2004 election ramblings
I haven't posted anything new in this Livejournal in a long time. Mostly, I've been using my LJ account to post replies to other people's journal entries.
This year I've been more politically conscious than most. What I'm about to say will probably alienate whatever friends I have left, but since I haven't posted anything since 'The Passion of the Christ' was released, probably no one is going to read this anyway so I might as well say anything I want to.
First off, I am greatly disappointed that 51 percent of the voters actually voted for George W. Bush. At the urging of my father (a longtime Republican voter), I gave Bush a chance. I even gave the war in Iraq a chance, even though I felt then (and I feel now) that it was an incredibly bad idea to go making war on Saddam when Osama bin Laden had still not been brought to justice (dead or alive). Despite what the Bush administration may have claimed to the contrary, Iraq and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and did not really have that much of a connection with Al Qaeda.
As for Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, I had my doubts, but it is very difficult to prove a negative. Really, one would have to search every inch of Iraq above and below ground to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Iraq did not possess said weapons, and since we live in a world that doesn't have a Superman whom we could send to scan the whole country with his X-Ray vision, that's more than a little hard to do.
So I gave Bush the benefit of a doubt, despite the fact that he rushed the nation into war and proceeded to get a whole bunch of other nations upset at the US in the process. When Saddam was captured and people were predicting Osama would be next, I thought maybe this would work out after all. Maybe the US would improve its relations with the Arab world, and maybe, just maybe, conditions in Iraq would improve.
That was overly optimistic. The situation in Iraq became increasingly chaotic in the following months, the body count of innocent Iraqi civillians continued to rise, and when the Abu Ghraib story broke, it became clear that the US no longer had the moral high ground in this situation. The US was now, in the eyes of many parts of the world, the bad guy. WE were the bad guys, not just Bush, because people all over the world tend to generalize (Columnist Charley Reese has an excellent column on this mindset titled
The Persistance of Bigotry.) Just as Japanese and Germans were treated with hostility during and after World War II, so would Americans be treated by many people in foreign countries. Not for something they personally did, but for atrocities troops and world leaders who claimed to be representing them committed.
I don't like being associated with 'the bad guys'. It's not a pleasant feeling.
Any respect I may have had toward the Bush administration was gone after Abu Ghraib. By not caring what the rest of the world thought about the US, the Bush administration has made further terrorist attacks even more likely. In a 'war on terror' (which can't be a real war since 'terror' is an abstract concept and not a country or a specific terrorist group such as Al Qaeda. All it can be is a declaration of 'zero tolerance' on terrorism, which should go for ANY kind of terrorism, not just Al Qaeda's brand), making more people mad at the US is counter-productive. I'm not a political pundit, and I can't even claim to be an expert on foreign policy, but even I know
that.
Furthermore, the erosion of our civil liberties over the past years scares me. The government can now declare anyone an 'enemy combatant' and hold them indefinately in violation of their Constitutional rights to a lawyer or a fair trial (indeed, people can be held without any charges being filed). Despite Benjamin Franklin's statement that those who would give up some of their liberties to obtain temporary safety deserving neither liberty nor safety, we find there are plenty of people willing to do just that.
On to John Kerry. I had no delusions that he would stabilize the situation in Iraq. Unlike the creator of
Bushgame., I did not really believe that Kerry could (or even would) do much to defeat America's new image of being greedy, arrogant, and imperialistic. But there was always the possibility that he MIGHT be slightly better than Bush. Under his administration, Osama bin Laden might be brought to justice, and maybe the US might improve its relations with its former allies. But those are 'mights' and 'maybes' now, and we'll never really know if things would have been better or not.
And that's the problem with this election in a nutshell. There was really no one to really get behind. Both candidates were for the war in Iraq; their only differences on that subject were the timing of the war and how it was being conducted. Both candidates believed that the way to defeat terrorism was to just hunt down terrorists and kill them without even considering the root causes of terrorism -- they would be continuing to go after the symptoms instead of the disease. Really, their only MAJOR differences were on domestic issues like abortion and gay marriage.
I've long been told that elections in the US's two-party system are choosing the lesser of two evils. I've never believed that as strongly as I do now. Tom Lehrer said in an interview on the Dr. Demento show that one of the reasons he gave up satire was because he started to see both sides of the issues -- and they're both wrong. He said that where there used to be good guys and bad guys, these days there are bad guys and slightly better guys.
I let time get away from me before I could register to vote, but in all honesty, I don't know if I would have voted for Kerry because I felt that in this case he was the 'slightly better guy', or voted for a third party candidate to protest against the two-party system.
I DO know that I wouldn't have voted for Bush, because I feel he has done our country a lot more harm than good. Really, the only reason to vote for him that I could find was that 'it's better the devil you know than the devil you don't know'. I suspect a lot of people who don't like what's happened to this country under Bush voted for him anyway for precisely that reason. Am I wrong? Were there other, more valid reasons to vote for him? (And no, religious beliefs about abortion and gay marriage don't count -- I won't go into my views on those here because this post is already long enough).
Still, I am upset and disappointed that Bush won. The Bush administration's policies scare me, and so does Bush's refusal to listen to other points of view. But, barring some sort of disaster or major scandal (such as one similiar to that which befell the Catholic Church two years ago), we're stuck with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest for the next four years. And I'm afraid things are going to get worse before they get better.
Current Mood: 
sad ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
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