Election Day blues

Well. Election Day. Let me start by saying to you, Don't fool yourselves. Whether you vote for Bush or Kerry, you're going to get another lying, cheating crook in the White House who's only interest is to line his pockets with YOUR money and keep his rich buddies rich and the poor poor. I'll take this time to assert that we haven't had a REAL President in this country since FDR. Kennedy, for all his polish and his tragic death, was the start of a downward spiral.
There is, however, good news. The era of "Political Heros of the Viet-Nam War" is drawing to a close. I'm not going to debate the "war" in VietNam, but I am a little bit tired of people using their participation, as limited as theirs usually is, as some sort of rallying point for a certain demographic. It's sleazy to hang your platform, not on what you will do to make this country great again, but on what you did in a war we shouldn't have been involved in the first place, much like our present situation in Iraq. I think Kerry thought he'd appeal to most people with the whole "war hero" angle and it blew up in his face. A majority of voters now were children during Vietnam and don't really view anyone from that era as a hero.
And here is where it gets bad. We are faced with an "evil we know" in George W Bush and an "evil we don't know" in John Kerry. I know, Nader is running, but the chances he'll win are about as great as if he were a woman and running on the Tampax ticket. I try and watch what the pundits say, but it only gets more muddled the more you listen. Bush has spent more money overseas than any President before him. Unemployment is higher since he took office. He gives tax cuts to the rich and places the tax burdens on the working class and working poor. All of that seems true enough, but how much of that did he inherit from Clinton? NAFTA screwed our working class by giving companies free rein to move to Mexico and take jobs from our factory and mill workers. I live in NC, and Pillowtex is very real to us here. Our state lost millions of jobs when companies like PillowTex went under and other companies, like RayChem, shifted operations to Mexico. When you take the jobs, the workers have no money to buy things, and the economy buckles. So, in part, the unemployment and economic troubles Bush got from Clinton. Now, for his part after 9/11, I think he brought that on himself, but he KNEW. His dad was head of the CIA when the government placed Saddam in power in Iraq to keep Iran at bay, and also when Osama was first active in Afganistan against Russia. And there are reports that the present governmental agencies knew of the attacks long before they happened and did nothing to stop them.
Which brings me to another point. How did we draw a line from Osama Bin Lauden to Saddam Hussan? From terrorist in Afganistan to a despot regime in Iraq? How do we still justify being there when we lose almost a soldier a day, and still cannot find any Weapons of Mass Destruction? Congress has the power to declare war, and ONLY Congress has that power, and can also demand the cessation of hostilities on our part and bring our military home. So, don't go pointing a finger at Bush without also pointing a HUGE finger at YOUR elected Congresspersons. I think we too often vote based on a single plank of a platform, or vote a Party ticket because our parents were one party, so we are too. And what happens is we end up with the same greedy pasty faced Senators and Representatives that say one thing to us and then do another when the vote is called for. And they only work for a few months out of every 2 years. I bet you you'd see policy change real fast if Congress was more like the Reserves, where they had to hold down a real job when they weren't in Washington DC living high on the hog. I say, let's stop over paying Congress, I'd like to see them recieve no pay AT ALL, except in times when they actually are working, much like Reservists.
Anyhoo, I'll leave all that for another blog. I think we face the same issues if Kerry wins. He can't do much with the mess that Bush leaves him. It would take much more than 4 years to clean up a pile of crap that has been building since the 60's. Taking care of Social Security and health care would make things a little bit better, but what will we do when it comes time to pay for all of that? I am not mormally a doomsayer, but I honestly believe that the ONLY way out of this mess, is either a revolution, taking out all the existing governmental figures and starting over, or a total collapse of our economy and general anarchy, which would result in a revolution. Thomas Jefferson once said something to the effect of "All true forms of government must have a revolution from time to time to keep them honest". I think that is true. We have become lead by miscreants and fools, who go to college to learn how to double speak and lie. We still want to believe, most of us anyways, that those we place in power will look out for us. They won't, and they haven't. I can't say I'd lead the country better than most, but I think I could surely make better use of 4 years at the amount of pay the President makes.
Vote your beliefs today. Vote for someone or something close to what you think will be right for this country. But don't be shocked when it's 4 more years of the same thing we've been seeing for the last 40 years.

More on politics in future posts...