Finally, it is over. The USA has endured the first General Election with the excretion of godawful slanderous ads brought about by SuperPACs and the Citizen’s United decision! Thank you Washington DC elites for making watching TV and online videos a complete chore for the past 2 years. Not that the mid terms were pleasant either.
And I realize that those same forces are now squatting and grunting out the beginnings of the 2014 mid-term elections even as I write this now. They are not interested in compromise and leadership for the USA and her people in their hour of need. Their only interest was in retaking the share of taxpayer money and public resources that was theirs before Obama took office. They deserve what they got.
We’ve had four years to present a viable alternative to Barack Obama and policies that I despise. He has been (to paraphrase Daniel Ellsberg- "a tool of Wall Street, a man who’s decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who launched an unconstitutional war (at a time when we were supposedly out of money!), supports kidnapping and infinite detention without trial and who has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents put together."
In addition, he has broken his campaign promise when it comes to respecting State’s rights to have medicinal marijuana and he has allowed a bureaucrat to lengthen the pain of the Housing Crisis by sitting on money meant to help homeowners facing foreclosure.
So, how, you may wonder, can I justify voting for this man?
We have had four years of partisan sniping and refusal to compromise with a Democratic president. And not once did I hear these legitimate reasons to dethrone Obama brought up (okay a few were brought up by Ron Paul, but I meant people who were going to win the Republican nomination). Indeed, a lot of the rhetoric was that these outrages were not barbaric enough! And what have we had instead? A slavish adherence to a party line that insists on confusing the worst excesses of Stalinist Russia with Keynesian formulas in place in this country during our most prosperous decades. We’ve had union busting and promoting superstition over science. We’ve had Global Warming bring us Frankenstorms and record hot summers and the only mention of it has been snide allusions to the East Anglia e-mails!
It has been four years Republicans have had to show me how they would be better than Obama. Instead they have demonstrated how they would be worse, much worse.
I have narrowed it down to 5 major issues that swayed my decision to hold my nose for Obama.
1.Supreme Court picks
This is always an issue in Presidential elections. But we have had a conservative court for most of my adult life. It has given us (among other pieces of judicial excrement) Citizen’s United and SuperPACs poisoning the airwaves with expensive lies during this campaign. We shouldn’t need to go further. But I will. Ginsburg, Kennedy, Bryer and Scalia are in their 70’s. The next President could nominate up to 4 Justices. This influences the lives of Americans for decades.Robert Bork himself is one of Romney's legal advisors He could inflict Paul Clement, the lawyer who almost brought back insurance company’s Pre Existing Condition denials on the US people and their Constitution.
Or we could have another Warren Court. Given that choice, I’m holding my nose for Barack on that issue!2. Thwarting a petty and malicious Republican leadership
This Great Recession has been a burden for the American people. And to help the American people in their hour of need, the Republican Party nobly reached across the aisle to help a new President in 2008 because the constituents were in need.
Er, wait…No they didn’t!
This has been four years of failed Austerity (punishing poor people for the mistakes and malfeasance of the aristocracy). This has been four years of blocked jobs bills, filibustered remedies, and constant dishonesty regarding what was being done. We here in the United States use the default currency of the world. Our dollars are needed in order to have a currency for oil to change hands internationally. But the deficit is constantly demagogued by the most corrupt in our system to sell us on a lower standard of living.
Loosening the purse strings in order to give States money to keep Police, Fire, and Schools up, is not Stalinist Russia!
The Republican leadership deliberately made the Recession worse than it needed to be in order to run against a President at a time of Recession!
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one term President" Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
I am more than happy and proud to cast my vote not for Barack Obama, but as a middle finger raised against that arrogant callous attitude among Washington DC elites!
3.The people we don’t vote for
There is also the issue of those people whom we don’t vote for, but wind up in positions of power and influence nonetheless.
The same cliques of elites get to weasel their way in and out of power on a regular basis whenever the flavors of power change.
If Romney gets in, this same crew who were in power under Reagan and Bush get a free ride to illegally shed blood again with no fear of prosecution and at the taxpayer’s expense. I’m talking about people like John Negroponte US Ambassador to the Honduras during the Reagan years and enabler of military dictator and alleged human being General Gustavo MartAnez in the Honduras. In 2001, 185 corpses including 2 Americans were excavated from the El Aguacate air base John Negroponte was in charge of. When George W. Bush was installed in 2001, he made Negroponte his UN Ambassador in the run up to the Iraq invasion and was made ambassador to Iraq in 2004.And I already mentioned Robert Bork. Robert Bork is an advisor to Romney. This the same guy who sought to advance his career by dismissing Archibald Cox during the Watergate hearings causing a cascade of resignations and outrage known as the Saturday Night Massacre This is the legal braintrust Romney has around him telling him who to put in Federal judgeships and on the court.
I do not want to see a Justice John Yoo (torture memo legal hack) or a Justice Paul Clement on the Supreme Court!
The United States is so much better off without Bork, Negroponte, Yoo, Clement and those who think as they do. They should be far away from of positions of power (the further the better). Keep them on chat shows, keep them writing pedantic dishonest columns, but for the sake of the US People and their Constitution, keep them out of power!4. Paul Ryan’s voucher plan
The man in the contrived Soup Kitchen photo would become Vice President if Romney won. This fraud he concocted to take my Medicare from me after paying into it all of my life would be closer to becoming a reality. He would replace my Medicare benefits with a voucher. And if the voucher proves insufficient to buy decent coverage, I’m an old person who is up shit creek without a paddle.
The Health Care system just got minor improvements with passage of the ACA. One of the more repugnant spectacles of our privatized Health Care system has been the sight of people forced into bankruptcy in order to afford treatment of their illnesses.
Paul Ryan’s promise to "preserve Medicare for future generations" is a brazenly insincere reassertion of one of the ugliest aspects of our Health Care system before the ACA.
And the irony is that this "promise to preserve" only opens the door to future raiding! If they can raid the funds for 55 and under for a bullshit reason, then they can raid the funds for current retirees! The "promise to preserve" is just as sincere as his work in that Soup Kitchen.And stop calling a fund I pay into every paycheck an entitlement!! Now!
5.The War on Drugs
The only candidates living in the real world on this issue are the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
Civilization on the other side of the Mexican border has collapsed due to policies that favor thugs over entrepreneurs. Marijuana Prohibition is a failure as a policy and it has been high time we recognized it as such.
One of the many disgraceful scars on Obama’s record was his breaking of a 2008 campaign promise to refrain from interfering with Medical Marijuana on the State level. So why hold that against Mitt Romney?
Well, there is no real change in his stated positions. According to Mitt, he would try to reduce demand in this country.
How? Are we going to have to go through the stupid egg commercials again along with more punitive sentences for victimless crimes? That’s worked great so far! I don’t see this getting better under Republicans, I see it getting worse.
We, the people, need to mute the influence of the privatized prison industry and law enforcement unions on the government in order to fix this problem. Legalization and taxation of marijuana should have happened decades ago! And neither candidate who was approved of for mass consumption among voters has offered anything other than the conventional wisdom that hasn’t worked for decades to deal with this problem.
And I see a better chance for that happening under Obama. After all, we need the money.
That’s why I voted for Obama in a Western Swing State.
That being said, I want to offer some constructive criticism for the Republican Party. And I am being sincere. Republicans are often good-natured family and friends. Being friends, let’s be honest with one another. There were things that could have been done that would have had me casting a vote for someone with a R behind their name.
What will follow in the near future is going to be a war within the GOP. There will be an effort to rebrand. There will be an effort to expand the pool of Republican voters. Now is a time for the GOP to choose new leadership. Now is a time for reinventing yourself.
What follows are recommendations on doing just that which would have resulted in my casting a vote for the Republican.
You obviously need to steal some of the agenda away from the Democrats. So here's my advice-
1.Take Environmentalism away from the Democrats.
One of the most popular Republican Presidents was Theodore Roosevelt. There is a proud tradition and history of the Bull Moose Republicans. If a Progressive Republican of that tradition had a differing view on Economics but agreed with scientists on Global Warming and been running against Obama, I would have probably gone with the guy who had the guts to stand up the Climate Change deniers.
Outdoorsmen could be a loud voice in a view that successfully challenges Obama. Ted Nugent is ready to lead.
2.Grab the biggest States Rights issue around and Legalize Pot.
The future is already written regarding the legalization of pot. There is just too much money to be made from legalization and taxation. There is a limit to the rationalization of brutally overcrowding prisons. There are limits to the extent Minimum Sentences for victimless crimes can be sold as convincing arguments the War on Drugs is worthwhile. Advocating this puts you in the same company as William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, Dan Quayle, George Schultz, Ron Paul, and the British House of Lords.
Washington and Colorado have just taken bold steps to end the moronic failure we call the War on Drugs with the passage of their pot legalization measures.
Do States have the right to decide their own destiny or is it the Federal Government? I say this issue is ripe for not only for acquisition by a party that will stand up from a party that takes its marijuana realists for granted. And it would drive a strategic voting wedge in the Pacific Northwest (aka Left Coast). Seriously, hippies out here are outraged enough to vote Republican!!
A Republican with the guts to take that kind of stand would have gotten my vote.
3. Don’t get rebranded as the Koch brothers and Karl Rove’s sock puppets this time.
I don’t vote for that sock puppets whom are quite that brazen.
And please don’t forget during this war within the Republican Party that whether you are blaming liberals, the media, the Tea Party, Paul Krugman, each other, Ron Paul, or whomever…that something important happens when you point your finger at someone else. Whenever you do that there are 3 fingers pointing right back at you.
You have only yourselves and your slavish obedience to a callous and avaricious leadership to blame for what has happened.
Really, the Obama win was that thin. And it would have taken so little to seduce me!
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