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    Independence Day reading..., 2003-07-04 19:06:29 | Main | Bush was never in the real mi..., 2003-07-07 10:46:04

    Aside from my feelings about electroshock therapy:

    and doubts about 9/11 foreknowledge, this reflects my view on 2004. Maybe it's because I'm not living in the same propaganda-induced fantasyland as most everybody else in the country, preferring my own particular fantasyland, but a canidate that can present any picture of this administration with some association to reality is going to have a hard time losing in a moderately fair election.

    Briefly:

    1. The increasing number of net job losses, whatever the economy looks like in a year the chances of Bush not becoming the first president since Hoover to preside over an economy with a net job loss are almost infinitely small.
    2. The fact that any given "revisionist" canidate can simply toss Bush's words about WMD back at him at a whim along with quotes from the intelligence reviews he was recieving at the time and demonstrate in a debate that he lied his ass off about the Iraqi threat. Pro-war canidates will have a harder time with this, the anti-war movement made the case plainly beforehand that what Bush was saying didn't match the known facts: Kerry et. al. really have no excuse for supporting the FUD.
    3. The cost and failures of the Iraqi war and war/occupation.
    4. The bumblefuck on post-war Afghanistan.
    5. The 9/11 coverup. Numerous 9/11 families are rightfully upset about this: get their endorsement, put them in front of the cameras, promise follow-through on the investigations.
    6. Underfunded homeland security.
    7. Ie. the issues Bush is supposedly strong on is vaporware, anybody willing to blow some hot-air on all the smoke that's covering the mirrors is going to have a hard time not destroying Bush's credibility on national defense: you just need the ideas presented to the public and defended from a scoffing media with the simple facts.

    And this time when he tries to steal the election we need a canidate that will actually fight it.

    Not surprisingly there's still a lot of vitriol thrown back and forth about the 2000 election, primarily towards Nader because he's considering another run - such as this discussion at Calpundit and this shit storm at DailyKos. Highly sectarian, devisive, full of lies and ridicule. I find it upsetting, but in keeping with the rule of thumb that the weaker the left is the more sectarian it becomes. I will now continue contributing to the problem.

    A couple things come out of it that I think are true: Greens had a minor hand in Bush's election (they had nothing like the impact of Perot in Clinton's election, or the millions of people who chose to exercise their right to not vote); Nader's remaining an independent may be a reason for mistrust; Greens might be better off sticking with the local elections - in which they have had a surprising amount of success - and try to be more strategic in running against Democrats, they have done some foolish things here and there but nothing nearly as foolish as the attackers make them out to be; and Democrats should get on the ball with respect to IRV and Greens should make that a primary demand of the two-party state with which they're dealing. The idea that the Green and Democratic leadership should work together is a nice little pipedream, but I think the Greens have shared interests of more immediacy with third wheel bi-partisans like McCain and Feingold than either party taken as a whole. I don't know if Greens feel that way, but what do I know.

    What is baseless criteria for attack: Nader's vote stealing from Gore. For starters, according to exit polls half would have been Gore voters, 30% were non-voters, and 20% were Bush voters. The reality is Bush stole far more votes from Gore than Nader could have hoped to (in the discussions linked to above it's mentioned that Nader discussed this in recent interviews, but it was disregarded out of hand as baseless, without justification): National exit polls revealed that 11% of Democrats voted for Bush, and in Florida that number was 13%. You can come up with your own conclusions about what that means: maybe Gore wasn't rightwing enough for centrist Democrats, or fundementalist enough for anti-abortion voters, or maybe Bush peddled his snakeoil populism well enough to bring in votes from people disaffected about Gore because of the beating he took from the media, nevermind his own brand of snakeoil populism (and how could anybody watch the debates and conclude that Bush won, anyway? Does nobody join debate team anymore?), maybe people were confused about who represented which party, what with the smarmy bastards all diving for the same center.

    And then comes the stream of shit: that the GOP funded the Greens (no, they funded anti-Gore commercials), garbage about how Nader was meeting with GOP leaders to strategize - something I'd be happy to see evidence for but nobody's ever offered any, and googling didn't substantiate the charge - yadda yadda, ad infinitum.

    In the end Nader couldn't have cost Gore the election, because Gore won and then let Bush steal it without the aforementioned fight. Not only do you have Gore not asking for a state-wide recount, not supporting the Black Caucus in their motion to not seat Florida electors, but you also have the massive purges of the voter rolls. How can anybody feel justified in blaming Nader for any of that? How can anybody be justified in being angrier at Green voters than at the system that allowed such a flagrant grab for power in the heart of the world's greatest democratic republic? It boggles my mind.

    All this shit almost makes me happy that I've been a perennial non-voter for 26 years, joining the majority of Americans in refusing to toss my lunch for any of the sorry basketcases we are granted the high priviledge of choosing, or not choosing, from. I did actually register in 2000, because of the Green ticket, but the fact that I couldn't find an unlocked door to my seemingly empty polling station shouldn't detract from the otherwise fanatic state of my apathy at the time.

    America has a wide range of devisive political ideologies, there should be a system that allows different parties that represent our wide range of political beliefs to form coallitions on policies they agree on, rather than being stuck inside one or the other monolithic party aparatus, both of which usually serve elite interests over public interests, primarily because they have to to compete for power. Fair election reforms are the direction to go to rectify the narrowness of ideology represented in government and subsequent control of the debate, and will end the petty bickering between "pragmatists" and "perfectionists", as they describe themselves, and allow for more petty bickering on stuff that actually matters.

    Anyway, if Nader runs as a Republican (some, being the asshole wing of the DP, might say for the second time) of all parties, and the Greens run Michael freakin' Moore of all people, and Lieberman of all Republicans runs as a Democrat, maybe I'll vote Republican this time around. Lordy.


:: posted by buermann @ 2003-07-06 23:40:20 CST | link





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