It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I will be voting for Obama next Tuesday. My conservative friends back in Clarence, NY all think I am a raging liberal, which I am not, mostly because I never bought into the GOP history of the town we grew up in. In fact, I find both parties mostly repulsive and incompetent, but the GOP ideas are far more backward, dangerous, and threatening to liberty and equality in this country. I thought I would lay out some specifics on why I am voting for Obama.....which mostly boils down to "Because he is not a Republican!".
ECONOMICS
Neither party has any history of doing anything sensible when it comes to economics, and I don't expect them to start now. The Democrats are addicted to throwing money at problems, then refusing to stop or change programs that are no longer workable. The GOP is addicted to tax cuts, to the extent that they will gladly let education, health care, and infrastructure die in the name of Grover Norquist purity. If Romney were serious about cutting tax rates and doing away with ALL deductions, he would be worth paying attention to. However, he has refused to specify which deductions he would have to kill, because the only way his plan is revenue neutral, as he claims, is if he does away with tax-free health insurance from employers, and with the mortgage interest deductions. This is a good idea, but this waffling weenie does not have the guts to either say or do this job.
My fear is that a Romney presidency would allow too many of the dangerously destructive economic ideas of the right to become reality. As a society, we must invest in human capital, and we must have infrastructure that allows us to conduct business, and Obama is correct when he said "You didn't build that". Romney spent a full year sucking up the right wing nuts in his party who think tax cuts are more important than good roads and bridges, and these guys are just wrong. In addition, Romney's main economic advisers are the same guys, Hubbard and Mankiw, who worked for W., and we know what an economic miracle they produced.
Certainly, we need to deal with the deficit, particularly the ticking bomb of future entitlements. Simpson-Bowles was a good start but Ryan voted against it, and Obama ignored it, and Romney had taken every position under the sun. So, on economics both candidates get a fail from me!
IMMIGRATION
Here is the sensible way that immigration should be handled: As a free market issue. Neither party wants to do that. The GOP's desire to run all immigrants back to where they came from is clearly based in the underlying racism of the party, particularly the Tea Party. Meanwhile Obama has deported more people than any other Prez. But at least Obama has had the good sense to allow children who were brought here by their parents illegally, and who we have already paid to educate, to stay in the country so we can get the benefit of their skills and knowledge. The GOP, Romney included, has their heads extremely far up their asses, and apparently sees nothing but brown people who don't speak English invading their towns. Romney even proudly has the guy who wrote the Arizona and Alabama immigration laws on his list of aids.
Restrictive immigration policies are bad economic policies. That is a truth that this country needs to accept!
SOCIAL ISSUES
This is, and has always been, the main reason that I tend to hold my nose and vote for Democrats. As long as the Religious Right is driving the social bus in the GOP, the party is unworthy of serious consideration. And the GOP is getting worse in this regard, not better. Social conservatives are wrong about everything. There is no God or Christianity in the constitution for a reason! These idiots want to teach creationism as science, replace policy with prayer, and treat people who are different like second class citizens. The Dems positions on these issues has not been great either, but they almost kept God completely out of their platform, which is where the fictional character belongs. And to Paul Ryan and all the other assholes who claim to be followers of Ayn Rand AND good Christians....CAN YOU STUPID FUCKS NOT READ? She was a committed and outspoken Atheist!
FOREIGN POLICY AND NATIONAL DEFENSE
Of the many things that George W. Bush fucked up, this was where he was worst. It is not the job of the US to tell everyone else in the world how to behave! But that was Bush policy, and that would also be Romney policy. In addition, we already spend more than the rest of the world combined on military spending, much of it as make work jobs to build weapons the military no longer needs. We don't need to spend more, as Romney clearly believes. And we don't need to start more wars, as Romney also seems to believe.
Foreign policy is a tricky, complex issue that even well informed Americans have trouble comprehending. What the GOP calls Obama's "Apology Tour" was a much needed effort to show the rest of the world that we were not going to behave like the arrogant idiots who ran this country for the previous 8 years. Bringing back the NeoCons, who are advising Romney, will be a step back to the destructive, expensive policies of w and his band of morons. We can not afford that!
THE TEA PARTY
This band of ignorant buffoons poses the greatest threat to the progress of this country in my lifetime. Schooled only in Rand, Hayek, and the Bible, these idiots seem to think the 19th century was a really great time to be an American, and want to take us back there. Any politician who would seriously even talk to this group of yahoos is unworthy of anyone's vote. They have become the heart of the GOP, and Romney is now trying to run away from the year he spent sucking up to them to get the nomination. Maybe Mitt would govern as the moderate who didn't do all that great a job in MA, but who knows. The bottom line is, an Obama presidency is the best insurance that we have that none of the horrible ideas these guys spout come to be. Just their positions on immigration and money (the gold standard is second only to Communism as the dumbest economic idea I can think of) are enough to impoverish the nation.
That's my thinking. What's yours? The President can not magically manage the economy to make unemployment go down, and if you think he can, then you are probably too stupid to be allowed to vote. But, the President can steer the country toward long term good, or bad. We had 8 years of horrible with George W. Bush, and Romney seems to want to return to too many of those policies.
