Thursday, October 18, 2012

Were they hiding under rocks?

I saw a little bit of the Presidential "debate" the other night - but I'm still mystified where they found 80 undecided voters just three weeks out from the election. Did they dig them out of the Institute for the Profoundly Clueless? Maybe they found a bunch of folks who had suffered short term memory loss (like the Guy Pearce in Memento) and couldn't remember who they were voting for.

How can anyone still be undecided at this point in the process? President Obama has been in office nearly four years. Mitt Romney has been campaigning since the beginning of last year. If anyone has paid any attention at all they know more or less where the candidates stand on most issues.

At this point you either think President Obama has done the best job possible with the hand that President Bush left him or that he's incompetent. Mitt Romney is either a really smart businessman who can translate those skills into managing the government or he's a shill for whoever's pumping big bucks into his campaign coffers.

Maybe you feel that Obama should be rewarded for working to bring back a sense of community in this country after decades of atomization. Or that Obama has sold the core constituency of the Democratic party down the river in his quest to make the party more like the GOP.

Maybe you think Romney could lead a revival of Ronald Reagan's supply-side economics. Or, perhaps, that Romney has no political convictions and will gladly flip a position if he thinks he can snare a handful of votes in Ohio or Florida.

One thing that should be clear is that neither Obama nor Romney give a rat's ass about the poor. Neither one  talks about the poor out on the campaign trail. They're both aiming for the mythical middle class.

When he took office, President Obama continued the very same policies that George W. Bush had instituted while he presided over the economic meltdown. Obama handed money to the banks hand over fist and did everything he could to protect the automobile industry. But, in all of the so-called stimulus plans President Obama introduced, not once did he allocate money for the purpose of directly hiring the unemployed. He gave it to the banks and the car companies. Instead of using the money to create public works jobs, he left his minions at the Fed to reduce interest rates to zero and pretended that it would solve the problem.

We know that it was the complete and utter deregulation of the financial sector that caused the meltdown. So what does Mr. Romney propose? You got it - even more deregulation. His investments created jobs - in China. His running mate will tell you about Mr. Romney's charitable endeavors to aid the poor - but why should the poor rely on charity? Shouldn't the government do something about it?

President Obama has done more harm to our privacy rights than any other president in the history of the Republic. He has done more to harm the rule of law in international affairs than any other president since the height of the Cold War. He inherited President Bush's program of extraordinary rendition and did his damndest to keep its darkest secrets from coming out.

Not that we should expect anything more from Mr. Romney.

Mr. Obama has proven himself to be a fraud. Mr. Romney has proven himself to be the more insincere candidate for the White House since - well, I can't remember.

Neither one of these men is fit to sit in the Oval Office. Unfortunately, one of them will be for the next four years.

Have you decided how you feel about that?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Voting for either one of these bozos is tantamount to treason.