Diatribe

NOW HEAR THIS: HILLARY CLINTON WILL NEVER BE ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I've now had at least 4 different people, all of them Brits, suggest this as a possible silver lining to the trauma of Tuesday's election. I realize that we are all groping for some shred of hope to sustain us through what will undoubtedly be a horrific 4 years (in W's 1st press conference after the election he said, "I earned a lot of political capital in this election, and I'm gonna spend it"), but this ain't it, folks. Personally, I love Hillary. I've met the woman, and she's as high-caliber as they come. But she doesn't stand a snow-ball's chance in a Hibachi of being elected. Accept it and stop bugging me--it only makes you sound like you don't know what you're talking about.

It's also been suggested that 4 more years of W will put the country and the world in such godawful economic shape that it will be an easy campaign for the democrat running in '08. THIS IS ALSO A LOAD OF BULSHIT. The country's already in godawful economic shape, W has already fucked up our international relations possibly beyond repair, the so-called war on terror has already killed over 20,000 people, most of them innocent civilians and over 1000 of them Americans, and GUESS WHAT, PEOPLE? AMERICANS DON'T GIVE A SHIT. America is rapidly becoming a theocracy, a Christian Afganistan, and the billions of "dumb" Americans who voted for W (so labeled by your own Daily Mirror) gave no consideration to economic, diplomatic, or environmental issues. They voted for W for 1 reason, and it is this: he, W, and they, his supporters, all see W as a warrior for the Lord with a red phone to Jesus, on a Holy Crusade to rid the world of anyone they perceive as a threat to their divine mission of global homogeneity. Sound familiar? Americans are living in Germany in 1935. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. They don't see all the problems of the last 4 years as problems. The very same things we rational people call problems they consider marvelous, or necessary at the worst. 4 more years of the same will not change their minds.

Furthermore, I have been told that ultimately there was very little difference between the two candidates, so this election was a non-choice for Americans. This could not be further from the truth.

Regarding the economy, America is and always has been a manufacturing economy. We will never recover economically until we get the jobs back which have been outsourced to overseas and reestablish the manufacturing base which has been moved mostly to Mexico (thank you NAFTA). W is a believer in trickle-down economics, that marvelous brain-child of Ronal Regan’s which maintains that if you give tax breaks to rich people they will spend more of their hard-stolen money and create lots of jobs for the blue-collar schmos who build yachts, thereby improving the yacht-makers’ livlihoods. It doesn’t work. We’ve seen it not work. It’s not working now. W’s tax cuts have resulted in his administration outspending their revenue by a factor of 4 to 1. In just 4 years he managed to completely spend the budget surplus left to him by Slick Willie and get us into the biggest deficit in the country’s history. Our foreign investors have even begun to cut off our credit.

Kerry, on the other hand, will put back into practice the economic policies of the Clinton years, which took only 6 years to eliminate the huge debt left to him by Bush Sr. and create the first surplus in American history. This on top of 8 consistent years of increased spending on social programs. I’m not an economist, but I know success and failure when I see it. Furthermore, Kerry would have 1, closed the tax loophole which makes it so advantageous for companies to move overseas, and 2, created a national health-care system. Right now employers are responsible for providing workers and their families with health care, and it’s costing them a fortune. A national health care system would not only cover everyone in the country (including the 5 million children currently living in poverty who have NO ACCESS TO MEDICAL CARE), but it would alleviate the financial burden on employers, making labor costs in America much more competitive globally.


The War on Iraq. God help us. You all probably know that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/ll, and that the war was entirely for the benefit of making W’s oil buddies even richer. You may not have heard that this same hypocrite who claims to love every American soldier and who dons borrowed flight suits to make himself look like one of the boys has so little regard for our fighting troops that he sent thousands of them into combat WITH NO BODY ARMOR! The troops were told that if they wanted kevlar vests they would have to purchase them themselves! These vests cost over $1500 each, and most of the men and women in the Army and Army National Guard are there because they are poor and uneducated and have no money and can’t get another job. So these poor soldiers wrote home to their parents and siblings and asked to borrow $1500 so they could buy a bullet-proof vest. To W, troops are expendable. He sent them into combat, ill-equipped, to fight a war for money, even after his own father, former President Bush, said that a war in Iraq was unwinable and there was no feasible exit strategy, the smug son-of-a-bitch.

Kerry, a seasoned veteran of the other war in which we never should have been involved and couldn’t win, does not consider American soldiers political capital to be spent on a whim. I’m disappointed that he supported the invasion of Iraq for political reasons, but I acknowledge the necessity of preaching support for the war to win the approval of moderates and undecideds, which was the only way he ever stood a chance of being elected. He also acknowledges that the cost of the war is killing us, and would have got us out as soon as humanly possible. Lastly, and most importantly, Kerry acknowledges a basic fact which continually eludes W: it is physically impossible to create a security system which cannot be compromised by some with sufficient means and motivation. No matter how much you spend on “homeland security,” regardless of how much airline baggage you X-ray, you cannot prevent fanatics from finding new and creative ways of blowing up Americans on American soil. It can’t be done. Every net has holes, and no matter how small you try to make them, a terrorist will always be able to slip through. W doesn’t understand this. He thinks he can conquer the world alone. Kerry realizes that the best way to make America safer is to stop giving terrorists new reasons to hate us. It means radically re-thinking our foreign policy and achieving new levels of international cooperation. It means becoming a part of the world community and participating in international law instead of standing over it and saying, “Nyah nyah nyah nyah boo-boo! You can’t make me!”

Finally, social issues. This is what killed the election for Kerry. Republicans, as I said earlier, don’t vote based on economic issues or effective, pragmatic approaches to national security. They vote for the candidate who will stack the Supreme Court with right-wing radicals who will repeal Roe v. Wade and send women back to basements and coat hangers. They vote for candidates who assure them that communists and homosexuals won’t be allowed to teach in public schools, and no one will ever try to take their fully-automatic “hunting” rifles away. In short, they vote for people who share their vision of a homogeneous, Christian State. Period. 11 states (mine included) had ballot proposals to amend their states’ constitutions to ban same-sex marriage permanently. All eleven passed. These proposals were put on the ballots in this election in several key swing states, like Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, specifically to encourage paranoid, evangelical extremists to vote in this election, which they did in record numbers. Robert Heinlein put it rather neatly in Methuselah’s Children: “Whenever the citizens fix their attention on one issue to the exclusion of others, the situation is ripe for scalawags, demagogues, ambitious men on horseback.” Enter George W. Bush.