During the long campaign the President attacked Senator Kerry for having a “September 10th mentality” in his plan for prosecuting a war on terror. Dick Cheney kept telling us that if we voted “wrong” we would insure another attack on the American homeland more devastating than that we suffered on 911. They chanted the mantra “everything changed on 9-11”. The war on terror became the campaign of terror and it worked.

If everything changed on 9-11 nothing changed on November 2nd. We are still counting flag draped coffins coming home to the American homeland from Iraq and Afghanistan. The President is still promising to strengthen Social Security by dismantling it. The President’s prescription drug program is still a program to subsidize pharmaceutical profits out of the Medicare payroll tax rather than a program to control pharmaceutical costs. And Osama Bin Laden is still hale, healthy and free to send us his video tapes to play upon our fears.

Nothing changed on November 2nd. The FDA is still acting to protect pharmaceutical manufacturers against profit sucking safety studies instead of protecting patients against unsafe drugs that deliver death instead of a cure. The administration’s answer to the Flu Vaccine failure is still to immunize the pharmaceutical industry from financial responsibility for deadly mistakes.

Nothing changed on November 2nd. The administration’s answer to the challenge of international terrorism is still to go it alone shoving any effort at international cooperation to control an international problem aside while it points to the three year interval without a dramatic attack as proof that it has been successful in controlling terrorism by military might. By that measure the previous administration’s success against the terrorist threat is still to be equaled. Between February 26, 1993 and September 11, 2001 there were no dramatic terrorist attacks except those launched by Timothy McVey and Eric Rudolph.

Nothing changed on November 2nd. The bitter rhetoric of division driving steel wedges into the spirit of America dividing the Reds from the Blues still assails our senses and overwhelms our common sense. The bitter partisanship of exclusion still dominates the Red controlled House, the Red controlled Senate and soon again the Red controlled Supreme Court nominations.

Nothing changed on November 2nd except that the Administration with its control of the levers of power strengthened must finally take responsibility for America – at least the responsibility to find new excuses when things go wrong. /.fc