Good reasons not to vote for Bush

1. Campaign Finance Reform: Remember back when he signed McCain-Finegold and all the talking heads said “Hey, this’ll get overturned in the courts”? Well, GWB was an idiot - the SCOTUS upheld this monstrosity. I’m losing much sleep over the ban on soft money - what I do think is a travesty is that they upheld the limitation on non-campaign sponsored issue ads within 60 days of an election. So, say I wanted to take cash out of my savings, go over to Iowa and buy an ad to say “Hey, Cornholios - Joe Lieberman has got the right idea on foreign policy, and he’s a great dancer. Sponsored by the Beer Drinkers for America and Lieberman”, well Justice O’Connor says that that’s not protected speech.

Great, you freakin’ lefties say. The rich shouldn’t be able to control the messages getting out.

Hmmm.

Let’s say that unlike someone we know I left my options in a computer company until, say, 1999, and walked away with a metric butt ton of cash in the bank. Then, let’s say I bought a controlling interest in a radio station in Des Moines, for instance. Now guess what - I’m “the Media”, and I can run programming 24 hours a day, 7 days a week saying that Our Station thinks Joe Lieberman is the Bee’s Kuh-nees right up until the polls close, and that’s editorial content, which remains protected.

So who’s speech has been silenced? Yours and mine, who could come up with twenty or so $K to run an issue ad close to the election without scraping too hard or hitting up too many of our friends and families (Hey, guess what - that’d be a PAC)? Apparently folks rich enough to own media outlets aren’t subject to the “corruption of money” that you and I are.

Limbaugh’s a nut, we all can agree, but even a stopped, obsolete, analog clock is right twice a day. He’s been referring to McCain/Feingold as the “Incumbent Protection Act” since it was proposed way back when, and IMO he’s right. The only people that MFA protects is folks who are already in office, who have almost unlimited access to the media, and who can bring home the people’s bacon.

GWB’s already on the record congratulating the SCOTUS for making a wise decision. Guess that’s since he’s already in office.

By the by, MFA’s ban on soft money hurts the Jackasses more than it hurts the Pachyderms. The DNC’s been far more dependent on large soft money contributions, hence the far more rapid rise of organizations like Move On on the left than on the right. The Republicans are more than happy to suck down hard-money contributions of up to $2K per individual per candidate per election (primary, general, runoff) just like they have since the early-80’s. No wonder GWB’s all over MCA.

2. Idiot Appointees Tom Ridge, secretary of Homeland Security, wants some kind of legal status for the millions of undocumented aliens living in the US. “I’m not saying make them citizens, because they violated the law to get here,” Ridge said. “You determine how you can legalize their presence. Then, as a country, you make a decision that from this day forward … this is the process of entry, and if you violate that process of entry we have the resources to cope with it.”

- Uh, Tom? … Last I checked we HAD a process of entry - that’s why undocumented aliens used to be called “illegal immigrants”, since they’d decided to bypass that process.

Most of the articles I found referred back to RWR’s legalization of 2.7 million illegals back in 1986, and commented that the rate of immigration had almost doubled since then. I’ve just got to wonder if the previous legalization had anything to do with it. I doubt it; I realize that most of the immigrants just want to work, and they do jobs that Americans won’t, or won’t pay for.

But the SoHS saying “Hey, we oughta just legalize everyone who’s already here” sounds like an open invitation for anyone thinking of coming over to hurry up and get ‘feet dry’ as soon as possible. ‘Specially if you’re thinking of, say, committing some act of terrorism. What safer way to be a sleeper than to have paperwork stamped by DoHS allowing you to stay in the country.

(3) Other Crap I’m tired and depressed after writing this, and I haven’t even gotten to Medicare, Steel Tarriffs, etc. I’ve heard bunches of folks theorize that GWB’s strategy is to completely gut the DNC and force them way, way, way to the left, so far that we do go over to a one-party system, essentially.

Look at just the above two issues - MFA appeals to politico types and WASPs (protects power from ‘New Money’), and the immigration amnesty may as well be subtitled “I’d like to buy your vote” en espanol.

My question - what’s the point of having a country if you’ve abandoned your principles?

But there’s no real alternative for folks of my political persuasion (Suppose I might be the only one, but still…). I honestly could see myself voting for Lieberman - he’s not completely out to lunch on entitlements; he’s beat up on the slow decline of western civilization before; he’s a hawk, possibly to the right of GWB on terrorism; and he’s effectively back on the message he’d carried for years before he got tapped to be VeeP nominee.

Posted by jank at December 11, 2003 10:44 PM