Saturday, October 13, 2012

Riding a Pale Horse

You had to know that I couldn’t stay away from politics for long. Second blog since my return from vacation and I’m already at it. This is the most important election in the history of the United States. Both sides say so. The choice is clear, they say. Each side claims theirs is the new direction, even though the incumbent wants to continue on the path that seems to be leading to recovery, albeit much more slowly than our instant-breakfast fast-food nation wants; while the challenger wants to return to the policies that created the problems we face in the first place. I don’t see change on the horizon. I don’t smell it in the air. This is the most important election – every election is the most important there ever was. The truth is, I suspect the super rich don’t care who is President of the United States, which is why they back both sides with their surplus cash. President Obama has been a big disappointment to me. Well, frankly, not that big because I did not expect that much. I saw him for what he was, a politician. As Rage Against the Machine co-founder Tom Morello commented on Thursday on “Totally Biased,” even Alan Cranston, much farther to the left than Obama ever thought of being, spent most of his time running for office, which meant begging for money from fat cats of all persuasions. On the other side, Romney is a liar. For example: how can we expect him to create 12 million jobs by outsourcing? And what exactly are the details of these so-called plans he keeps mentioning? Oh, you know the joke. How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving. It’s been refined further, of late: How can you tell when Romney or Ryan is lying? They use the word ‘values.’ Unfortunately, the louder someone screams a lie, the more likely it is to be believed; the more reasonably the facts are presented, the more likely they are to be ignored. I have no other explanation for how Romney could pull dead even with the President in the polls even for a single day. Obama and Biden may be moving us forward slowly, but at least they are moving us forward. We didn’t start the fire. When he took office in 1969, Vietnam became Nixon’s war. He did not end it as soon as most of us wanted, and he did other things to make us disrespect him as a man and as our leader, but it was a war he inherited from his predecessor, who happened to be a Democrat. When he took office in 2009, the burst bubble became Obama’s debt crisis. So far he has done nothing that I am aware of that should make us disrespect him, but he is resolving the crisis much more slowly than we want. Still, we have to remember that he inherited the crisis from his predecessor, who happened to be a Republican. It is not a failure of current policies but of previous ones that we have to consider when we vote. Not that it matters: millionaires elect millionaires. We’re just along for the ride, but Americans don’t think we have a ruling class. Still, there are only a handful of ways the common man can express his opinion about the course our country should take, and feeble as they might be, weak as each single voice might be, taken together we can still shout out a mighty message to our ruling class. Your message might be different from mine, and the choices we are given might be seen as picking the lesser of two evils, or at best, the better of two possible goods. I have voted. Have you?

No comments:

Post a Comment