I am an idealist, usually a cautious optimist, not a Democrat, a life-long Republican turned Independent, disillusioned in 2000 by the Republicans' choice of the frat-boy mediocrity Bush as their Presidential candidate. I quit the Republican Party when Bush was nominated. To me, the Republicans were spitting in the eyes of America - Bush's nomination: an insult to all Americans. Clearly, this was a setup, a put-up deal by the big interests, particularly oil. Bush, Cheney and the Republicans proved to be disgraceful failures beyond anything I could have imagined. Nixon and Clinton's misdeeds, as serious as they were, were nothing compared with the Bush crowd's record. Needless war based on lies, murder of our soldiers and foreign innocents, trashing the Constitution, prostituting the work of legitimate scientists, corruption, outrageously erroneous foreign policy, torture, politicizing the military, the Justice Department and environmental departments and on and on....
I don't hate Bush, I just despise him for what he has done to the United States of America and the world at large. To me, Bush, Cheney and their crowd are the pinnacle of evil and immorality. I have no doubt that reputable historians and political scientists will find little Bush to be the worst President in the history of our country. If Clinton or anyone else had done this, I would feel the same. So, it's not liberal versus conservative. It's stupidity, ignorance, greed and malevolence versus the honor and opportunity to serve the people of America with excellence.
Maybe some actually hate Bush for this saga of misdeeds. It's not my personal approach. The argument of conservatives versus liberals is tiresome and out of date. Democrats and Republicans are out of date. As a nation of presumably educated people, we should be sufficiently analytically sophisticated to determine reasonable and proper courses of action that are best for America. But, no, we insist on regressing to prejudice, ignorance and preconceived notions. We do not think. We just react.
What good are underlying principles if the proponents don't live by them? I call them hypocrites. Most of the Congress and the Executive Branch are hypocrites, in my view. I am not a cynic, but I tend to believe what I see and hear in the misdeeds of these people, even as we watched some of them shunt around the ethics rules as the Democrats partied here in Denver during the Democratic National Convention in August.
There are so many axes of culture in America, that, to treat only the liberal versus conservative scale is to vastly oversimplfy. I think the "haters" are the extremists on any axis. The depth of their hatred may be amplified by interaction with other cultural dimensions. Hatred impedes clear thinking and serves no one beneficially.
I am an American who loves and cares for our country. I care for the future of this country and those, including my own children, who will live in it. I want to get on with rebuilding the integrity of the nation we once had. I care not for Republicans or Democrats, as such, but only for those politicians who share that grander view and have the talent and personal integrity to pursue it selflessly. Wisdom and common purpose must replace hatred and divisiveness. Only dramatic change in the near future will enable that. Otherwise, as a nation, I am certain we will continue to decline to an inevitable third world status.
I strongly recommend for your consideration the following Comment from the Talk of the Town section in the October 13, 2008 issue of The New Yorker Magazine:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/10/13/081013taco_talk_editors?yrail
My thanks to the editors of The New Yorker. I have not seen the reasons to vote for Senator Barack Obama stated more convincingly !
Nothing New…..just Pay, Pray and Obey!
10 years ago
2 comments:
"Frat-boy" mediocrity hits the nail right on the head!
We will have either a Democrat or a Republican as our next president. We must choose between two individuals and/or the very different philosophies of the two parties that the candidates belong to. It’s one or the other.
I have voted in every presidential election since 1964 and never been so unsatisfied with the candidates and process of this 2008 election. Never before have I thought so much about HOW to vote, and perhaps WHY to vote. This year I feel like voting `no’ for president. Ironically, California now being solidly Democratic, the result will be the same no matter which box I check.
I was a Democrat until a few years into the Carter Presidency but I cannot say that my move away from that party was sudden. It was more of a gradual move as I began to increasingly appreciate how good ideas had been taken to extremes and an almost religious zealotry for strange and dangerous notions began to characterize the leadership of that party. Though I was appalled at the corruption of the Nixon presidency I also could not blind myself to what I saw were the destructive seeds being sown by the mainstreaming of left wing extremism into the core of the Democratic Party.
Because of actions largely supported by Democrats, institutionalized racism has disappeared in the country. Women now have the same economic opportunities as men and now make up a majority in many of our professional schools at the university level. Those are two great human rights achievements of Democrats in my adult lifetime. At the same time, we have become a more disunited country as the result of things like multiculturalism and the concepts of `compensatory equality’ which have led to preferential treatment based on `minority’ status. This is compassion over standards, equality over liberty and group identity over individual identity. It is nothing less that the disuniting of the United States. Finally, the desire to purge religious expression from any part of our public life has been largely a leftist-liberal Democratic effort. It has fueled the religious extremism among those with traditional values and been destructive to this country.
Over the past several decades we have seen erosions of liberty in pursuit of false notions of equality. Whether it is income and wealth distribution, racial hiring preferences, lowering of standards for home loans, college admissions or employment based on race or gender. To the extent that we are all forced into equality, we loose the precious right to be different, to compete with each other, to do something for a greater good than our own inherently selfish interests. I hold leftist ideology and its embrace by the Democratic Party responsible.
Last but not least, the view of America and its role in the world by Democrats is far from that of the party before the late 1960’s,. It reflects a view of human nature and of the world that can only be described as dangerous and suicidal. From the era of the Soviet Union to the present day threat of instability in the Middle East fueled by Islamic Fundamentalism, to the reemergence of a totalitarian Russia to the likely emergence of China as a major military force, the Democratic party has shown itself unwilling to understand the need to confront evil with force, or the threat of force.
Instead, the modern Democratic Party seeks to blame America first, rather than to praise America as the greatest force for good in the world today. That is, to me, unforgivable.
The theme of this campaign is change. Some think change is in and of it a good thing, others think that change should only occur to make things better. But change is relative. Obama’s change looks new to a 30 year old, but to this 65 year old is looks like very old liberal dogma. Only if you don’t remember George McGovern or Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis would you think there is anything ideologically `new’ about Obama. The Democratic Party of 2008 looks too much like the Democratic party of 1968-72.
I confess a bias: I do not hate George W. Bush. I think Bush has been a less than competent president but one whose moral compass points in the right direction. I supported the second invasion of Iraq because its regime was the focal point of globally destabilizing forces in the Middle East. There is nothing to suggest that America, or the world, would have been better off if Saddam Hussein and his two rotten sons were with us now and for the next half century. The removal of Hussein was unfinished business from the 1991 war.
Bush’s fault was his unwillingness or inability to adequately explain the danger Iraq posed to the world. (That it did not have WMD at the time of our invasion is of little importance to me). We did not use sufficient military strength, and did not anticipate the sectarian unrest following Hussein’s removal. Bush must be held accountable for that. It will be beyond my lifetime until we know whether or not Bush’s invasion of Iraq was the beginning of change in the Middle East. In their lifetime, many of today’s first time Bush-hating voters may come to see Bush in a very different way.
And I do not hold George W. Bush responsible for the current economic crisis which has its origins with irresponsible (& greedy?) borrowers and the feeling that out of `compassion’ we should lower lending standards to accommodate unworthy borrowers. Sorry, but the implicit willingness to forgive personal irresponsibility and blame bad things on large or wealthy external forces, is a Liberal-Democratic, not Conservative-Republican notion. Yes, we need regulation in our financial markets, but we should not use regulation to excuse individual foolishness and irresponsibility.
The visceral hatred of Bush, of rich people, of corporations is troubling as is the desire to be loved by other nations and the view that Obama’s soaring rhetoric can have the same effect on our enemies as it does on those Americans and Europeans who are entranced by him. It seems highly emotional and I am uncomfortable when emotion seems too heavy a component in the selection of leaders and in the construction of national policy.
The choice in this election is not appealing. On the one hand is the mediocre candidate of the party I agree with on broad philosophical grounds and on the other hand the personally attractive candidate of the party I think has greatly damaged this country over the past four decades.
This will sound like age discrimination but so be it (I have experienced it myself and it’s no fun). I am troubled by the possibility that this most important election may be decided by the least informed voters, who may be in large part the youngest. By all news reports there are record numbers of new and young voters being actively solicited by the Obama campaign. Commercial advertisers target younger people for good reason. Younger people are generally less discriminating, more impulsive and more susceptible to influence. This is a natural part of youth and in many ways essential to the human learning process.
I recognize the fairness, in a sense, and also the irony associated with young voters. The youngest voters will be most affected by this next president, but more so in decades to come when they may come to regret their youthful impulsiveness. But that’s true in all areas of life – another reason for lamenting the weakening (by the political Left) of institutions and traditions which support with the passing of wisdom from one generation to the next at as early an age as possible.
There may be an additional factor at play with our `new voters’. When I first voted at age 21 I had been reading a daily news paper for at least the ten previous years. (Thank you my dear parents for the encouragement and opportunity). I followed domestic and international events and watched serious television news programs. I can remember watching the 1952 conventions on my family’s small black & white television.
Today our media and culture have been dumbed down. Fewer people read newspapers or serious journals of opinion. News is reduced to emotionally charged television sound bites on cable TV and the Internet. I fear that the least informed of the electorate may be the decisive factor in the election. And that is probably always the case. It still does not comfort me merely because the demographics of the uninformed may have changed. Further, the marketing of Obama as a quick fix, unifying force and psychological antidote to Bush hatred promises disappointment in a world that often moves slowly, deliberatively and dissonantly.
The combination of the media savvy Obama, the increasing superficiality of media and this youthful naïve desire for quick, feel-good solutions is worrisome. I confess another bias. I am, and always have been, a bit suspicious of those who seem a little too charming, too clever with words, too easily forgiven and less critically examined in ways that others without such rhetorical skills are not. For all his personal qualities, I do not feel that I know Obama as well as I know McCain.
So I have reservations about Obama the person, as well as his party.
Yes, I am troubled that John McCain seems to present an image of America’s past, in a sense. He does look old. He IS old. And he is an old white male – a member of the only remaining unprotected social class in America.
McCain was not my choice for the Republican candidate though I trust him on foreign policy and national defense more than any other candidate who ran for the nomination. I trust that he can be tough, and toughness backed by military force is often the only language understood when dealing with those who have non-negotiable demands. The world is a tough and hard place. We must be both strong and smart.
Which brings me to the Sarah Palin VP nomination? It is the one thing that makes me not want to vote for John McCain. She clearly has neither the intellect nor temperament for the office of VP or president. No one thought of Ronald Reagan as a deep intellectual, but he had spent two decades thinking and speaking about critical national and international issues before becoming president. He was intuitive, creative, and clever. He knew what he did not know and hired smarter people to work for him.
I do not see any of the qualities of Reagan in Palin. It was a bad and desperate decision by McCain, though an understandably political one aimed at energizing the socially conservative base. I think it will be shown as having harmed not only McCain by driving moderates and `undecided’ voters toward Obama, but also by further damaging and dividing the Republican party at a time when it will be critically important for it to unify and again reach across party lines.
So --- a worst case scenario is that John McCain dies on Jan 21 and Palin becomes president. A Palin presidency with a Democratic congressional majority would most likely produce serious deadlock. Americans sometimes seem to like opposing parties in the Executive and Legislative branches for this reason, but I do not think this is one of those times. Must I pick the worst case scenario as the `base case’ for casting my vote? Who would I fear less in the Oval Office, Palin or Obama? Don’t make me answer that question!
I know who I will be voting for (as I hold my nose) and I think I know who will win.
We’ll be OK no matter who wins. Hope and a bit of prayer can’t hurt either.
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