With Mitt Romney's super-PAC limo now on cruise control to victory at the GOP convention, voters are left with only two reasons to vote against Barack Obama: Either they are desperate to return a white man to the White House or they feel strongly that it is time to break the glass ceiling denying Mormons the presidency.
Out of a sense of tolerance I could cotton to the latter -- heck, why should the bizarre beliefs of Romney's church be a deal breaker? I'm hoping for a strong Jewish contender someday and wouldn't like her burdened with defending Old Testament claptrap.
The problem in this mind-numbing Republican primary season is that the campaign has exposed Romney as not just another white male Mormon like some of the fairly reasonable senators who have represented Utah. Or like Romney's own father, George, at one time the governor of Michigan. No, this Romney is now widely regarded as the vulture capitalist he is, a politician who is a say-and-do-anything opportunist with no moral limits on his outsized ambitions.
Nothing is sacred to the former Massachusetts governor, not even his own signature health plan that he sold to that state's voters as the standard for rational government decision-making as regards the deep problems faced by our economy. The weaknesses of what Romney and the GOP deride as Obamacare have been all too obvious in the plan Romney touted in Massachusetts -- a mandate to sign up without the cost restraints that a single-payer government program would offer. Now, with a new national plan from Rep. Paul Ryan emerging from the U.S. House, Romney and the Republican Party generally seek to compound that error by undermining Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that offer at least a modicum of cost control. Instead, the candidate and his fellow Republicans would turn consumers over completely to the tender mercies of for-profit insurers.
The justification for gutting what little remains of enlightened government programs to aid the vulnerable is, of course, the dreaded federal deficit. (Lest we forget, seniors were foremost among the vulnerable until the arrival of the programs now under attack.) What is so outrageously hypocritical about the proposals from both Romney and Ryan is that they do not touch, and indeed would further open, the spending spigot that caused all of the red ink following President Bill Clinton's budget-balancing act.
Both Romney and Ryan want to increase President George W. Bush's tax breaks for the wealthy, which seriously cut revenues while treating as sacrosanct the Cold War levels in military spending that Bush put in place in a wildly irrational response to the 9/11 attacks. This week Ryan announced that defense spending is off-limits, and Romney has campaigned for an increase in what represents more than 40 percent of the non-mandated federal budget.
I can't wait for the moment in a presidential debate when Romney talks about the need for even more advanced U.S. weaponry to counter the emerging military threat from Communist China and Obama ever so coolly points out that Bain Capital, the company that Romney co-founded, has been supplying those Red tyrants with surveillance equipment to better monitor their citizenry.
With Ron Paul's fortunes as a presidential candidate declining, there is no pressure on GOP leaders to link a withdrawal from the imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan with a reduced federal handout to the military-industrial complex. Nor will the Republican leadership confront the party's responsibility for the nation's economic collapse, the subsequent loss in tax revenues, and the Fed and Treasury policies that bailed out the Wall Street charlatans who invented this meltdown.
Instead of reining in Wall Street greed, the GOP is demanding a reversal of even the tepid efforts of the Obama administration to hold the financial industry accountable to honest business practices. And, at a time when the largest multinational companies have shifted jobs and profits abroad, the GOP stands for rewarding that betrayal of American workers by eliminating all taxes on overseas corporate profits.
The pity in all this is that a legitimate critique of the Obama record -- present to some degree in the Paul dissection of the president's war policy and his continuation of the Bush Wall Street bailout strategy -- will not be heard in the general election debate. Instead, on the one hand, we will have Obama offering clever-sounding arguments for establishment policies that fail to deal with high unemployment, a brutal level of housing foreclosures and sharpening income inequality. And on the other hand there will be a Republican Party so steeped in the ethos of greed, racism and war-mongering that it would leave even Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, were they alive, with no choice but to vote for Obama as the lesser evil.
To enjoy fair democracy we must eliminate the bribery that is our political system.
Do this and our debates will mean something instead of wasting our time fighting each other.
Think your ideas are the best for our country to follow?
Prove it!
Make sure your vote has more value than a dollar and let the votes and ideas fall where they may.
Pay for campaigns equally. Pay politicians equally. Enjoy democracy equally.
People only work for those who pay them. You only get what you pay for.
1- An African American who they believe is a Muslim, a person not born in America, a Socialist; plus a 60-something, Catholic man from a blue- collar family.
2- A Mormon, plastic "Richie Rich", $250mm man, Wall Street titan, unable to get in touch with middle class Americans; plus an Hispanic kid whose parents were born in a foreign country, speaks that Spanish language they hate, has a very "Mexican-sounding" name and at different times has been Catholic, then Mormon, then Catholic and now worships at a Christian church.
Yes, no question about it, turnout will be very low this November.
Now he has a contender. Barack Obama.
Wilson signed the sedition acts and the espionage act. He had people thrown in prison for speaking out against WW1.
Obama ignored a federal judge's ruling on his drilling ban. He entered into an international treaty (without Senate approval) allowing foreign law enforcement officials to detain Americans on American soil on suspicion of violating foreign copyright laws. He sent American forces to war in Libya, without congressional approval, citing a UN resolution as giving him the authority to do so. Never-mind that article 43 of the UN charter states that a member nation must follow its constitutional process to commit forces. He signed an executive order allowing him to seize natural resources from private citizens for use by the state. He signed the NDAA which allows him to imprison Americans in a military facility indefinitely without due process. He signed the FAA reauthorization act which allows the feds to fly drones over American cities starting in 2014. He signed a four year extension to the Patriot Act.
Do I need to go on?
A more perfect candidate does not exist right now.
Personal Liberty. That means to be free to do what you will as long as it is within the law.
End the wars, close the bases and bring our troops home to protect our border. They will also spend wages at home. Big boost for economy.
End the drug war and release non-violent offenders.
Repeal NDAA, healthcare mandate and Patriot Act.
Take on the Fed and print LAWFUL MONEY. Not borrow money from banking cabal.
Our troops love him. They held a march for him in DC. Paul gets 3x more support than all candidates combined.
The elite owned news ignores him.
The Gop establishment are destroying themselves trying to stop him. They are rigging elections.
The 1% are scared to death of this man.
Please support Ron Paul.
He is running for us. That is the only reason.
Hit the nail on the head there.
Obama 2012 Disappointing is better than Terrible.
Hopefully after Obama I'll never have to cast a vote for a President that does not support gay marriage.
And the 'safety net' for the poor and the elderly? The middle class could sure use a safety net, and instead, they pay twice the tax percentage of Romney to provide this net to others, while often going without for their own.