The Liberal Bias of Reality

During much of the Romney campaign, I was reminded of the Saturday Night Live sketch The Guy Who Plays Mr. Belvedere Fan Club where they have a vote to see whether they should kill him. After the vote, Tom Hanks as Chairman says, "The Nays have it. He lives. But the vote shouldn't have been that close." This sums up how I feel about the election. We won, but it shouldn't have been that close.

Rachel Maddow had by far the best elocution on the election:

if the Republican party, and the conservative movement, and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum sealed, door locked, spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived, as a nation, of the constructive debate between competing, feasible ideas about real problems.

This is not to say that I've been entirely pleased with Obama either. Under Obama, the march to destroy education has continued apace. Transparency about security and foreign policy has not improved. Our use of flying death-robots has grown. But all of these things would probably have been even worse under Romney. But maybe the next four years will be different.