I have good and longtime friends who keep voting GOP and seem incapable of learning from their own stupidity. They are decent people, but seem unable to overcome the cognitive dissonance of recognizing how foolish they have been, and therefore continue to be. I have been thinking about what I really want to say to them.
Then Kaina PDX posted this short diary titled My Husband Voted Republican. I started to comment in that diary, but then my comment started to get a bit long, and I realized that perhaps my response would help others in Kaina's and my situation if it were its own diary.
What I want to say to them below the squiggle:
I really can understand why you're voting for Romney. After all, you voted for Bush II in 2004, and I guess there was something about the way that turned out that you didn't like. I assume that maybe, just maybe, you recognize that, as it stands, you voted to RE-elect a President who had already:
1. Ignored months of warnings about a terrorist attack that led to 3,000 American deaths.
2. Invaded a country after fabricating false intelligence claims.
3. Lost many thousand more American lives in that invasion (as well as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis).
4. Ignored the war that sorta made sense (Afghanistan) so that it would fester, cost many additional thousands of US lives and have to be dealt with by his successor.
5. Turned big budget surpluses into huge deficits through giant tax cuts, unfunded wars, and unfunded pharmaceutical benefits.
But perhaps if Bush II had only served one term, he would only have gone down in history as one of the TEN worst of the first 43 Presidents. So I guess you decided that it was VERY important that he be re-elected so he could be recognized by professional historians (as he definitely will be 50 years from now) as THE worst President of the first 43. So you voted to RE-elect him so he could:
1. Ignore the Katrina disaster while many hundreds of people died and hundreds of thousands suffered.
2. Continue economic policies that would feed a huge financial bubble that would result in the first financial crisis in almost 80 years, one from which it would take both the US and the world years to recover.
3. Reduce the US, through incompetent military adventures and through practices that the international community regard as war crimes, to such a level of disrespect abroad that journalists would throw shoes at our head-of-state.
4. Be so universally loathed that it would be many, many years before members of his own political party would dare to be seen with him, or invite him to their conventions. (Even Nixon used to get occasional visits from Reagan!)
5. Continue to ignore, just as he had the warnings, and fail to capture the enemy who actually killed the 3,000 Americans on September 11.
So with that vote on your record, yes, I can see where it's important for you to vote for Romney, because at least he has a sliver (only a sliver, but hey!) of a chance of one day being regarded as worse than Bush II.
And then you will be able to say:
"Yes, I may have voted to RE-elect George W. Bush -- but he was only the NEXT-to-worst President. The worst President of the first 45 Presidents in US history, Mitt Romney, I voted to elect but not RE-elect! So, see? I learned something!"
Or maybe, just maybe, you haven't learned anything at all.