November 4th: Vote!

Rob Landley has an awesomely well written reminder of why we should all vote today. He’s given me permission to post the whole this here. Any formatting errors are mine.

The existence of a Google Maps polling place finder is pretty darn cool, if you ask me.

I really really really hope that Bush Fatigue actually has motivated people to the 90% voter turnout they’re expecting in some places. I know that when Sarah Palin complains that her first amendment rights are being infringed upon by other people’s criticism of what she says… that kind of Complete Failure To Get It is just not noteworthy anymore. We’ve had eight years of Refuge in Audacity. We forget about old scandals because they’re constantly buried by new scandals.

Outing Valerie Plame for political gain was treason, a crime they execute people for, and enough of her contacts got killed after she was outed to justify doing so as manslaughter anyway. The whole Alberto Gonzales thing wasn’t related to that, nor was the brouhaha about waterboarding, which this administration did after Abu Ghraib caused such an international scandal; how tone deaf can you be? I’m still mad at Obama about FISA, but he wasn’t the guy who demanded the warantless wiretapping in the first place. And that’s all just recent stuff, the no-bid contracts for Haliburton are mere embezzlement and having oil lobbyists draft your first energy policy seems like a rounding error in comparison, but coming up with bigger scandals to distract from the existing ones should not be a successful survival strategy for 8 consecutive years.

These idiots never finish anything. Iraq didn’t mean Afghanistan was over. The cleanup from Katrina is ongoing; did Hurricane Andrew in Florida back in the 90’s still have this kind of lingering damage 3 years later? This banking thing isn’t even our first massive economic crisis on this moron’s watch; doesn’t anybody even remember Worldcom or Enron anymore? (California brownouts? Anyone?) Anybody remember Treasury secretary Paul O’Neil resigning back in 2002 and becoming the first in a long line of ex-insiders publicly lambasting the administration for malignant incompetence, and being proven right?

McCain abandoned his principles during the primary to court the “base” of right-wing religious extremists, and got himself stuck there somehow. (It’s like he’s a horror movie where he’s a hostage, and Palin’s his keeper or something.) There’s a guy with an actual brain hidden under that campaign, which you can see in old Daily Show appearances, or the speech he gave at that roast thingy a couple weeks back, or his recent Saturday Night Live appearance. Not great, but not run-away-screaming creepy like the guy we’ve seen campaigning this year. But no matter who McCain himself is, his campaign brings with it the same group of cronies that the first two Bush administrations had, Karl Rove’s progeny. And if McCain’s a doormat to them all through the campaign, he’d be a doormat to them in office too.

The definition of insanity is endlessly repeating the same actions and expecting different results. The fact that there are still over a dozen states solidly voting for McCain, and any chance he might still win, implies that this country has some seriously hard-core idiots. I mean really. I’m boggling. HOW CAN YOU NOT GET IT? After the past 8 years, what does it take to convince you that there is some seriously bad juju at the heart of the current republican party? Whether or not you agree with the ideals intermittently (and conflictingly) espoused, that the implementation is an unmitigated disaster should be obvious to small children, pets, even some of your more active house plants by now.

They’re “conservative”, right. What exactly are they conserving? It’s obviously not money, our national debt is now over $10 trillion, and the deficit’s never been higher (even at the height of the cold war). They’re not conserving energy, or water, or any other environmental thing. So what is it then?

(Speaking of money, the whole “tax cuts for the wealthy” thing is rationalized because we can’t punish hard-earned success. Didn’t John McCain marry a rich wife rather than earning his own millions, and didn’t she inherit her money? And these are the spokesbeings put forth to promote this philosophy?)

They’re “socially conservative”, they believe new social developments are immoral and to counter it the government should control public morals. Legislate morality. And they do so while crying for less government and wiretapping us without a warrant. Send people to the other side of the planet so women can’t be forced to wear Burkas, then impose crippling FCC fines when a clearly accidental “wardrobe malfunction” happens at a superbowl halftime for under a second. Federal regulations should specify how long miniskirt lengths can be, with inspectors? (And of course people can’t have sex out of wedlock but if they want to get married you throw Proposition 8 at them, but that’s state level lunacy.)

And they keep getting indicted. The moral crusaders are the people caught having covert homosexual relations with pages or random strangers in airport bathrooms. John McCain keeps going on about this Ayers guy when McCain was a member of the Keating 5. They scream about Acorn but live with Diebold. McCain is of course on his second marriage (having divorced his first wife to marry a younger rich blond woman), just like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich before him. (Remember the big “Family Values” campaign in 1996, the last election pre-Bush jr?) If you take them at their word and judge them by their own standards, that’s when they fail worst of all.

As far as I can tell, rather a lot of religious nuts either fervently avoid thinking (because God works in mysterious ways so it never has to make sense) or are actively trying to hasten The Rapture. They believe God is omniscient and all-powerful and therefore it’s vital they take action to micromanage the world around them or else it’ll all fall apart. The hypocrisy is built-in at every level.

I’m starting to believe that Sturgeon’s Law applies to the population at large. Alas, I believe most of the Republican party would agree with me, which is a strong counter-argument. But it’s clear there are determined, dedicated, self-destructive idiots out there who want to take the rest of us with them. And not all of ‘em are on Zoloft.

The only way the system has ever worked is if the rest of us work even harder to counter them.

To quote John Adams in the marvelous movie 1776, “Now vote, damn you.”

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