This page was last updated on Friday, 12 November, 2004
|
|
This page was last updated on Friday, 12 November, 2004 |
|
| features |
election
2004
|
|||
|
I don't really care about very much. Usually what I truly care about is extremely insignificant in the long run. I hardly ever take major events such as presidential elections seriously. When tragedy strikes I wait impatiently for everyone to start having fun again. On September 11th, my line to all the girls I knew at the time was, "you know, with this changed state of newly dangerous world affairs it's only natural that our own moral restraints be significantly relaxed." So the presidential election is on Tuesday. I don't take it seriously. Whoever wins will just be another joke to me. However, while I'm here, I might as well give my own skewed perspective to this election. I got registered just in time, much to my mom's relief. She told me to make sure and register to vote because "this will be the most important election ever and maybe your vote would be the one to put Bush over the top." Of course I greatly let my mom down by telling her that with the electoral college firmly in place, my vote couldn't possibly win it for George and also that she was being a bit presumptuous to think that I was going to vote for him anyway. If you're registered to vote in the state of Utah, it's absolutely imperative that, regardless of your political stance, you DO NOT vote for George W. Bush. Even if you're the most conservative Republican in the state, you may actually do some good by not voting for Bush. I say this because for as long as I've been alive, Utah has consistently voted Republican for president. Despite whatever influence I can give to all 20 of you out there, George W. Bush WILL WIN Utah and its electoral votes. Since Utah's presidential stance is consistently inevitable, no presidential candidate cares about our pretty great state. As long as we're so completely true blue to the Republican Party, no candidate will ever care. To the Democrats we're lost causes and to the Republicans we're blind followers. Bruce Springsteen made me decide how important it is to shift the presidential numbers of Utah. This year, the election is noticeably hot because of the intense opinions musicians, actors and other celebrities have thrown into the mix. Since I've been alive, I've never seen such a movement to remove a president from office. I read in something like Entertainment Weekly that Springsteen was starting up a tour called the Vote For Change Tour. The Boss hired a bunch of other musicians including Ben Harper, Bonnie Raitt, Dave Matthews Band, Dixie Chicks, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, John Fogerty and John Mellencamp to accomplish one thing: the removal of the president. Their method was to continuously tour the 13 most prominent swing states singing and campaigning against Bush. Obviously Utah wasn't on the Vote For Change agenda. Sure it's fine now, but what about next time when some decent musicians want to do a little campaigning? In the meantime, no presidential candidate will ever pander to us at all. If we don't watch it, the government will make our elementary school kids have mandatory coffee and tea breaks (if I thought really hard, maybe I could think of a more fitting example). If, however, we push ourselves into becoming more of a swing state, not only will Bruce Springsteen come and visit, but we'll have people running for president who will be willing to offer federal grants toward home teaching in order to secure Utah's electors. Now the really good thing is that we don't even have to vote Democrat to turn the tide. I'm probably not going to vote for Kerry. I don't like the guy. Just like the Democrats to give us a flip-flopping shape-shifter they don't even want to be victorious. They threw us a guy who'll probably lose so that they can run Hillary in 2008 and win in a landslide. So cheap. If they got someone decent, I would love to start voting Democrat, but I can't now. Okay, back on subject. Did you know that both the Socialist Workers Party and the Personal Choice Party have females running for vice-president? It's true. I'm slightly partial to the Personal Choice choice, since they have such a great name. The party is named after my favorite justification for committing some of my favorite sins. Also, if I vote Socialist Worker I'll start getting the Daily Worker in the mail alongside some interesting Christmas cards from Castro. So here's the plan: I'm thinking everyone ought to vote for Charles Jay and Marilyn Chambers Taylor of the Personal Choice Party, then once elected, we assassinate Jay and Taylor will become the first female president before Hillary has a chance. Let me scoot back a little to all those people who are so pissed that Bush is president. They don't hate him just because he talks funny. The reason Bush has so many people so riled up is because of war. I must admit, that I'm far more familiar with the entertainment industry than I am with politics and the general state of world affairs. I'm sorry to admit that I do believe this has affected the way I perceive the current election. As a disciple of TV and magazines I've been bombarded with anti-Bush and anti-war rhetoric. Despite this acknowledgement, I don't believe that my exposure to such views is such a horrible thing to have. A while back (I can't remember the date. It was about the same time that the United States first invaded Iraq) I heard a guy on talk radio saying a loss in Iraq was inevitable. The guy related what happened in Vietnam. First, within weeks the Viet Cong were defeated in a few decisive battles and victory was imminent if not completely declared. After that incident was the horror of the Vietnam War we remember today. It then became a drawn-out unnecessary unwaking nightmare struggle the U.S. waded through for about a decade. Eventually, after about 50,000 soldiers were killed there, the United States eventually decided it just wasn't worth being there anymore. Looking back, it's sort of amazing that it took well over 50,000 lives to decide to leave. Now we must deal with the fact the Vietnam War was the only conflict we've ever lost. The funny thing is, by the numbers, we annihilated the Viet Cong. According to some estimates, the commies lost about a million fighting men. We should have won, but we didn't. We just left. Am I angry that we deserved to win, but didn't and now have to deal with the beginning of a losing streak? Actually, no. I'm glad we lost. We may have won, if we were willing to sacrifice another 50,000 lives. Fortunately, I think we were fed up. After about 12 years of doing more killing than dying, but still doing a lot of both we realized that there just weren't enough reasons to be there. There weren't enough reasons to lose another 50,000 and there definitely weren't enough reasons to kill a million more. I did some sloppy checking of some of the numbers in our current war situation. Presently, the United States has lost a little over 1,000 military servicemen in Iraq. I had a hard time finding actual fatality numbers of the Iraqi imposing forces. The straightest number I found was actually in an internet post entitled "More Good News From Iraq." The author of this particular post felt that we heard too much bad news from Iraq and wanted to counter by saying that the allied forces are generally taking out eight bad guys for every one of our guys who falls. That puts the bad guy deaths at about 8,000 (what good news!). We kill pretty well nowadays, but not quite as well as we did in Vietnam. The really horrifying numbers are the estimates of the Iraqi civilians killed since the beginning of the war. One source puts it at about 14,000 (14,000 was the minimum estimate with the maximum estimate being over 16,000). Saddam Hussein supposedly killed 300,000 Iraqi civilians while in office over a period of 24 years. That averages out to about 12,500 people a year. At the present rate, more civilians are dying without Hussein's help. Okay, the numbers are out of the way. Let's now talk a little bit about the reasons why 21,000 people needed to die. First of all, the presidency determined that Iraq was amassing weapons of mass destruction. I'm guessing that there's still a chance we'll find the weapons since I'm also guessing that not every single inch of Iraq has been thoroughly searched. Still, it's very commonly believed that the intelligence that led us to believe in said weapons were erroneous. Whoops. That's fine though, because we needed to get rid of Saddam Hussein. He killed lots of people, so Iraq and the world would be better without him. Eliminating Hussein did not eliminate the need to continue fighting, killing and dying. Now we're stuck. The world sees the United States as the ultimate representation of mad imperialism. People who weren't against us before are now against us. People who wouldn't have before are now joining organizations such as Al Qaeda. It is nice that we can't find nasty weapons. It's also nice that Hussein is behind bars. The thing is, if President Bush knew there were no weapons of mass destruction and he said we had to go to Iraq just to take down an evil dictator we would not have been supportive. We would have said there are evil dictators all over the world and we just don't care enough to do all that killing and dying thing we do so well just for Saddam, because he's just not worth our trouble. He's too insignificant all by himself. It wouldn't have been worth it for us and, more importantly, we would have known it wouldn't have been worth it before the fact. Bush probably really believed the WMD mis-intelligence. That doesn't alleviate his guilt though. His administration should have solid enough to more adequately confirm whatever intelligence they had. Bush really believing what was actually wrong puts him at fault and that means he's responsible for an unnecessary war. I spent a lot of words just now talking about a war we shouldn't have gotten involved in. The war actually has very little to do with the election. Although I want Charles Jay to win, John Kerry is the only person who can possibly defeat Bush, and Kerry isn't going to leave Iraq. The reason I spent so much time talking about the war is because it's important to realize that the war was a mistake. There's a lot of talk about the war being a mistake, but also that we're committed and we need to finish what we started. This attitude often includes including the man who started it in the first place. I feel very strongly that under no circumstances should we reward a man for making a mistake. Keeping Bush in office just to clean up Iraq would be like keeping Nixon in office just to clean up Watergate. That's pretty much it. I guess it's all been said before by obnoxious celebrities. It's probably all a bit naive, sure. I was driving around with a friend a few months ago and he saw another bumper sticker with the admonition to impeach Bush. My friend looked at it in disgust and wondered aloud why there weren't so many "Impeach Clinton" stickers in the midst of his scandal. As long as this has rather weirdly turned into an anti-Bush rant, let me talk about something seemingly way off the subject. Anybody remember King David? He was in the Bible you know. He was Israel's greatest king. God blessed him in many ways. One day of course he slipped into marital infidelity. His transgression ultimately led to an unwanted pregnancy to a married woman. Such an action was completely abominable for a king and sickeningly wretched for a man of God. Although he committed such a horrible act, this was not his downfall. David's truest degradation didn't come with his sexual impurity, but with his decision to send an innocent man to unnecessarily fight and die in a war where he didn't belong. http://www.brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html
(30oct04) |
||||
