Thursday, October 21, 2004
Vote No
I wish I had some strong reasons to urge people to vote for John Kerry, but frankly I am not coming up with much more than “he’s the only viable alternative,” a slogan born for bumperstickers if ever there was one. However, as the saying goes, “in the jungle you need not run faster than the lion; you need only run faster than the other guy running from the lion.” If I can convince one person not to vote for another Bush-Cheney term (I can’t bring myself to call it a “re-election,"), whether it gets you to vote for Admonson and Plettin, Jay and Chambers, or god help us, Badnarik and Campagna, I feel I’ve done my best. Baloney on toast looks pretty good when the alternative is more of the military-industrial club sandwich we’ve been choking on for the past four years.
I’ve therefore selflessly taken up the solemn task of badmouthing the president. I don’t do it out of schadenfreude or to take ghoulish satisfaction in the failings of others. These are the failings of us all, and divulging them like this is in the nature of group therapy, sharing our shame in public so we can move the hell on with the healing process. But after reviewing the points below, if you still want four more of the same, at least we’ll all be clear what it is of which you want more. In 2000 GWB was a pig in a poke. Now we’re the squealing piglet, and as for who’s the poke, well that’s what the political process is here to determine. So, with no more ado:
1. Not Trustworthy: claiming to be Born Again and to walk in the footsteps of the Christ, whose guidance he seeks on a daily basis and for all important decisions in his life, I’d expect the president to eschew unilateral aggression, to care for the least among us first, and to speak the truth even when it hurts. I don’t think we’re getting any of that from him, and in fact this administration hides or misrepresents more critical information than any other ever has to my knowledge. He rams his morality down the throats of those too weak to stave him off, but the words ring hollow when he mouths them. I’ve caught him in so many errors that I can’t give him the benefit of the doubt anymore - he’s not just wrong, there are times I’m sure he’s actually lying. Sanctimony is overlaid upon hypocracy. One lodestone example: Mr. Bush, if you think the bible is the final word, then you think homosexuality is wrong - step up and say so, or stop pretending to occupy the moral high ground. You’re just as morally relativistic as anybody else - you just create the false impression that your position is consistent and ethical when it’s really just convenient and expedient. Or “facile,” if you prefer that word, though words seem to mean almost nothing to you. You are not a man of your word, and I take that as the worst possible failing when it comes to the public trust.
2. Bad stewardship: let’s put 9/11 aside for the moment. The rest of our infrastructure has continued to crumble at an unchecked rate and all you want to do is drill for oil in our wildlands and dig a hole under a mountain to store nuculur waste? Fish harvests are down. More kids have asthma from factory exhaust that’s dirtier since you took office; auto emissions standards have been rolled back and alternative energy sources aren’t receiving enough investment to get them off the ground. Schools are closing; colleges are turning away students because of cutbacks. National forests, reserves and protected wildlands are shrinking; those that remain are poorly maintained and under attack by loggers, hunters and snowcatters. Our soldiers are refusing to fight because their vehicles aren’t armored; their families back home are on food stamps because it costs more to live here, in relative terms, than ever before. Meantime, you’ve facilitated the re-introduction of utterly unnecessarily “assault” weapons onto the streets despite the remonstrations of pretty much every local law enforcement agency that exists; you’ve presided over the worst ever increase in health care costs while defaulting almost completely on promises to improve the availability of low-cost medicine; you give no-bid contracts to your cronies; and - here’s the big one - you’ve busted the budget more spectacularly than anyone in our history. You’re not a steward, you’re barely even a lackey. You are not to be trusted with heavy machinery, such as government.
3. Bad manners: I keep hearing from his apologists that George W is a good man - a “people person” who inspires confidence, respect and admiration in all who bask in his glow. But those of us lucky enough to have evaded his personal charisma can see what he’s really like: he took office at a time when americans were generally respected, if not appreciated, around the world, and he pretty much single-handedly turned us into one of the most hated, feared, and execrated nations on the planet. I’m not interested in any “global test;” if we’re in trouble we need to do what’s necessary to fix the problem. But when “the problem” is “international relations,” we don’t fix it very effectively by alienating and bullying any nation stupid enough to ask us to slow down. Maybe we were right to invade when we did; maybe not. That’s not my point here. I’m talking about doing what must be done without pissing off the neighbors. It’s one thing to go it alone, it’s another thing to make ourselves unwelcome among the brotherhood of nations. We owe them a lot of money now, you know - it doesn’t serve us well to irritate our creditors, or our foreign markets, or the places to which our graduates are increasingly relocating. Don’t we want to be invited when they have a party?
4. Bad delegation decisions: I don’t trust your cabinet or advisors, Mr. Bush. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld is happy unless we’re blowing things up somewhere; he got us into a war we didn’t need to fight and he should have been called to task for it. Condi Rice is not competent to manage the human side of intelligence-gathering; someone of my acquaintence knows her from her stanford days and swears she was the worst, bitchiest manager she knew in the entire university, which is saying a lot. Dick Cheney is so far “inside the beltway” that he should know how to manage an administration, but I guess he’s too paranoid and greedy to do that very well too. You fired your EPA chief because she didn’t want to say that global warming was bogus science. You dismissed scientists from a nonpartisan advisory panel because they disagreed with your position on stem cell research. You called in oil companies to set our energy policy in a meeting so secret we still don’t know who attended it. Your candidates for judgeships basically suck, demonstrating profound ignorance about basic issues of federal power as against state/civil rights, and adjudicating their personal morality with a heavy hand. Your administration is riddled with incompetants and maladaptation, and at its heart is Carl Rove, whose venality knows no bounds, for whom power is a drug so addictive that he is willing to mortgage the country for it, fiscally and morally. These are not delegation decisions that inspire confidence in me - and it’s been widely reported how heavily you rely on delegating to your staff. They’re no so much your staff, it seems, as your crutch. Well, Mr. Bush, your crutch is broken.
5. Bad governance: when a mistake is made, you have to find out what happened and deal with the problem. Don’t try to keep congress from investigating 9/11, don’t keep your cabinet officers from testifying to the committee, don’t refuse to appear before the committee, don’t put conditions on your appearance. If you say you’ll be careful if we give you authority to use force, for god’s sake be careful. If you make a mistake, admit it. If policy professionals you’ve hired advise you one way, don’t ignore them in favor of a rosier scenario of your own imagining. If the country is at war, don’t take so many vacations. If the country is at war, don’t get into a military uniform unless you’ve earned the right to wear it - keeping in mind that “commander in chief” is a civilian, not military, position. Don’t tell us that Canadian drugs are too dangerous to be available to our citizens, and then scramble to buy flu antivirus from Canada because you ignored a well-documented problem with our supply on which you’d been briefed years ago. Don’t cut taxes and call for privatizing social security without a plan to reduce the deficit you’ve created. Don’t call a national policy speech and use it as a grandstand for campaign mudslinging. Don’t eject citizens from open public forums where you are speaking, just for wearing clothes that have a message you disfavor. Just, don’t. Pretty much everything you’ve done, you’ve done badly. So stop doing everything. You’ve done enough as it is.
I wasn’t happy about the last election but I was willing to play by the rules even if you didn’t, Mr. Bush, which I think you didn’t, but anyway I decided to give you a chance not to ruin everything. That chance has expired; you have actually ruined everything and more. My only hope is that your failures have galvanized enough of this sleeping country into action so that we can be rid of you in two weeks, once and for all. Then all we’ll have to worry about is rotating this battleship and turning it back into the love boat. Maybe putting Marilyn Chambers in the Pretty Prospect mansion isn’t such a bad idea after all.
PS: I just got my Election Protection assignment: I’m supposed to go to Cleveland on 11/1 for training, and to work as a polling place monitor on 11/2 - making sure all who are entitled to vote, get to, and that all votes cast are counted. Non-partisan, non-advocacy. Non-paid. I’m working out the details now - Cleveland is a long ways away and 11/1 is just around the corner…
