ELECTIONS 06

(News-Herald, November 2) I still have to make some election decisions. Hutchison vs Hutchinson contest—I know both the candidates and they’re both good guys. I also struggle with the Swann-Rendel contest. I don’t know either one of those guys, but I don’t like either one.
But when it comes to national races, I know what I’m doing. And since everybody else is telling you how they’re voting, and why, I might as well join the party. At least I’m doing it here in print, instead of calling you with one more recorded message. If you’d rather, you can stop reading now, and I’ll see you next week, with something non-political.
My own voting history is splotchy. I registered independent for years, until I realized that, locally, primaries are the main event. So I registered Democrat, on the theory that my vote would have more weight in the tiny crowd of Venangoland Dems.
I never vote straight party. The two political parties are a shameful mess, stumbling dinosaurs who have outlived their value. And they know it, too—that’s why they spent the last decades rewriting election laws to make it harder for any third parties to crack the Dempublican monopoly.
I like strong effective local government, and I prefer the feds be as ineffective as possible.
For that reason, I don’t like entrenched power. Years ago I was happy to help chase the Democrats out of power; they were fat, happy and out of touch. And I think we’ve come back to that place.
These guys just don’t care.
This is what I hate worst about the partisanship in DC. Not the struggle strictly along party lines, but what ignorance it indicates. These guys battle as if what happens in Congress is personal, only about them, as if they and their opponents are the only people in the room. Their first loyalty is to their party, not the people who elected them. And they dismiss the opposition as if those guys did not represent citizens back home.
This Republican administration has grasped one of the important lessons of the previous leaders—it doesn’t matter what you do, only what you say. As long as you say what people want you to say, you can go ahead and do whatever you want.
Republicans made a promise to go stamp out gay marriage and funnel money to religious groups. Then – they did nothing. And then, just a few weeks ago, Condoleeza Rice swore in new Global AIDS coordinator Mark Dybul. With Laura Bush as a witness, Dybul’s gay partner held the Bible, and Rice recognized the partner’s mother as Dybul’s “mother-in-law.”
I’m not a fan of the theo-con agenda, but I’m impressed at the brass it takes to ignore so many people who help get you elected.
But then, Congress is pretty well ignoring all of us. Accelerating a trend started Dems when they were in power, Congress discusses and debates almost no bills that come before it. Perhaps that how, here in the USA, we’ve ended up with a law that says the President can grab anyone he believes is giving aid or comfort to an enemy of the State and throw that person in a prison for as long as he wants, without a word of explanation to anyone.
It is a conservative dilemma. Conservatives would like to see fiscal responsibility in DC; conservatives would like to see a federal government that didn’t try to stick its nose into every school or bedroom in the country. When a secretary of defense takes us into war with a flawed Plan A and no Plan B, you’d like someone to hold him accountable. But what do you do—vote for a Democrat? If you can find a Democrat with anything resembling a clue, he isn’t likely to be promising to stand up for conservative values.
But if elections are good for anything, it is for reminding the bozos in DC that they are, in fact, elected. The way I see it, there are only two possible outcomes for this election.
Those in power remain in power, and they conclude that even after every kind of betrayal, failure, corruption, and lie, they really are elected for life and need never listen to regular citizens. Or a bunch are sent home, and those that remain suddenly develop a new interest in paying attention to the citizens of this country. Then, after two more years of fumbling around, we might have an election in which candidates actually listen, and we can get a Congress that is slightly less useless than this one.
Vote against the incumbents in DC? Darn right—if I could, I would vote against the whole of Congress. These guys need to go.