Thinking about the Election

[candlelight1228]

I have been watching the Primaries much more closely in the last couple weeks since reading Lee Iaccoca's book, "Where have all the Leaders Gone?". (I would highly recommend that book.) I suppose it helps that I get paid to watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report everyday. Either way the mixture has pushed me to pay closer attention. I have

Comments

[obsidian468]

I actually just commented on another friend's post with the same topic, but a slightly different scope/point. It's good to see that my peers/friends are very aware of the election. We all need to be.

As I see it right now, with the primary results so far and the state of the nation in general (specifically public opinion of the candidates), I think the general election will likely be between McCain and Obama. Hillary has lost a lot of points with the Democrats lately with the constant attacks on Obama by both Hillary and Bill. Hillary has proven herself to be a sore loser, and willing to do anything to win. This is not the kind of person we need in the White House. I think many voters see that.

Unfortunately, my preferred candidate (being a registered Libertarian myself), Ron Paul, has no shot of winning. He's simply too radical. However, he is the only candidate to state the one thing that would make me vote for a candidate: he wants to repeal the Patriot Act and disband Homeland Security/TSA (as well as essentially remove any government agency/act/law implemented since the 1790s. Basically, he wants to hit the reset button).

Fact is though, how much does your vote actually count? There was proof of fraud in the 2000 election. There was proof of fraud/rigged votes in the 2004 election (sure, the proof didn't come out until 2007, but the key witness [a former programmer for Diebold, who designed, but refused to implement code that would easily rig voting results in the new Diebold voting machines, and was fired because of this] was too scared to come forward until then). There's already been accusations of fraud in the 2008 primaries.

Honestly, I'm torn between voting for one of the two frontrunners, or writing in a vote for either Ron Paul, Stephen Colbert, or Cthulu.

[hex61]

Ron Paul didn't impress me much. There were a lot of things he said which would be great accomplishments - and a lot of other things that seemed worse than isolationist and spun for a naive audience to latch on to.

[obsidian468]

I hate to use the phrase, "toeing the party line", but this is exactly what Ron Paul has done. He is a Libertarian at heart. He ran in 1988 as a Libertarian. He is only running Republican this year as he wanted more of a fighting chance. He really is still a Libertarian.

At the most basic level, the Libertarian party is about stripping down the government so far that the only role they play is national defense (not offense as the Bush administration of the past 8 years would have you believe), peacekeeping (with many roles delegated to the state/local governments), and a possibility for educational involvement.

Essentially, Libertarians want to strip the role of a Federal government to the role they had shortly after the Declaration of Independence, when the Federal government swore to keep out of the day-to-day lives of Americans.

To put it at its most base level, Ron Paul wants to hit the reset button.

[candlelight1228]

You know I didn't realise that that's how Ron Paul thought. I admit I didn't give him much of a chance to persuade me one way or the other on supporting him. There was never much that really grabbed me about him. Either way though in all honesty that would be far to far in the other direction in my opinion. There's a fine line somewhere in the middle.