Left from Center – 336.5

Although I gave my reasons for becoming a Democrat, I had always considered myself to be moderate, and I would look at both parties for candidates. As time progressed, I found that I was pretty much always voting for the Democrat though, and feeling more and more contempt for the GOP.

Was I becoming more Liberal? I don’t think so. I was just reacting to a trend away from those things that might be positive about conservative politics. I can see the value of reducing government spending, even if I think it is often more practical to have some programs run by the government than leaving everyone to work out education or retirement on their own. Really, how many improvements has deregulation brought?

That is not my point, though. My point was that there seemed to be a strong trend away from the proposed platform of moral values and fiscal conservancy and small government, primarily towards nothing being more important than favoring the rich—not so much in the speeches and campaigns, but in actions. This has been most obvious with George W. Bush, whom I despise.

It started out with a “What?” when he first ran. Conventional wisdom always indicated that the next Bush to run for the presidency would be Jeb. As it was, all I really knew about him was that he ran a pretty slimy campaign against Ann Richards for governor, and that is was effective. It wasn’t promising, but slimy campaigns are pretty common.

As more things came out, my image of him worsened. No, it was not so much the National Guard or alcohol issues. It was more the decline of the environment in Texas during his governorship, and the increase in the death penalty, even for the mentally handicapped. He was not a good governor. Granted, he was not much of a businessman, or much of a student, and that never stopped him, but it seemed pretty presumptuous of him to be running for president based on his qualifications.

That was my big concern right there—his sense of entitlement. I couldn’t see what he felt he had to offer to the people, and he didn’t care about that anyway. He just wanted the prestige and power and why shouldn’t he have it? His father had been president, he was rich, and his desires had been gratified over and over again with no other merit.

Really, he has been exactly the president that you would expect from that beginning. If the impropriety of having the person in charge of the election in a key state as your campaign manager does not throw you, than why would you be concerned about putting cronies and yes men into important offices, handing big contracts over to Halliburton without bids, or allowing energy companies to set the energy policy? Why not invade two countries, and why shouldn’t you lie and falsify data to get the second one justified?

There’s really so much that could be covered here, and it’s all been covered before. There is probably some wonderful site with it all in one place, but that’s a lot of data. Rape the environment, trample the Bill of Rights, and cut taxes for the rich. Don’t get me wrong—I think the party trend was to head in this direction anyway—but he just took everything and amplified it to the Nth degree.

I keep feeling like nothing will surprise me anymore, and it really shouldn’t, but I do still get appalled on a regular basis. Some of us were joking the other day about how much he can do in the time between now and the next inauguration (invade Iran and North Korea?), and one person suggested that he will probably declare martial law and prevent the switch. It’s a joke, but dang, you almost wonder.

Perhaps he will not need to do so if he feels comfortable handing the reins over to John McCain. This is where I hurt a little. I used to really like him. Once upon a time I seriously considered voting for him. That was in 2000, and he seemed promising, what with his Straight Talk Express and work on McCain-Feingold, not just because it was anti-corruption but it was also a bipartisan effort. However, someone with a history of slimy campaigning went after him, using his time as a POW to question his mental health. I’ve got to admit, it is kind of impressive to turn being a war hero into a drawback.

(Funny how most of his W’s achievements are so dubious. I think his greatest accomplishment may be making his father look like a better president in retrospect.)

This is the part that hurts me. Bush has the lowest presidential approval rating of all time and it keeps dropping. He has a personal history of wronging McCain. He is not truly fiscally conservative, but in other ways does not really depart from party lines regardless of world opinion, scientific data, or common decency. So…

WHY IS MR. MAVERICK REPUBLICAN SETTING HIMSELF UP AS MCBUSH, SYCOPHANT EXTRAORDINAIRE?

It makes me question his mental health.

I don’t really even want to get into that. Suffice it to say, I will not be voting Republican this year. I will go over the Democratic candidates in my next post, but I will close on this note.

A documentary that I really appreciated was “The Fog of War”, which is basically just an interview of Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. It focuses quite a bit on the Vietnam War. Johnson and McNamara disagreed on what to do, but I really feel that they were both trying to do the right thing. (Maybe there wasn’t a right thing at the point that it became their problem, because troop buildup there started under Eisenhower.)

We can’t expect our leaders to be infallible, but they should at least feel answerable to the greater good. This has been sadly lacking in the current administration. They may present themselves as religious, but their actions contradict it over and over again.