Thursday, May 29, 2008

Just A Little Disgusted

For some odd reason I thought that paying taxes and being a veteran entitled me to vote or not vote for the candidate of my choice. I was told differently. I was told that my opinions (not even actions yet) were stupid. I ws told that I was foolish. I was told I was completely wrong and that everything was done in a fair manner. Now I see why less and less people vote. I'm so glad that I (Ft. Lewis, 9th Infantry ), my father (USAF 26 years) and my brother (Lt. USN) were all willing to die to defend the country so people can have their opinions and feel free to express them. As opinionated as I am, I never told anyone who voted for Nader that they were stupid, but that the only way their vote was ever going to count was by screwing over a worthier candidate. People are more concerned with who wins than who is actually qualified to run the country into something other than the ground. Whatever, this is the last time I am going to make that mistake. And if my earlier post didn't make it clear, I am not going to vote for Obama. Period. Change is just another word for "elect me".

Now on to more interesting things. The Republican wagons are circling (Newt, do you mean Bush "allowed" 9/11?) and people are trying to defend their actions or lack thereof. Press included. Lil Scotty is now saying that the press didn't do its job by asking the hard questions (no surprise there) and that the Plame leak was the turning point for him. Great words now, but they would have been so much more helpful while Libby was on trial or when Fitzgerald was originally investigating the crime and the cover-up.
However, McClellan said that it wasn't until he realized that he may have been led to deliver false information to the media about two senior administration officials’ roles in outing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative that he knew he would someday have to tell his story.
Disgruntled, I do not think that word means what the White House thinks it means. Lil Scotty isn't in a bad mood, he is publicly displaying the crisis of conscience that the rest of them should be having. If logic, fair play and compassion had been in their rule book. It's in the Bible, but it's obvious they have as much respect for its principles as they did for the Constitution.

Find the billions that were lost to fraud, then China or the EU might bail Iraq out of the mess that the US put you in. We can't do it, we don't have any money of our own. Anymore.

It's a male dominated world in which only the way women look and act subservient is important. Get a little older or show a few brains and it's war. And if a guy attacks and rapes you, it's up to the woman to prove she didn't do anything wrong. Even if she was asleep in her own home, she must have had provocative bed covers and the perpetrator may have been affected by a "sleep disorder" that made him act the way he did. And if she was only ten or fifteen, she must have been asking for it in some way that doesn't seem to qualify the perpetrator as a child molester. The man is never responsible for keeping his zipper zipped. Unless he's Clinton and a 24 year old innocent intern was involved. Then the fate of the US is affected. Double standards indeed.

I'm sure it has a lot to do with the light and dark sections of D.C. The rich don't seem to have as much trouble getting to the hospital with a pulse when they have a heart attack.

Suggestible and can't resist a dare. Just what we need in another president. A McCain tour of Iraq is like driving through the ghetto in an armored limo with tinted windows. How unprepared do you think the terrorists are going to be this time?

3Bs

3 comments:

  1. Hello Deb:

    I finally twigged to the fact that you were linking us, so I thought I would stop by, say "thanks," and chew the fat a bit.

    I think that your spot and ours and maybe one or two more are the only ones on the "reality-based" blogosphere to be agnostic on Obama.

    I don't know how much of my stuff you've read, but I've had something of an evolution in my thinking on him since Ohio. From his "speech" in 2004 until his loss in the Ohio primary, I loathed the man.

    My first choice was Kucinich, then Clinton, then Edwards, then Richardson, then Paul, then Romney, then Obama. All of this is meaningless of course because I live in Panama and don't have the right to vote in a US election.

    Latin policy, though, was a key issue for me and they didn't come much better than Bill Clinton's and Hillary Clinton has a very close relationship with our governing party the PRD, of whom I think quite highly.

    Until, he was forced to start taking stands on issues, the only guess I could make on Obama's latin policy was that it was a toss-up: he had been supported by Pat Robertson who favors the overthrown of Hugo Chavez on the one hand, yet on the other hand, Obama and PRD Secretary and former President Of Panama "Toro" Perez-Balladares share the same attorney, Gregory Craig.

    There were a number of other problems I had with Obama, mainly his coziness with Joe Lieberman, Republicans in general, his religiosity, and hectoring tone. The nadir came when he was quoted as saying "Democrats need to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior." Who the hell was this guy, anyway?

    Come Ohio, and he had a choice to make and he made the right one. He became for the first time in his public life, a Democrat, and proceed to take a number of positions on a number of issues and I couldn't find too much area of disagreement.

    I have found the level of rancor between Clinton and Obama supporters to be absurd considering that in my country for example, our most Right-Wing candidate for president, Martinelli, would be considered "loony-liberal" in the the USA because he's against the death penalty (max penalty here is 15 years), pro-choice, pro gay marriage, pro-welfare, pro-single payer national health, and doesn't differ all that much on economic issues from our most Left-Wing candidate, Balbina Herrera.

    That is our old-fashioned fuddy-duddy Right-Winger, Martinelli! I think Herrera will win, but you do see how silly US politics seems to the rest of the world. Herrera would be our second woman president. Her skin color and that of our current president, Martin Torrijos, is darker than Obama's, and the PRD candidate with White Skin, Navarro, has views that like Herrera's are left of Kucinich or Nader's.

    The Clintons are to Panama what JFK and Jackie are to Ireland but more so. Bill Clinton LIBERATED Panama. And, weird as this will sound, I can make a pretty good case that General Manuel Noriega was certainly a more reasonable president than Bush has been and you could also say his social policy might have been about where Hillary Clinton and Obama's are.

    So, when Clinton went into her Commander-In-Chief bit and Obama was still all things to all people, I took a step back and realized I liked Cynthia McKinney best of all for president.

    Now, that I know where Obama stands on most of the issues, I find him acceptable and hope he beats McCain, because McCain is a beast. What America has is a choice between a smart conservative in Obama and a stupid and crazy Nazi in McCain.

    Being that Obama has said all the right things about Latin America recently and he'll probably be the nominee, I hope he wins.

    What I find so appalling is that the debate in the US is over trivia. Who said something racist? Who said something sexist? Who's a patriot? Who loves Jesus the most?

    Most Americans don't know what Panama is like but their image is all wrong. This isn't the rain forest! And we aren't running around with loincloths! It's a 21st century, banking and trade powerhouse, with a democratic-republican system of government. There are Panamanians of every ethnicity you can think of. Race is NEVER discussed in the way it is in the US. It's perfectly fine to describe someone as "negro" or "judio" to distinguish that person from someone else, but everybody's pretty much the same. There are no issues of segregation. Or White vs Black. Or Jew vs. Arab. Or anything like that. That you have that is kind of a joke for us.

    But back to the original point, the ISSUES in our elections are ISSUES. Trade policy, taxes, regulations, wages, budgets, infrastructure projects, etc. The idea that the color of someone's skin would be a factor in an election is just cracking everybody up.

    You can't find a priest down here who thinks mixing religion and politics is a good idea or that the Bible has anything to do with our constitution.

    We also think that the use of the words "hispanic" and "latino" in America is really goofy. A Panamanian is as much like a Mexican as an American is like an Australian!

    Points to ponder.

    Keep coming by and enjoying our blog.

    -Kelso

    ReplyDelete
  2. Deb, I just read the responses you received to your post at IIRTZ, and I want to say I'm very sorry. I haven't been reading or posting there much lately; I didn't think my lack of enthusiasm for Obama would be welcome, and now I know for sure.

    Your vote belongs to you, and no one has the right to demand, cajole, or threaten to get you to cast it for a particular candidate. You know that already, of course, but I just want to second it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kathy,

    Thank you. I quit reading the responses yesterday. It was like reading the Bush kool-aid drinkers all over again.

    It's my vote and I'll do with it what I wish. Some people have completely lost their minds. This used to be America, land of the free and home of the brave, now it's you do as I say or you're not American. I notice they don't come over here and post and the reaction at BBB was totally different.

    The IIRTZ commenters only made me more sure that I wasn't going to vote for him. I probably won't post there any more, I only do that level of hatred in my personal life and try to keep that to a minimum.

    It was certainly an eye opener. All that vitriol for a black woman that doesn't want to vote for Obama. I never knew I had that much power. :)

    ReplyDelete