Position paper: politics and stupidity.

Until June, I was a staunch supporter of Barack Obama. In June, when Obama endorsed the sell-out FISA bill ripping the Fourth Amendment out of the Constitution and substituting warrantless wiretapping in its place – giving George W. Bush everything he had demanded – I realized that I had been used. It was then that I was glad that my foot had been too swollen during the primaries to drive to my polling place – my vote wouldn’t have mattered anyway; Hillary Clinton won handily – but it was the principle that mattered.

It was then that I realized that nothing would change under an Obama presidency. No matter what platitudes a presidential candidate may mutter, the real decision makers in Washington are never elected. Instead, they are hired, by multinational corporations or special interest groups – lobbyists, in other words. Corruption has spread so thoroughly throughout the executive and legislative branches – and has made inroads within the judicial – that there is little hope of “saving the patient”, to use a heavy-handed metaphor. Even if he had been sincere in his positions, Obama could never have changed that; his willingness to embrace the status quo, however, revealed that he had never been sincere.

I try to stay true to my principles, no matter how much it hurts. I had to withdraw my support for Obama. When he made his position official by voting in favor of the FISA legislation, he also lost my vote.

I have struggled with that ever since. Obama has done nothing to regain my trust, or the trust of many of us “far-left radicals” (which is apparently the camp supporting the Constitution puts you in nowadays). Yet it is obvious that a John McCain presidency would be disastrous for America. There are few issues on which McCain has not flip-flopped; I doubt even he knows what his positions are on them (though I’m sure his owners know). On the issues to which he has remained committed, his views are repugnant. As an individual, he is mean-spirited and temperamental, and seems to display some level of cognitive impairment; he is also old, which should be a factor, PC or not. He has no honor or principles, as his associations reveal. And I want nothing to do with those people who still support him: that core 28 percent.

Just as I held my nose and voted for John Kerry in 2004, and would have voted for Clinton in November if things had gone differently during the primaries, I decided that, if I could not vote for Obama, then I could at least vote against McCain. It won’t change much, except to keep Bush out of his third term, and to roll back the influence racist intolerant ignorance rural fundamentalist nativist fascist puritanical denialist creationist warmongers have over the White House, at least a little bit.

Between Obama and McCain, after all, Obama is clearly the lesser evil.

I am just one person, though, and I cannot fathom how polls still show McCain with as much support as he has retained. Polls, of course, are hardly predictive of the final outcome, and polling has not quite caught up with new technology that may have introduced generational bias into them. I still imagine most of McCain’s support comes from that core 28 percent; the rest comes from mainstream Americans who have been duped by the Republican noise machine. However, Michael Dukakis had a significant lead over George H. W. Bush in 1988, and he lost the election in a landslide thanks to Republican mudslinging. McCain, having signed Karl Rove and his Machiavellian thugs to the campaign, has begun to roll out that same kind of tactic. And, dishearteningly, it may be working.

Although it is too early to tell, McCain may be getting some traction from that “presumptuous” label. People like me, who understand that the word is supposed to mean “ni—“, I mean, “uppity”, won’t be affected. But for the apparent legion of Americans who need to keep a dictionary at hand as they read Go, Dog, Go!, maybe it works. After all, this is a country in which McCain could proudly proclaim that he graduated fourth from the bottom in his class – a country with a proud history of anti-intellectualism. This is a country in which a substantial portion of voters can believe that Obama is a “socialist”, while those of us who actually know something about socialism can say for a fact he is nothing of the sort. This is a country in which McCain can insinuate that Obama is a “fa—“, I mean, “gay”, by pointing to his educated and lucid manner of speaking.

Next to the rest of the development world, America stands out, and not in a good way. This country has the worst educational record in the Western world. A substantial portion of the populace believe that the earth was created a couple of thousand years ago by a god, and that that same god was responsible for creating “man” in “his” present form. This is a country which seriously debates whether life begins at conception or implantation, though the people doing the debating want to restrict abortion rights anyway. This is a country that has fallen for propaganda slogans by “war on drugs” and “war on terror”, and where a substantial number of people still think that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks and possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In other words, America is a stupid country.

And if, somehow, John McCain is elected to the White House in November, it will only cement that view and drive us further away from the 21^st century world and into the dark ages.

Like I said, I cannot support Barack Obama any longer. He has violated a principle on which I cannot accept any compromise. I can vote against the alternative, however. I know it won’t change much, if anything. But I cannot provide any assistance to that 28 percent who believe that homosexuality is a “sin”, but stupidity is not.

TAGS: 2008 Presidential Election, Barack Obama, John McCain