Ugh. I had been putting off facing the 2006 ballot, and for good reason. God, what a depressing pack of losers. I can feel the idealism shrivel and crumple up inside just looking at their campaign websites.
I have more or less resigned myself to the pragmatic goal of balancing out the filthy, stinking Republicans in power by voting for their opposition. Unfortunately, at least in most races this means I face the repugnant task of voting for the filthy, stinking Democrats instead. I have visions of my arm spontaneously rebelling and throttling me in the polling booth before I can pull the lever.
True, the Pennsylvania Libertarian Party has fielded a few candidates. Tom Martin, running against Rick “butt-smear” Santorum seems agreeable enough, despite having a campaign website hosted on his AOL account, and using the <BLINK> tag on said campaign site. He’s going to hell for the latter offense, but it’s not enough to withhold my vote over. Ron Satz, on the other hand, has a campaign website link which leads to some software company’s homepage, and then to an error message telling me I have to turn Javascript on. Sorry, dude. I cut a lot of slack for candidates running for office as libertarians – hey, at least they’re running. All I ask is that they understand the force-or-fraud principle and that they be sober enough to stand up for their swearing-in. But if you can’t be bothered to have your 8-year-old kid put together a MySpace page telling me what you stand for, I can’t be bothered to write your name in.
That’s a total of one libertarian to vote for in my district. So, one vote I can make with my conscience clear. Then there’s the usual smattering of Green party nutcases (and I mean that in the nicest possible way; I actually know one of them and he’s a nice guy). For the rest it looks like it’s gonna have to be the Other Evil right down the board.
I don’t even get the solace of believing I’m voting for the lesser evil. These guys stand for values I find just as morally reprehensible as those of the Republicans I hope they will replace. And I believe their relatively corruption-free image has more to do with lack of opportunity than with any innately superior moral fiber.
No, this is about creating gridlock, pure and simple. A cynical, uninspiring goal for a cynical and uninspired time.
God, it’s depressing.
I’m relatively lucky…
The choice for me is actually for a couple of people that I do like (i.e. Tammy Baldwin) and for some democrats that are signficantly better than the republican candidates.. i.e. they supprot stem cell research, aren’t threatening to take away not only abortion, but also birth control, and don’t make campaign promises of supporting education and complaining about rising tuition while having voted to cut student loan amounts and been part of a party that dramatically cut state funding to the university forcing them to raise its tuition so much…
So I’m relatively lucky…
My parents, on the other hand, are in Illinois, where the choice is between seriously corrupt democrats and equally corrupt republicans who associate themselves with Bush…
Basically, I hope the dems win only so that the Republicans can do some house cleaning.. and then we can do the same with the dems…
Maybe both of the parties will break up in the next couple of years…
One can hope..
fuck…
obviously.. I fucked up the formatting.. please excuse…