y2kxj said:
P.S. liberals are pussies.
Agreed. And for the guy who didn't read the earlier long post: I'll save you the trouble and let you know you can stop right now; from your perspective, this'll be way too much work.
I'd like to clarify my earlier statement about not knowing who I don't want to vote for less. I'm a registered Republican, and voted for Bush in the last election. I stand by that decision, and think it was the right one. But it's also my belief that the last truly great president (party politics aside) we had was Reagan - regardless of political affiliation, it has to be admitted that he was instrumental in keeping the world from basically annihilating itself, no mean feat at the time.
However, in this election I really do not want to vote for Bush. I could care less about the war in Iraq; hell, the Iraqis here that I've talked to expressed regret that their country has been turned into a battlefield, but if it got rid of 30 years of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship they were all for it, and I can support that. No, what I don't like about this administration - plain and simple - is the Patriot Act.
This has probably been the single greatest erosion of our liberties since the Second World War. That a piece of legislation which essentially removes due process in tracking and surveilling Americans could pass with no real understanding in the House or Senate of its impart tells me that a) we've elected the wrong politicians across the board, and b) there is a poor understanding of how to fight terrorism at the same level.
I've lived in countries with a terrorism problem. One of my friends was very nearly killed in a bombing; another one very actually killed. To this day, I still get antsy if I see a bag sitting without an obvious owner. But the no-fly lists, TSA harassment at the airports, and near-creation of secret police has me bloody worried. The 'something's maybe gonna happen, but we don't know what' announcements I keep hearing on the radio don't do jack to combat the issue - but it does tell me that our politicians are afraid to admit the truth: you can't predict where or when these things are going to happen. Maybe if you're lucky and have good intelligence, you can stop them before they do - but wiretapping, the passive monitoring of Internet traffic, and recording movements in and out of even private buildings only serves to raise the noise level of benign movement to signal of actual problems. And at its core, it's unconstitutional. This is what has me upset over the direction America is going in.
John Kerry, the direct alternative, scares the crap out of me. He strikes me as posessing all the goofy incompetence of Jimmy Carter but with rash judgement instead of Carter's let's-just-sit-here-and-hope-it-goes-away ineffectiveness; there's also a touch of spitefulness in him that makes it easy for me to visualise him unravelling four years of economic progress in an attempt to make the Bush administration look bad. The enemy of your enemy isn't necessarily your friend, and I really wish that the chowderheads going to the polls in November could figure this out. Besides, I've actually overheard people saying that they will vote for him, based on what they saw in Michael Moore's 'documentary' (a term I use extremely loosely in this context)
Fahreheit 9/11. If you're dumb enough to vote based on a single movie, you really shouldn't.
While I'm on the subject of Michael Moore: f**k that guy. Just thought I'd get it out of the way. Onwards.
America has a number of problems it's facing right now: poor foreign relations, mainly through a weak understanding of how other cultures operate. Even in a non-war context, this is bad: we are the big kid on the block, and like every other big kid on every other block, can either be perceived as a bully, or the kid who comes over and helps that nice old lady pull weeds. Whether or not this perception is deserved - and quite frankly, I don't think it is, but we haven't done much in the gentle persuasion department to prevent it from happening - is another matter, but endemic of the decline in foreign relations in the last 12 years.
Immigration. Here in Southern California, the media no longer refers to illegal immigrants as illegal immigrants. They're now 'undocumented immigrants'. Sorry, but to me an undocumented immigrant is someone who has lost his Green Card. Didn't have one in the first place? Nope, you're illegal and on the next bus / boat / airplane out of here. This argument that illegal immigrants only do jobs that citizens don't want to take is, to me, crap. If you didn't have illegal immigrants doing the jobs, citizens or legal resident aliens would do them. Nature abhors a vacuum; open one up and it'll be filled.
Next stop: education. Good Lord, I can not believe how DUMB kids are these days. Schools used to prepare people to get through life by teaching them relevant skills like how to put a meaningful (not necessarily complex, but meaningful) sentence together, do basic math, and have enough reading comprehension to make it through the newspaper; now it seems like all they do is churn them through regardless of ability. It really scares the hell out of me that people who can barely read, write, communicate, or make change for a ten dollar bill from $9.14 without resorting to a calculator are going to be deciding who runs the country. Maybe this is one case where voter apathy is a good thing.
Speaking of voter apathy, that's a large part of the problem. People have it so damned easy these days that as long as they're clothed, fed, and have somewhere indoors to sleep at night they figure they don't *have* to care. Wrong. Look at the decline in voter turnout from the 1970s to today. Now compare that with all the wacky legislative crap that's invaded our lives since then. When you don't care, you're a doormat. Unfortunately, in this case you're a doormat for the rest of us, too. Thanks for not taking the time off work (for which you may not be docked pay) to go to the polls and make a difference; we all appreciate your non-efforts.
I'll steer clear of the erosion of the first, fourth, second, fifth, and fourteenth amendments except to say that I don't like them one bit. Someone with a non-armchair grounding in Constitutional Law would be better off covering that, anyway.
Grmph. This has ended up being a hell of a lot longer than I intended it to be, but hopefully it's made some sense. I think America is a great thing, but it's turning into something it was never meant to be.
atriot:
Change it to....ummmm....drug use. Who am I hurting, besides myself, if I elect to take a few bong hits in my own home...not around children or anyone else who didn't want to be there? Same goes for that.
