Think before voting
When I began this blog I was naive about how to attract readers. I found political blogs tedious to access. I desired a dialogue, but found my blog was a monologue. I need to change that because the impending election is too important. Feedback is welcome.
I am sixty-seven. Over the years I have read and heard of the numerous unethical and illegal activities of the members of both major parties. I am not a partisan. In each election I vote for the individual who I perceive to be the best (or the least evil). This year the choice is uncommonly easy
Current events have pushed the economy to the forefront, but the economy is the common thread that links almost all the issues together. George Bush began his first term with a significant surplus. That was gone before the term was half over. The credit freeze roiling the economy now is the result of laissez faire policies favored by John McCain, whose initial response to Henry Paulson’s annoucement of a crisis was to say that our economy is fundamentally sound. He reversed himself a day later. You would think that the owner of seven (7) houses might be more concerned, but given his wife’s fortune, maybe the houses are all paid for. His tax plans indicate that he has little concern for us commoners (he has said that you have to have $5,000,000 before you are rich). He plans a 3 billion dollar tax cut for the richest people in the country. He has voted more than 90% of the time in favor of George Bush’s policies. Of course this should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention. He is linked to the same corrupt infrastructure that put Bush into office.
There are significant similarities in the rise of Bush and McCain to prominence. Bush is third generation politician and McCain is third generation military. Their respective checkered careers strongly suggest that the opportunities they have had arose in the first instance from their family’s influence. McCain’s real break came when he married mon… Cindy, his second wife, heir to a beer fortune.
So this year, after eight long years of duplicity and incompetence by the leader of the Republican party, I find myself a partisan of sorts, not a Democrat exactly, simply an anti-Republican. That party will be suspect as long as they countenance the presence and the advice of Karl Rove in their midst, a latter day Machiavelli, if ever there was one.
By the way, a 72 year old man who runs for President is not putting his country first. His choice of Sarah Palin over other more qualified Republican women says more about him than about her. Neither McCain nor Palin has the temperment or the intelligence that I want in the President or Vice President of the United States of America.