Bone In The Fan

So many choices for President.  So few good ones.

There will be 14 candidates for President on the ballot in Florida. In addition to Obama and McCain, we can choose from the following:

• Gene Amondson: Prohibition Party.  Now I, for one, had no idea that this party even existed.  Didn’t we learn our lesson a few decades ago about this?  Their candidate is a landscape painter.
• Chuck Baldwin: Constitution Party.  I don’t know much about him except that he used to be pretty wired into the Republican party.  And I’m too lazy to look into it.
• Bob Barr: Libertarian Party.  A turncoat, a fraud, or someone who has seen the light, depending on how you look at it.  I’m a Libertarian, but Barr was a monumental social conservative for a long time.  His running mate is a douche.
• James Harris: Socialist Workers Party. Oh please.
• Charles Jay: Boston Tea Party.  Another libertarian party, and a play on words too!  Also a pain in the ass to find on the web, due to their name.  Fully 500 members. Their site is here, if you’re interested.
• Alan Keyes: American Independent Party. Line one of their website: “We Acknowledge the Creator’s Gracious Gifts.” And so on….
• Gloria La Riva: Party of Socialism and Liberation. Because if there’s one thing history has told us, it’s that socialism leads to liberation.  Morons. Their site is now enhanced with 30% more Che!
• Cynthia McKinney: Green Party.  Yawn.  I’ve done my green rants.  Boring.
• Brian Moore: Socialist Party.  As opposed to the Socialist Workers Party and the Party of Socialism and Liberation.
• Ralph Nader: Ecology Party.  You already know how I feel about this stupidhead.
• Thomas Robert Stevens: Objectivist Party.  These guys built their entire party around the writings of Ayn Rand.  What next, the Lion Witch and Wardrobe Pary?
• Gary Nettles (qualified as write-in).  Who cares?

My point being, well, nothing really.  Except that apaprently anyone can get on the ballot here, which actually isn’t such a bad thing (I wonder if they’ll let me nominate my colon.)  As for me, I’m still in the undecided column (I believe it’s too late to get my colon on the ballot) though leaning (again)  towards voting Libertarian.

Look, I want to like Obama, I really do.   He’s a likeable guy.  I think he genuinely cares about doing the right thing.  He’s smart.  I like his ideas about pork (the money kind, not the pig kind - I don’t know how he feels about bacon.) And he might just shake things up in a good way.  And maybe, just maybe the Dems won’t completely fuck everything up in four years.

I don't care how you feel about the guy, this photo looks like a Sears photo gallery shot from 1972. Or like someting you'd find in my high scool year book, taken when we all went to the "No Nukes" concert at Battery Park in 1981. Awful. Even so, he's just so damn LIKEABLE. Plus, his daughter Sasha (in his lap) is WAY cute.

But then I think about his windfall profit tax idea, and his “save jobs from being shipped overseas” rhetoric, and his pro-Mexico/US-wall position, his failure to stand up and say something truthful about the economy right now while encouraging the $700 billion package, and Joe Biden’s creepy metamorphosis into Carrottop, and I think “well, maybe they can.”  Fuck things up I mean.

Not that there aren’t plenty of good things about him too.  But you can figure those things out for yourself.  Try starting with his website.

And while I’m not a huge fan of Barr’s and I actively dislike Root (that’d be Wayne Allyn Root, Barr’s running mate who, as Doug Stanhope points out, spells his middle name like he’s in an 80’s hair band), they aren’t going to win.  So I’m back to thinking that a vote for the Libertarian party is the only way to be heard at all when I say that the government has it’s head up its own ass.  Really far, too.  Like, inhumanly far.

In the end it’s a moot point.  Neither candidate will listen to libertarian ideas, Obama will probably win, and that’ll be that.  But I will say that I’m open to being completely wrong about his policies.  I really hope that he’s everything that the Starbucks baristas, trustafarians and leftist women everywhere believe he will be, by which I mean I hope he makes useful, meaningful changes in Washington, gets our servicemen out of Iraq, starts to restore our International Street Cred (ISC) and gets people interested in the political process again.

If we can just keep him away from gun legislation, protectionist trade policies, windfall profit taxes and the complete socialization of banks and corporations this might not be so bad.  I’m not holding my breath though.

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