I have to say I'm not neutral. I HATED Bush and what I considered his neo-fascist minions. I hated even more that so many people in my area of rural Va were ready to back him all the way. I wanted to say to them, 'I am a PATRIOT and I RESENT what YOU PEOPLE have done to MY COUNTRY and I consider it my DUTY to turn you and yours to FERTILIZER in your FRONT YARD.' I was beyond partisan. I was about ready to kill. I told more than one person that if I ever saw a Republican poaching on my land I would sieze the opportunity to put them in a shallow grave for The Cause.
I cannot say how happy I was when Obama got elected. I expected to be let down. But what has actually happened has caused me to rethink things going all the way back to 2000.
My main prob with Repubs was what I perceived as their Fascism, which I defined as the belief that the Military Industrial Complex really ought to be in charge of the country, along with Wall St. 911, IMHO, was an inside job, and for seven years it seemed Bush and Bin Laden did a kind of tag-team to convince us all that we could never ever be safe from Terrorism, and therefore the Constitution just had to go. Their coordination could not have been accidental. Whenever Bin Laden's people released a tape to Al Jazeera, Bush's people were there to authenticate it as Definitely Him almost before they'd had time to hear it. Why? if he was really the enemy, the thing to do would be to cast doubt on all communications, convince Bin Laden he had to come out more in the open and prove he was still alive. I'd have announced he was probably dead in about 2002, and forced them to try to prove he was alive and not a double. Even the Official Story says that Al Qeda grew out of joint US/Saudi/Pakistani intelligence ops that they claim 'went rogue' or some such. WHat if they never went rogue, and were still however tenuously connected with those intelligence services? And that's if nobody was lying. 911 seemed more like a coup d'etat by military police wing nuts than an attack from outside. It reminded me of nothing so much as the Reichstag Fire. (And note that Hitler started out as a German Military Intelligence agent infiltrating the DAP, or German Workers Party.)
A friend asked what I thought of the financial bail out, and I said it was the bankers and the Republicans trying to steal everything they hadn't stolen already, as part of their treasonous agenda of bankrupting the Fed Govt so that it could be drowned in a bathtub, their stated aim. Shameful naked theft, no more no less.
So you can imagine the joy I felt when Obama won and took office. I don't think any other two presidents in American history were ever so different. Bush was as much of a conservative redneck evangelical as one could be and get elected. Everything he did was aimed at increasing the power, prestige and budgets of the Military Industrial Police Prison complex. Environmental laws, civil rights laws, consumer protection laws were flagrantly flaunted, and individual bureacrats who tried to do their jobs were nakedly fired for it. Obama was and is the most progressive 'liberal' intellectual pres to be elected, maybe since Thomas Jefferson. (Did he bring Sally to the White House? I wonder...) As different from Bush as one could possibly be, in the campaign it seemed his approach to all major issues was just the polar opposite of what Bush had done.
It was almost like a controled experiment in seeing how much change could be wrought when a Genius president had a big mandate and the non-fascist party had both houses. I was thinking back to the Reagan years, and how he parleyed his 'mandate' into revolutionary changes that were not undone under Clinton...
I expected that Obama would run into opposition, maybe even get shot at, but I never expected him to just lay down and adopt identical policies and even identical team members to Bush on the main issues of the wars and the economy. What happened? Did Wesley Clark get him alone and tell him that if he didn't just give the pentagon whatever it wanted he'd be killed? That's all I can figure. The economic policy simply underscores what the Real Left has been saying for a century or more, that it doesn't matter which party gets elected -- The orders come from Wall St.
I am now convinced that the last election and politics in general are simply places where revolutionary potential can waste its energy and accomplish nothing of substance. We all got so excited about electing Obama Instead Of bringing the thieves and war criminals of the previous regime to any kind of justice, and Instead Of finding out the truth about 911.
I am now convinced that if Gore/Liebermann had won in 2000, the 911 consiracy would have gone ahead, with Liebermann in the Cheney role, and Gore as the clueless southerner whose friends defended him by claiming he didn't really know what he'd ordered. Like Coke and Pepsi, the Reps and Dems both have an interest in convincing people there is a difference, the difference matters, and that we ought to drink their poison, despite tooth decay, obesity, and diabetes. But I say it's all hype. I say all this partisan Sturm and Drang that so many of us take so seriously is nothing more than professional wrestling for the literate. It's all a show: they don't really disagree, and they aren't even really fighting, and the one certainty is that nothing is ever going to change for the better as long as these people are pretending to wield power.
The people who wield real power don't let anyone vote about it. They use their power to get more power and to crush opposition. In the rare instances where some elected 'public servant' actually opposes what they say, some 'lone nut' kills them, or their plane blows up inexplicably, or the pictures of their sexual indiscressions get onto the internet, whatever. The real powers don't have to make examples of too many of our souless scum sucking elected officials to cow the rest into ineffectiveness. Nothing will stop them other than Patriots Prepared to take action as ruthless and decisive as they are. That's what it takes to be a real player in this world. All this political party BS is just a game.