Romney’s defeat is worth celebrating. Obama’s victory is not.

It’s good Mitt Romney will not be our president. It’s bad Barack Obama will be.

It’s bad for the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and countless other countries where he is DIRECTLY responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands. (Remember: Obama approves each drone strike, including those that target mourners of previous drone strikes against ambiguous targets. We have also bombed more countries under Obama than we did under Bush.) It’s bad for the people that will continue to be deported under the record expansion of deportation policy that his administration has overseen (1 million, more than Bush). These are very real people. Their lives are not something politicians simply “have to sacrifice” for elections. It’s bad for the citizens that will have their constitutional protections stripped away and indefinitely detained, a policy Obama pushed for and got passed – and which we have no way of knowing if its already been used. (Building upon and worsening even Bush’s PATRIOT Act. Remember how outraged we all were about that?). It’s bad for the climate and environment, as Obama has worked to expand offshore drilling and only reluctantly temporarily put a halt on Keystone, which will effect impoverished communities and countries the worst. And on and on and on.

So you can be happy that Romney is not president. I recognize and fully agree with it would be worse if he was. For a myriad of crucial reasons it is better that Obama is president. But that does not mean it is good he is president. It is not a dichotomy. And, in fact, Obama has been worse than Bush on a score of issues. And, again, these have real consequences to real people – there are corpses, torn apart families, destroyed communities and ecosystems that are on his hands. There is not one Obama that is a progressive and one Obama that is a warmonger, who oversees and approves the deaths and destruction of thousands and thousands and thousands of lives and communities. They are not two different people; they are one in the same.

We can do better. Much better. Romney’s defeat is worth celebrating. Obama’s victory is not.