse of John and John Quincy Adams,” as Todd S. Purdum of the New York Times terms it. The Adams family curse was beginning to haunt democracies the world over.

As the evening wore on, and my papa’s Patek Philippe predicted the break of dawn, I offered a tasty theory to Jones, who’d sheepishly had a change of heart about Myanmar.

“If this is another disputed election, America is in for another civil war.”

Jones shrugged and continued to pick up nacho crumbs with a wetted finger.

“The President will have no choice but to bring the troops home from Iraq and launch a pre-emptive strike on Boston.”

Jones went to get more beer. I chuckled to myself as he collided with the refrigerator door. It was no skin off my nose that the chump was worse election night company than Hillary Clinton. I’d got a significant sum of capital and a cellar load of fizz riding on Bush.

If you’re feeling a little down about the result, think of me glugging my way through case after case of free champers.

See? It’s not all bad. All hail Bush! And chin-chin, everyone!