Kept me busy for a while earlier!
"Deserve's Got Nothin' To Do With It
My name is Edgar J. Steele.
Voting. What a joke. Like voting makes a difference.
First off, we never get any really viable candidates for any office. Seriously, now - Obama and McCain are the best that America has to offer? The best? Hell, I can think of any number of people within a 5-minute drive who would be more honest, honorable and thoughtful as President. Certainly, almost as experienced as Obama and qualified as McCain. I'll bet you can, too. So, how did we get saddled, yet again, with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum?
Seems like Americanus Boobus would notice that the game is rigged, but the vast majority of us never do. You can fool most of the people all of the time, it seems.
Like Charlie Brown every Fall, trusting Lucy to hold the football while he kicks it (she always pulls it back at the last possible moment, so that Charlie Brown falls in a heap from his vain effort), once again I put my support behind a candidate: Ron Paul. Once again, it was a total waste of time and money.
Yes, I believe that Ron Paul was the best of a fairly vapid field and, yes, I believe that Ron Paul would make a good President. In fact, I believed more than Ron Paul himself that we could make him the President. Of course, neither the Powers That Be (PTB) nor the Main-Stream Media (MSM) would allow it. You saw how he was marginalized and neutralized at every turn. It didn't help that he turned out to be a one-note Johnny (albeit the correct note). Nor did his inarticulate responses to so many "debate" questions and challenges help. Nor did his shifty-eyed demeanor and squeaky voice reassure us. Pity.
We Deserved to Win
I encouraged others to support Ron Paul and the response was magnificent. Thank you. I felt I had to make one, last try at working within the system to save America. I feared it was foredoomed, just as did Ron Paul from Day 1, but we had to try, just like good ol' trusting Charlie Brown. We deserved to win. We deserved to win and that counts for something, doesn't it?
However, we have learned that, in the immortal words of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, as he stared down the barrel of his rifle at the crooked sheriff, prostrate on the saloon floor and protesting that he didn't deserve to die: "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."
To those who keep sending around emails explaining how, at the convention, Ron Paul somehow will ensnare enough delegates to receive the Republican nomination, I say: get over it.
To Ron Paul, to whom my family contributed hundreds of dollars we could ill afford to spare, I say: I want a refund. We gave you that money to campaign and challenge illegal vote tampering. Despite manifest rigging in the very first primary (New Hampshire), you chose not to raise a legal challenge - you chose to "take the high road." Time and again, you have ignored patently illegal rigging and tampering. We've all seen how that approach has worked out for you.
You didn't even spend all the money we gave you in campaigning, but held back millions of dollars that you still hold, preferring to spend it on some sort of splinter effort to "influence the outcome." True winners influence the outcome by winning. We contributed to help you win, not simply to influence the outcome.
Too McPainful
Having rapped both Obama and Hillary, I suppose that soon I must do a piece about the traitorous McCain, the third liberal running for President this year. Not today, though. It's just too much pain to contemplate McCain's shortcomings so close to Independence Day.
The biggest problem McCain confronts is the guy sitting in the Oval Office right now - the guy with the worst public-approval ratings in history (worse than Nixon, even). McCain's a Republican, too, and obviously the second coming of George W. Bush.
Just as the Republicans got thrown out of Congress at the last mid-term election (for all the good that did us), I expect them to be thrown out of the Executive Branch at the upcoming election. If we're lucky, the Democrats might get thrown out of Congress, too, not that it really matters. The real problem with America's two-party system is that both can't ever seem to lose.
The Lesser of Two Evils
Yet again, I hear many tuning up to vote for whomever they perceive to be "the lesser of two evils," as though that is some sort of conscientious and informed method of selection. They're both evil, you morons! If Bush the lesser taught us anything, it is what a crapshoot that sort of thinking can produce.
Yet, here they go again - voting against Obama because of his anti-gun stance or hyper-liberal bias or, incredibly enough, due to his skin color, the very least intelligent criterion upon which to evaluate a member of another race (and exactly what race is it, of which Obama is a member, incidentally?) or voting against McCain because he wants us to stay in Iraq, shredding our children for another hundred years, needs be.
Yes, there are third parties, notable among them the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party. Do you even know who their nominees are? I didn't think so. So much for third parties.
Vote Yes on No
That leaves us with choosing between voting selectively and not voting altogether. We should vote, if for no other reason than to be able to go into that polling booth and vote against every, single incumbent in every, single office on the ballot except President, perhaps. Write in Mickey Mouse or Madonna? Don't give them an excuse to invalidate your entire ballot. Simply don't vote for President. Vote against all incumbents. Vote against all propositions. Vote a resounding No on everything this year. Everything except President, of course. To the Presidency, offer only your refusal to play along.
New America. An idea whose time has come.My name is Edgar J. Steele. Thanks for listening. Please visit my web site, www.ConspiracyPenPal.com, for other messages just like this one.
Copyright ©2008, Edgar J. Steele
http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/rants/deserve.htmHere are a couple more posts to read:
"Meet the war criminal and traitor who will be..."
"VIDEO: 9-11 False Flag Operation Conspiracy"
"OPPOSITION TO INVASION OF IRAQ BASED ON EMOTION OR..."
And read once you've come back here.
You will come back here, right?
(Blogger understands getting lost on that site today)
"Keeping Count (When Ours Goes Down, Theirs Goes Up)
Dave Lindorff
Celeste Zapalla, the Gold Star mother of an early casualty in America's invasion of Iraq who lost her son when he was doing guard duty during a fraudulent "search" for alleged WMDs in Iraq, was speaking from the heart when she told a group of antiwar demonstrators at Philadelphia's Independence Mall Saturday that she was grateful no American troops had been killed during the past week in Iraq.
Her concern for the troops' well-being is understandable.
But left unsaid is that the lower US casualty figures in Iraq are coming at the expense of much higher civilian casualties. This is even more true in Afghanistan, where the war is heating up.
The reason for this ugly calculus is that in order to keep politically damaging US casualties as low as possible, the US military and the Bush/Cheney administration that gives the generals their marching orders, are resorting increasingly to the use of air power--bombs and rockets and remote controlled, missile-equipped Predator drone aircraft--to attack suspected militant targets.
Case in point--the 22 people the BBC reports were killed in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province yesterday in a US missile strike on what turns out to have been a wedding procession. According to reports from local Afghan police and other officials quoted in the BBC story, 19 of the victims of this horrific attack were women and children.
This slaughter--which US military authorities, following their standard MO, are denying, claiming that those killed were "militants"-- follows an earlier one Friday in Afghanistan, in which a missile fired from a US helicopter killed 15 people, all civilians.
It has reached a point that in Afghanistan, the US and its NATO allies (thought primarily the US, since most NATO forces are not in front-line combat roles, and are not conducting most of the air strikes) are killing far more Afghan civilians than are the Taliban and their allies in the country.
The same thing is true in Iraq, where the on-the-ground combat role of US forces is being scaled back, while the use of air power is being ramped up.
The very idea of conducting an "occupation" via airpower is fundamentally criminal in nature, since there is simply no way that people operating at command centers and computer terminals--sometimes in the case of Predator drones, terminals that are actually situated in the US!--can make accurate determinations about who the target is, and, equally importantly, how many innocent civilians may be in the immediate vicinity of a strike.
We cannot celebrate the reduction in US casualties if they are coming at the expense of innocent civilians (and I know that this was not Ms. Zapalla's intent, either).
The same strategy of killing from the air was adopted in the later years of the Vietnam War. It wasn't as successful at reducing US casualties, because in Vietnam, US forces were confronting a large, well organized military force, and had to confront them on the ground, but it was successful at killing innocent Vietnamese, as well as people in Cambodia and Laos, who were dying at a more prodigious rate towards the end of that conflict than in its earlier years, thanks to indiscriminate US bombardment.
The same thing is happening now in America's current imperialist wars.
At the Independence Mall demonstration, organized by the venerable Brandywine Peace Community, there was a somber memorial made to America’s dead in Iraq: a black cloth on which was painted the number 4000 in large white numerals. Several blood-red long-stemmed roses were laid upon the cloth. But there should have been a second black cloth also strewn with roses, on which should have been painted the number 1.2 million—the estimated number of innocent Iraqis killed in America’s invasion and occupation of their country. (I don’t mean to criticize either Celeste or Brandywine here, and certainly the Iraqi and Afghani deaths were mentioned by speakers at the event.)
We in the anti-war movement need to make certain that we do not allow the issue to be narrowly focussed on protecting American troops. We need to continually make the point that it is criminal for America's military forces to be slaughtering innocent Iraqis and Afghanis.
