John McCain
John McCain hired a lobbyist, Doug Goodyear, whose firm once represented Burma’s repressive regime to manage his GOP convention this summer. Burma (Myanmar) has been strongly condemned by the Sate Department for its human rights record and remains in power today. He is CEO of DCI Group, a consulting firm that earned $3 million last year lobbying for ExxonMobil, General Motors and other clients.
McCain has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests and yet hires a special interest advocate. Much the same way ex-NY Governor Eliot Spitzer ran a campaign on ridding the city of white collar crime and was caught as a client of a high-priced prostitution ring.
He admits the war in Iraq is for oil and then back pedals. Will he have a chance to backpedal while in the presidential office? What ramifications will we see then? Judging from the media, not much.
McCain voted against passage of Martin Luther King as a national holiday and when confronting constituents who wanted the passage he backpedals yet again and said he was wrong.
He, along with John Edwards, authored a Patients’ Bill of Rights in an effort to crack down on the tobacco industry. He said he never back down from legislation to regulate the industry. He has since changed his mind.
He supports the war in Iraq but won’t give soldiers expanded GI Bill benefits because he thinks they will not re-enlist so they can take advantage of the benefits.
The news media has already made its choice by choosing to downplay McCain’s involvement with xenophobic, homophobic, bigoted evangelical John Hagee while serving up a relentless campaign against Obama for his association with Reverend Wright, even two months after Obama dumped him.
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton resorts to dirty politics, lies and scandals in an attempt to win her nomination. She insulted an entire race of people who has been undyingly supportive of her husband by saying that since Obama is black he cannot cut it with hard-working white Americans. She insulted white Americans as well with this poisonous rhetoric, by inferring that most working-class white people are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election.
Bill Clinton did have “sex with that woman” and then lied about it to the voters and investigators.
They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president’s last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket), flatware, carpeting, and so on. In response to the outcry over that, they decided to repay the value of the gifts.
Bill Clinton has been under investigation of drug use, threats against women for testifying to his numerous extra-marital affairs, improper influence in judge selection to hear cases potentially harmful to Clinton, allegations of a cover-up involving the deaths of two teenage boys while Clinton was governor of Arkansas.
She is desperately trying to count votes, from Michigan and Florida, that were knowingly illegally cast and were therefore ruled to be void by her own party chairman.
Hillary constantly tries to smear Obama through associations with controversial people for their questionable activity while she herself was investigated for her actual involvement in the Whitewater Development Corp. affair. Her associations with the type of people she is trying to connect Obama with are well documented.
Barack Obama
Barack Obama is calling for diplomatic solutions to Iraq, a path I have long been supportive of. He has shown me to be a thinking man’s answer to politics as usual.
He was criticized for no longer wearing a lapel pin of the American flag, his response was that wearing it had come to feel like “a substitute for true patriotism”. He is correct, simply ‘showing’ patriotism through the display of some materialistic item does not prove patriotism, actually doing something shows your patriotism.
Obama has tried to get more people involved in the process by not playing dirty politics, by presenting himself as human by admitting to past mistakes, and by acknowledging the rights of people to make their own choices about how they conduct their lives. His honesty and openness to questions about his past has garnered great respect from voters.
His campaign has been one of respect and many voters have taken to it because we are tired of the ugly, dispiriting campaigns that have so defined political races in the past. He is persuading younger voters in record numbers to participate in the process.
I believe he knows that by demonizing his opponent he is actually demonizing himself. It is refreshing to find someone who is willing to shun conventional belief and stand by what voters are searching for, a clean campaign where the actual topics are center stage instead of what the other person did to or for whom.
How his demeanor will be taken in Washington as president is yet to be seen, and I don’t foresee him as able to come out of it without all the good being boiled out of him. Which is too bad.
No Vote
This has long been an alternative to choosing between the ‘lesser of two evils’ that has lead to widespread apathy among voters in this country.
I don’t want to have any part of putting another George W. Bush into office and I am tired of rich, old, white men thinking they have a monopoly on power in this country.
I don’t want to be a party to endorsing dirty politics as a viable and acceptable tool for campaigning. It’s high time we prove that gender does not dictate leadership ability, but this woman is bad for this nation. She has way too much dirty laundry and has proven too many times that she will sink to any devious, underhanded method to get her way, and I don’t believe there is enough room in her heart to put America’s best interest ahead of hers.
It is also high time we show the rest of the world that America’s race relations has come far enough that a persons race has no connection as to ability to be commander in chief. But I believe that anyone who thinks they can survive unscathed from participating in the partisan, scandal-racked, special-interest-backed political arena of the federal government without succumbing to its temptations while being looked back upon as a great president is truly naïve.
We either flip a coin or don’t participate. What are you going to do?
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