Erection Day 2004: First Contact
I started my morning off by listening to Bananarama’s cover of the Sex Pistols’ “No Feelings”. I think that’s a perfectly good way to start here. I’m off to the polls in a moment (and I hope you all are too). For those who don’t know already, who are wondering who I’m voting for and why, I’m voting for John Kerry, but not because I have any great love for him (I wish his wife were running instead; sadly, if we let her run, we have to let Ahnold run). I’m voting for him because we absolutely cannot afford another 2 term President, no matter who it is.
You can say whatever you want about our current President, in whatever filthy language you like (and some of you have used extremely filthy language), but the bottom line here really is about momentum. Bad things often happen when Presidents get elected to multiple terms, in my opinion. Clinton did nothing but waste our time and money in his second term. Aside from whatever his role was in the fall of Communism (and really, I’d say the fall of the Soviet Union may just end up being a little spill in the long run), Reagan was 8 years of badness. Nixon? Watergate. Lyndon Johnson? Vietnam. Truman? The beginning of the Cold War/Red Scare/McCarthyism. Even FDR, who people talk about as if he was Gandhi, had the atomic bomb created under his watch, put Asian-Americans in internment camps not entirely dissimilar from the ones that the Nazis were throwing Jews in, and quite a few people believe that he had advance warning on Pearl Harbor, too. If I were forced to, I could probably dig up bad second-term stuff on the rest of the multiple-term Presidents of the past century (Eisenhower, Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt) as well. The fact of the matter is, I don’t see this country as being any better off than it was 4 years ago, nor do I see our current President as being the guy who’s got a shot at making it that way. Kerry? He’s a mixed bag, but he’s something different that doesn’t look any worse than Bush does (in case you’re wondering, I thought the Gore/Lieberman ticket would have been worse than Bush/Cheney, and I stand by that…I didn’t vote for either of them, though…), so I’ll roll the dice on him.
In the past, I’ve voted Libertarian (and encouraged others to vote Libertarian as well), but under these circumstances, where the front-running challenger is going to need every single vote possible to unseat the incumbent, I can’t justify using my vote to try to help the Libertarians receive matching funds for the ‘08 Presidential campaign. I do encourage you all to vote for Libertarian candidates running for other offices aside from the Presidency, as I will be doing (here in New Jersey, Virginia Flynn is running for the House Of Representatives), because while they’re another imperfect party, they offer the most support of our free speech rights, the rights upon which this country was founded.
That’s all for now. I’ve got to get to the polls. I will be checking in throughout the day with news if there are any interesting developments, and in the meantime, feel free to drop me a line or post a comment with your Election Day/voting stories.