Back in 2004, after the elections, a young woman calling herself A Very Sad American posted "An Open Letter to the Democratic Party: How you could have had my vote." It made a minor stir across the blogosphere. (You can read it here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041109034126/http://fromasadamerican.blogspot.com/2004/11/how-you-could-have-had-my-vote.html)
I added it to my bookmarks because I wanted to see if this person ever retracted their words as we went further into the Bush presidency. Well, her blog is gone now, but you can still read her original entry via the Internet Archive, and it's even more chilling in hindsight. Like this snippet:
The notion of an abortion makes me queasy, but I don't want Roe vs. Wade overturned. I have friends who've been impregnated by rape and friends who found out late in their third trimesters that they were carrying babies too malformed to ever have normal lives.
Way to go, VerySadAmerican. How do you feel now? When Alito is confirmed you can kiss your freedom of reproductive choice goodbye in whatever Red state you live in. You knew this was going to happen, but did nothing to stop it.
Or this snippet:
You didn't convince me that you would defend America against the threats of terrorism. Kerry seemed to think that terrorism is like any other crime. You catch the people responsible and put them in jail, and that's that. After seeing the destruction – physical, financial, psychological, and emotional -- wrought by the September 11th attacks, I do not understand how he could believe this. The hijackers lived among us, ate at our restaurants, shopped in our malls, and wounded us worse than we have ever been wounded before. How Kerry saw this as a crime, and not as a paradigm-shifting event that deserved a military response, both in direct retaliation and to keep it from ever happening again by going on the offensive, is something I don't understand.
Of course, she apparently forgot about Kerry's support for the invasion of Afghanistan, and for using special forces to root out and kill, not indict, the terrorists. But what truly chills me here is the willingness to shed everything she claims to believe in earlier paragraphs, to sacrifice it all for a Big Brother-like protector. My hunch is that even today, when she hears that Bush is wiretapping the American people without warrants, when she hears that his administration uses torture and secret torture prisons, that American citizens can be seized and detained for their entire lives without counsel, that Bush asserts he has essentially infinite power as the "unitary executive"...
She welcomes it.
Destroying the Constitution and the Bill of Rights makes her feel SAFE.
You want to know how people can still support Bush? Fear and ignorance. That's all it takes. Fear and ignorance. What will it take to make people like this wake up?