Drill THIS, baby

So I’m at Motria and Chris’s last night, margarita in hand, watching the election returns, refusing to get my hopes up. Same for Chris and Motria. It makes for a rather subdued evening.

Me, glumly: “Well, they called the first state for McCain – Kentucky. That’s not a good sign.”
Motria: “We might still be okay. Kentucky has gone red every election since Herbert Hoover.”
Me: “Still. We’re doomed. Hey, we got Vermont! 3 electoral votes from the hippies. Sigh.”

As the evening wears on and we drink more margaritas and keep hitting refresh on the laptop to see if that offers more up-to-the-minute information, the returns looks good, but not good enough to get giddy, Pennsylvania notwithstanding. Especially since they declared PA with only about 2% of the state counted. Then Laura calls.

Laura: “Can we celebrate yet??”
Me: “I don’t think so. Anything could still happen – the Republicans could declare that gee, they have all these ballots they just found in someone’s car trunk, or thousands of absentee ballots from overseas, or god knows what other kind of shenanigans could take place. Remember 2004! Say, what’s that noise?”
Laura: “Eddie’s already celebrating – he’s got the noisemakers and champagne out.”
Me: “Well, I’m cautiously optimistic, but nothing more. The scars are too deep. As they say, fool me once......you can’t get fooled again. Besides, we want Indiana to come in from the cold.”
Laura: “Eddie says Indiana doesn’t even matter at this point – Obama has enough electoral votes anyway.”
Me: “Of course Indiana counts! If you think about it, Illinois is right next to Indiana, and that makes our relationship critical. We even share a narrow maritime border, Lake Michigan, and sometimes the Indianans fly over our airspace, and we have to send someone out to keep an eye on this not-very-powerful state. Besides,” I add, “I can see Indiana from my house.”

Motria pipes in: “I can see Indiana from my work.”

Me: “So clearly it’s to our benefit if Indiana goes blue. Because right now with them being red, it’s like our next-door neighbor is a foreign country, right next to our state. Plus then I can spend money when I drive through their state, rather than buying everything in Illinois, gassing up beforehand and so on.”
Laura: “Okay, McCain just called Obama to concede – can we celebrate NOW?”
Me: “I’m cautiously hopeful.”

While I’m decidedly non-partisan, I did get in my email inbox this morning the celebratory missives from Environment Illinois, the Center for Biological Diversity, and of course the NRDC – which was amusing, because they note that since they’re a non-profit, they’re not allowed to endorse any presidential candidate, but they then go on to gush about Obama and what his victory means for the environment after all these years of decimation by the Bush administration. Hmm, I wonder who they wanted to win.

Me, I stay out of politics. But I would like to take this opportunity to reach out to our Republican brethren, out across party lines in a show of unity and harmony, to those who know how we’re feeling because they’ve been here, kind of, to all those who voted for George W. Bush and then re-elected him in 2004, to those who yammer on about “morals” and “values” and then have no problems destroying our planet and wishing death on gays and bombing abortion clinics and letting the super-rich get richer while everyone else suffers and giving the biggest tax breaks to oil and pharma companies, to them I would like to say just this: Suck it, red states.


That is all. And so, after I’ve expounded on this bright, shiny new day in America, we now return to your regular programming.