I’ve been refraining from blogging political for the past several days, partly out of disappointment and disgust, and partly from burning out–I posted 13 times on election day, and 33 times in the four days preceding, over 50 posts for the week leading up to the election results. That’s easily five times more than my usual rate, and considering that most recent news is bad–not to mention that I’ve had more than the usual amount of work at school lately–I’ve simply stepped back from the grindstone a bit, give the old nose a break.

Soon after declaring victory in the election Bush did a speed-dial version of what he did in 2000: promised to reach out to Democrats, almost immediately followed by his producing an agenda even farther to the right than before: an agenda he failed to present clearly before the election, wouldn’t you know. And now that the election is over and dying soldiers can’t hurt his political standing so much, Bush has unleashed an all-out attack on Fallujah, with casualties expected to be very high (an unconfirmed report says that 35 U.S. troops have been captured by the insurgents).

Conservative politicians made no excuses about their extreme partisanship in the wake of the election. Crowing about their “mandate,” their claim to “moral values, and how more people voted for Bush than for any other president in any other election, they instantly discarded their false facade of bipartisanship and cooperation and announced gleefully that they would be forcefully pursuing an even more one-sided agenda, threatening to divide the country further still:

The majority Republicans said strongly that they intended to move ahead with President Bush’s agenda and wouldn’t go out of their way to be conciliatory toward the minority Democrats.

Of course, the “mandate” may be one of the weakest ever heard of. While more people voted for Bush than for any other president, more people voted against him than any other president as well. He won the popular vote by a slim margin. The Congress remains Republican, but they gained only one Senate seat for a 3-seat advantage; the House gains were even slimmer, just four more seats out of 435, and that paltry gain was due to DeLay’s illegal gerrymandering in states like Texas–redistricting that may soon be overturned (a bit too late, natch). If not for the outlaw redistricting, the Democrats would have gained seats, and might even have regained control.

So the claims of a mandate are no more then chest-puffing, posturing for the press, and an excuse to be even more partisan and divisive than ever before.

Meanwhile, we still wait to see what investigations into voting fraud may yet reveal. Numbers are being looked at, results tested. The problem with the voting machines is that if they did have a hack to give Bush more votes, it was likely self-erasing by the end of election day, and without proof of programming, no amount of statistics proving rigged voting machines will push any real action forward. Which is why I say that unless they’ve already been snagged by Diebold or ES&S, somebody better get a hold of their voting machines that broke down on election day–they may still hold the suspicious code, if it lay in the machines. Else it could be in tabulators, little more than glorified PCs.

And though you may not be hearing much about it right now, be certain that there are a lot of people checking and re-checking results, especially in contentious states. I don’t know if fraud tipped the election or not, but it is pretty certain there was fraud: the numbers don’t lie, and it is just a little bit more than fishy that just about every case of miscounted votes, glitches and “malfunctions” just happens to favor Bush. We’ll probably hear more by this weekend, when states like Ohio start counting provisional votes; if those votes take away from Bush’s advantage enough to make fraud a possible make-or-break issue, then there will be more of a fight. Right now, people are patiently investigating, and those aware of that fact are still holding their collective breath.