As they reap...

Every country has the government it deserves.

Joseph de Maistre

or, perhaps, more charitably for the 48% of us:

In a democracy the people get what the majority deserves.

James Davidson

When the shit really starts to hit the fan, when Iraq descends even deeper into the morass, when the economy stubbornly refuses to improve and even more people start to lose their jobs and their health insurance, when our personal liberties hit a contemporary low, when corporations have free reign to manipulate and deceive us, government regulators are toothless and emasculated, unions are powerless, the environment is raped and degraded, and we still cower in the corners from fear of a terrorist attack, I don't want to hear from any of the 60 million people who voted for "values" and "strength", and other simplistic bullshit, about their problems, because, frankly, they deserve whatever they get for their part in this election.

What I say is screw them, all 60.4 million of them, whoever they are and whatever their motivations were. They're adults, and responsible for their actions, and I'm holding each and every one of them, regardless of their own particular personal qualities, accountable for every single one of the mistakes, missteps, foul-ups, fuck-ups, screw-ups, stupidities and wrongdoings that the second Bush administrations is bound to inflict upon us and the world.

If you think I was mad before the election, take a look at me now.


Postscript:

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental -- men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, or self-respect, it is cruelly hard.

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even a mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second or third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically the most devious and mediocre -- the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

H.L. Mencken
The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

[via Follow Me Here]

More:

The problem is, how do you maintain a democracy, when there are so many millions of people who are stupid enough to believe anything?

Unidentified psychologist
quoted by Robert and Shirley Eberle in
The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial (1993)

I keep saying to everyone who will listen that you can't run a democracy with people who don't know how to argue, don't know how to think clearly, and don't know how to express themselves.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff
professor of humanities, MIT
quoted by Scott Lehigh in
"It's, like, extreme, but not gross" in the
Boston Sunday Globe (2/9/97)

What disturbs me the most is that people can be so gullible and so easily led around by the nose. It was not because they lacked intelligence. It was not because they were unable to access the best available information. It was because they abandoned the ability to doubt extraordinary claims. It was also because of the frightening and omnipresent tendency of humans to blindly follow charismatic leaders and fanatics.

There has been a very "mod" trend over the last generation to "have an open mind" and presume that one person's claims or opinions are, by some kind of natural law, just as valid as another's. This notion of personal truth is an intellectual poison which might just pollute our culture's intelligence to the point where we as a society, become crippled by it. This is democracy gone rampant. Paranormalists,political extremists, and religious cultists have taken full advantage of [it] ... and their collective influence in our society could literally destroy it.

Brant Watson
"Suicides...the Big Picture" (4/5/97)
sci.skeptic and elsewhere