Yet another article to stimulate debate

[Alias]

For me, John Kerry's voice has already started to acquire that special fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect that Bush's induces in me. The thought of listening to him daily for the next four years makes me feel better about the possible onset of rock 'n' roll deafness. His morose Eyeore visage has become a vista almost as tiresome as Bush's simian smirk. His patrician demeanor reminds one why George Bush has gone to such pains to disguise himself as an illiterate West Texas hick rather than the Yalie he also is.

Worse, Kerry's transparently theatrical efforts to out-macho the Republicans make him seem, as a friend recently put it, all dick and no balls. Bush's problem, to hear Kerry tell it, is that he's *not tough enough,* despite his being demonstrably willing to bomb civilians in a country that neither attacked us nor expressed any desire to do so. That's pretty gosh-darned tough, if you ask me.

Kerry's failure to capitalize on the failures of the worst

administration in my lifetime is unfathomable. The systematic

ineptitude of his campaign organization so far fills me with grave

concerns about his ability to form an administration that wouldn't

make us nostalgic for Gerald Ford's.

Generally speaking, it would have been better for the future of the

Republic if, upon eliminating Howard Dean, Kerry had been stashed in

a location as undisclosed as the one where they usually keep Dick

Cheney. Then he could have let Bush defeat himself through policies

and actions that no sane electorate could have ratified.

But no. He insisted on campaigning, apparently under the

misapprehension that to know him - or at least to know that virtual

version of him his marketing wizards had wrapped around him - was to

love him. This, unfortunately, has not been the general effect.

Gradually, I have watched the steam go out of the Anybody-But-Bush

crowd as we realized that anybody, in this instance, was the

increasingly irksome John Kerry.

People who, several months ago, were ready to go door-to-door in Ohio

in order to defeat Bush are unwilling to even campaign among their

friends to elect John Kerry. And I have become, I must admit, one of

these. Being an actual Kerry *supporter* just seems, well, un-cool.

For the last month or so, the election seemed reminiscent to me of

ads for the film "Alien vs. Predator, " the tag line of which goes,

"Whoever wins, we lose." (Further, it has seemed right to me that one

of these characters is and alien and the other a predator.)

The first debate, which I watched over the Internet in Berlin, did

nothing to alter my feelings about the candidates. Though many

American pundits seemed to think that Kerry "won" that Battle of the

Teledroids, it looked like they both lost to me, with their

stammering repetitions and hollow phrases. Lincoln vs. Douglas it was

not.

Is it any wonder that so many people are playing political possum

again? As ordinary folks go back to pretending to be asleep, the true

believers, more fervent than ever, prepare to re-elect George Bush.

But is Kerry really as personally lame as he appears? Well, in fact,

no. I had dinner with Kerry at one point last year, and, while I

found his views that evening to be a bit too tightly congruent with

those of the real money at the table, I found the actual John Kerry

to be a great deal more likeable than his manufactured simulacrum. I

remember thinking he might be an entertaining guy to spend a day

skiing with.

But even if Kerry himself were as off-putting as the guy I see on TV,

should we allow his personality deficiencies or cultural

idiosyncrasies to dissuade us from supporting him? I would say not,

especially when we consider what's at stake here.

Right here, right now, somewhere over the Atlantic, I'm having a

moment of clarity. I realize the obvious. I realize that, along with

a lot of other people, I have fallen prey to the peculiar American

frailty which has given us so many bad presidents. I refer to our

national tendency to treat presidential elections as though we were

all high-schoolers choosing a Prom King.

Thus, when it comes to qualifying for the American Presidency, a

grating accent can be a bigger political liability than a record of

homicidally misguided policies. Being inconsistent is a greater

personal failing than being consistently, doggedly, disastrously

wrong. Being dorky is more damning than being dictatorial.

We all need to get a grip and quickly. Whatever it has been

traditionally, this Presidential race should not be a personality

contest. I say this as much to myself to myself as I do to you. I

have to snap out of it and remember we are not electing our new best

friend here. We were electing a set of ideologies, cultural

predispositions, policies, practices, and beliefs - many of them

religious - that may literally affect the fate of life on earth. And

one thing I will say for George Bush, he has disabused me of my old

belief that it doesn't really matter who's President.

That's because George Bush was and is a package deal. Along with the

man himself, whatever his personality traits, we got a large cast of

characters who, in aggregate, have been vastly more important than

the hands-off President himself. We got Cheney, Rumsfeld, and

Condoleeza Rice. We got Ashcroft to a fare-the-well. We got

Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle. And, boy, did we ever get Karl Rove.

We got a legion of too-smart-by-half Stepford husbands with flags on

their lapels, fire in their eyes, and God on their side. We got

pharmaceutical companies designing our health care systems, the

prison-industrial complex designing our sentencing schedules, Exxon

and Enron designing energy policy, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group

and the Center for the New American Century designing foreign policy,

Louisiana-Pacific designing forestry policy, and Con-Agra designing

agricultural policy. We got the super-rich and multinationals

designing tax policy to their personal benefit, creationists

designing school curricula, fundamentalists designing scientific

research agenda.

However one feels about the shapes of either John Kerry's jawline or

his vowels, what matters most is the shape of what he would bring

with him to the White House. His masters, his servants, and his

fundamental beliefs will all be very different, whatever his

marketing wizards (all of whom study Rove) are telling him to say now.

More to the point, terrible things have happened during the last four

years that should not be rewarded no matter how we feel about John

Kerry. The war in Iraq alone is unforgivable. While it would be a

wonderful thing to have a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, it

is criminally misguided to think that we could bomb such a thing into

existence. And while it has become a mandatory cliche to say that the

world is safer without Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq, I wouldn't

even say this appears true at present.

Between his ill-conceived military adventures and the billions his

tax cuts have diverted into the pockets of his friends, Bush has

created a deficit that may ultimately bring down the world's economy.

He has started the United States on a path towards oligarchy that,

unchecked, could turn America into a country that makes Mexico look

like Sweden. He is responding to the foreseeable exhaustion of the

world's oil reserves with policies that burn them faster. And as

nearly unprecedented hurricanes whip out of the warming Caribbean, he

has continued to be the primary obstacle to a collective human

response to galloping carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere. He

has taken a good shot at gutting the Bill of Rights, and, with regard

to Moslems, he has largely succeeded.

I won't attempt to repeat the list of his catastrophes here. It's far

too long, and much of it has been enumerated on the Internet already.

We all know it, and yet we continue to occupy ourselves with such

airy trivialities as which candidate looks most "presidential." And

against this backdrop of Bush-driven national emergencies, I've been

allowing John Kerry's accent to diminish my sense of commitment to

his election,

I can't do this any more. Neither can the rest of us who have any

regard for the well-being of our descendents.

Yeah, John Kerry makes a lousy candidate for Prom King. But that

isn't what he's running for.

http://www.eff.org/~barlow/

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This was taken off skypilotclub.com -- An "affiliate" of the Merry Pranksters. The Pranksters are generally credited with initiating the "Psychedilic Movement" back in the '60's. Y'know, the "Tune in, turn on, and drop out" school of thought advanced by Timothy Leary. Anyway, have yourselves a blast.

[Jimmy Leeds]

Kerry's failure to capitalize on the failures of the worst

administration in my lifetime is unfathomable.

I guesst his guy wasn't paying attention when Carter was president.

[Devils731]

"Bush has created a deficit that may ultimately bring down the world's economy. "

I guess this author doesn't care that our deficit is under 4% of our GDP which is about 1/3 of Japans and less than most of Europe. The author doesn't talk about our huge GDP growth though, that part he forgets.

[GA Devil]

Or maybe he was paying attention and just has a different interpretation of that regime than you do.

[Devils731]

Or maybe he was paying attention and just has a different interpretation of that regime than you do.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Those are hard numbers though, he stated a generalization that may be true but the numbers tend to say something different.

-Scott

[GA Devil]

Sorry Scott, was responding to James. But to address your post; yes the deficit is less than 4% of GDP, but it is still a point of major concern. Bush himself stated so during the last debate.

But to say it will bring down the world's economy does appear to be approaching hyperbole.

[Devils731]

I agree, deficits aren't a good thing. Looking now I can see how close our posts are to each other, which is where I got confused.

-Scott