Congratulations to President Bush and the Republicans for their win in Tuesday’s election. They have won the day – in fact, four more years to pursue their agenda and extend their policies, potentially beyond their term with the ability to mold the Supreme Court for a generation or more.

Their place in history will now be more fully assured. Future generations will read about them and what they stood up for when it counted most: their work to institutionalize intolerance in the bedrock of our legal system; their use of a self-perpetuated climate of fear to curtail our most precious civil rights; their selective interpretation of a religion of peace to justify war; and their decision to use an unprecedented unity of the global community to show the world not our ability to be humane and just toward our fellow human beings, but rather our shocking disregard for these same principals.

They have their 270 electoral votes. To the rest of us they have given us 1,000 lost American sons and daughters, 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians, 1 million jobs lost, 5 million more children without health insurance, and the countless billions upon billions drained from our future for a needless war while giving handouts to those who need it least. I wonder which numbers the judgment of history will remember most clearly.

Richard Law

Snohomish