My vote? It’s the revulsion, stupid
Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 05:57:04 PM PDT
Two weeks ago, I changed my voter registration from Independent to Democrat to facilitate voting in the California Primary. I voted this morning and I’ve been wishing someone would ask me about it all day. A business meeting this afternoon had me walking by the California Secretary of State’s office and there were six satellite news trucks already setting up so that pundits could breathlessly report the ponderous progress of counting California's votes later tonight... but no one with a microphone seemed evident and no one probably wanted to talk to me anyway.
I fantasized about my 60 seconds of fame if some carefully coiffed talking head from one of the networks had happened to ask me about the election and my comments were sufficiently interesting to get into the news cycle. It would never happen, but I can dream...
Talking head: ...and you sir, did you vote today?
Me: Yes. I suspect it was one of the most significant votes of my life.
Talking head: May I ask whom you supported?
Me: The non-Republicans
Talking head: Er... ah, so... you are a Democrat?
Me: Not really. I’m more of a disenfranchised moderate. While I resonate with Progressives on many issues, I’m a moderate and a Libertarian. I like to make sure we can afford the good things we want government to do.
Talking head: What inspired you to get off the fence and into the Democrats' camp for this election: the historic opportunity to vote for a woman or the unprecedented opportunity to vote for a "person of color"?
Me: I was inspired by shame and disgust of the last seven years. We were attacked by a handful of fanatics wielding box cutters who killed 3,000 people while the President of the United States read a children’s book to an elementary school class, we were mislead into a war of choice with a country uninvolved in the attack, taxes were cut in time of war resulting in incomprehensible deficits we will be paying off for the rest of my lifetime, the US Justice Department has been implicated in efforts to suppress voting by the opposition party, an Attorney General of the United States is on record as opining that Geneva Convention limitations on questioning prisoners are "quaint", the Vice President of the United States and his staff revealed the identify of a covert CIA operative for political purposes, the government has engaged in illegal spying on its citizens after deciding that the minimal constraints of the FISA law were too onerous, the right of habeus corpus has been suspended for hundreds of people, my country has subjected both US citizens and foreign nationals to torture, whisked them away to secret prisons, or held them in no-man’s land at Guantanamo Bay for years without benefit of legal representation. To see my homeland and its guiding principles become so corrupted so quickly has been shocking and disgusting. I AM voting for change... and
I would vote for an honest, non-Republican illegal immigrant atheist gay transvestite who was a bigamist involved in both a gay AND heterosexual marriage if I thought it might help get my country back on track
toward pursuing its basic principles: that people have inalienable rights and that government is supposed to serve and represent its people.
It’s not the economy, stupid.
It’s not gay marriage, stupid.
It’s not illegal immigration, stupid.
It’s not about sex, gender, race, or religion, stupid.
It’s about the revolting, corrupt, and dysfunctional government that has us fighting a war of choice against people who never attacked us and has decided that its prerogatives outweigh the rights of its people. As a veteran and citizen I am deeply ashamed of my government's behavior. I see my vote today as possibly the last peaceful opportunity to change the disgusting course our government has chosen.. and I sincerely hope that I am not alone and that my vote is counted.
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