I suppose my rationale is more negative than positive. This is unfortunate, given how much I dislike the mud-slinging associated with politics (though this is nothing new to America…didn’t we used to have politicians that dueled after talking junk to each other?) but I am far more disappointed with the current administration than I am enamored of any possible future one.
George W. Bush and the Sith Lord Cheney have pooped on the face of American honor.
There was a time when it was easy to be proud to be an American. We saved England from the Nazis. We were a light of freedom and hope for all people who came to our shores. America was a place where an illiterate immigrant could become a entrepreneurial millionaire, where in three generations an Irish family could rise to national prominence and the Presidency (on bootlegging, but c’est la vie), where people were in control of their own destinies.
Now, thanks to Bush and Cheney, our name is mud. Let me give you an analogy for what happened after September 11, 2001:
We were the biggest guy in the bar. Some drunken asshole decided he was going to sucker punch the biggest dude so he could get some street cred. We got bashed in the back of the head with a juke box. But did that knock us out? Oh, no. It just pissed us off. We got up, dusted ourselves off, walked right up to the guy who hit us…and then stabbed some other dude in the gut with our pocket knife. That’s right. We’re gonna get that Osama dude one day, but we saw our opportunity to get Saddam and we took it! He talked about our Daddy once! We HAD to get him.
Does that reaction make any sense at all? To ANYONE? I don’t see how. The whole pretext was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Time and time again, the people whose job it was to find those weapons told us that he didn’t have any. Did that stop the Republican administration? No way. They don’t let little things like the truth get in the way of their mission. And what, pray tell, might that mission have been? Hmmmm. Well, we all know there were no WMDs. So what else, what else…? Maybe there was some oil to gain control of? Perhaps. I personally wonder if that was the motive, since we’ve done nothing to actually take control of those oil fields and reap the revenue ourselves. I do, however, find it particularly suspicious that both Bush and Cheney come from oil company backgrounds. And behold, due to the turmoil their actions have caused, we now have the highest oil and gas prices we’ve seen in a generation, and these companies are making money hand over fist. To me, it appears the Bush/Cheney machine did this to line their own pockets. Despicable.
And in doing so, they’ve pooped on the American Constitution as well. No longer are we the land of the free, the home of the brave. Now we’re more like the land next to Guantanamo, and the home of the torturers. Read a book about George Washington and tell me if you think he would ship prisoners of war (and think about how loosely he would use that term) to other countries so they could be tortured, or even torture them here. Maybe that’s what W needs, a WWGWD bracelet. Forgive me, I digress.
Due to Bush/Cheney’s reckless policies of hack and slash diplomacy and less-than-Constitutional “law enforcement” I find it far more difficult to be proud to be an American. I am, however, still proud of the fact that they’ve yet to erode all of our freedoms, and we still have the power to vote them out of office.
I would like everyone who reads this to consider this point carefully: The stuff I wrote about up there isn’t good. And I think it would be very difficult to argue that it’s not based in fact (except for the oil company line, but it’s a valid hypothesis). The guys who did that are Republicans. It might be hard to believe, but yes, they are Republicans. You didn’t see them at the convention, but yep, that’s their party. Now we have a new Republican who wants to take over, who says he’s going to change things because he’s a maverick. Okey dokey, time for another analogy:
You pay a contractor to build onto your house. The house not only doesn’t get any better, but it’s turned into a piece of junk and appears to be collapsing in on itself. Your family has no place to live but there. The contractors, when confronted with this, say, “Oh, yes, we’ve done a horrible job. We apparently have no idea what we’re doing. It’s time for a new way to do this job and fix it up right! Let us do it.”
Uhhhhhh. No, thanks. We can’t let the Republicans try to fix what they have broken. The risk is too great, the price too high to let them keep screwing things up. Sure, they can say what they want about making things better…lower taxes, free pie, corporate greed checked…but has the same party done anything like that in the current administration? No. We can’t afford to believe their promises again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and I’m a retarded rhesus monkey who believes it every time someone promises me pie. Given the mess they’ve made, do I foresee lower taxes in the future? No, sadly I don’t. It costs money to fix things and boy are things broken. That’s what we’ve gotten out of 8 years of a Republican administration.
Do I think that the Democratic nominee will do any better? How can he not? Truly, if the Democratic nominee was a retarded squirrel, I’d vote for it before I’d let the Republicans back in the driver’s seat. Under the Republicans, our economy has gone to crap, we’re now losing two wars instead of being in none, the world hates us, and I have to pretend I’m Canadian when I travel abroad. Please, please, please, for the love of all things holy, do not let these people ruin our country further. Vote Democrat! Vote Obama/Biden! Help me save our country.
