Hope is the First Step on the Road to Disappointment
With the 2008 election rearing its ugly head, I find myself viewing it with the same hopeless dispassion that I viewed 2004 and 2000 with. If there’s one thing the Bill Clinton to George W. Bush transition taught me—no, reinforced since this is something I already knew—it can always get worse and generally will get worse. To many people though, our current president has set a new standard for rock bottom and a lot of people think anything will be better. Do not, whatever you do, get caught up in this snare. There is no such thing as rock bottom.
The current “leader of the free world” is a bumbling fascist who is practically drowning in his own cronyism. He’s a war monger, a religious fanatic and a man who has the spoken eloquence of Beavis and Butthead. (”Heh, heh… heh, heh… we’re gonna bomb Iraq. Bombs rule! So do nachos.”) He’s also managed to have the kind of personality that could get him elected as the Governor of Texas and that, in and of itself, has a volume of implications and not one of them qualify as good. If you want to understand the true intellect and quality of George W. Bush you need look no further than the people who still support him. I realize 2 digit IQs make you special, but that’s not something anyone should really aspire to.
So now we’re left with John McCain and Barack Obama. Oh, joy. Oh, rapture.
It’s really a game of heads I win, tails you lose where “I” is the conglomeration of the rich, powerful and tyrannical and “you” is the rest of us. For the time being I’ll refrain from commenting too much on McCain since his insanity is unparalleled and I believe the man has the personality, the clout and the absolute will to grind this country to dust in a manner Mr. Bush can only dream about. I really do hope he’s our next president though, since it’s my belief that the cost will be so severe and so awful that maybe, just maybe, the people in this country will decide they have to do something. Of course, Vietnam gave us a draft which was good for a few years of protest before all the free love hippies morphed into the material obsessed yuppies of the 80s, so it’s possible I’m just being naïve.
Honestly though, I don’t think a lot of people expect anything else from McCain. He is, after all, a Republican. The only thing I like about the guy is that, by right of his nomination by the Republican party, conservatives everywhere are forced to justify their support for him as they hold their noses. Listening to that amuses me on deep, dark levels. There’s something about the internal erosion of people the ease at which they sell themselves that I find to be both fascinating and humorous.
Obama and his supporters, on the other hand, have crafted an image of the man as some kind of outsider, free from the typical corruptive chains of the average politician. He’s a man that brings with him the Santa’s bag of everything meaningless that people want from a politician, chief among those: change and hope. Americans love those words. They sound good on paper and sound even better in speeches and they don’t require any real evaluation. They’re simply feel good, do nothing words. His entire campaign is, “I’m not like everyone else. I have a spine.”
The trouble is, he is like everyone else and he doesn’t have a spine.
Other than being black—and let’s be honest with ourselves, that’s a huge factor in all of this—and constantly regurgitating feel good nonsense, his primary claim to fame has been his staunch opposition to the Iraq war from the get go. Trouble his, his recent voting record tells us that Obama, like every other government man out there, is adept at saying one thing and doing another. It’s the first rule of politics.
Mr. Obama seemed as fierce in his defiance of the new amendments to FISA as he was about the Iraq war. The trouble is, unlike Iraq, he had to back up this stance with more than speeches. It required actual politicking and, heaven forbid, a vote on the Senate floor. Any guesses as to how the savior of the progressive world voted? Was he a maverick? Was he a lone voice in the wilderness? Did he stick to his guns and fight tooth and nail even if he felt he couldn’t win? Did he demonstrate to the American people that he’s anything new? Nope.
For the record, this is a joyous moment for me. I’m human and as such am not immune to terrible things like hope. I feel it now and then and sometimes for the silliest reasons. It’s well known that I’m a cynic and a curmudgeon but even someone as consistently bitter and negative as myself occasionally falls prey to feeling like things might actually turn out okay. I never agreed with most of Obama’s policies and would never vote for a Democrat anyway, but I was hoping that he was at least something else while at the same time I was telling anyone who was preaching that very same thing that they were only setting themselves up for disappointment. The hardest part about always expecting the worst is that there really isn’t any solace in being right. I get tired of being right.
What exactly does Mr. Obama gain from this? I really don’t know. I guess he’s more worried about looking like a sissy on terror than he is about doing the right thing and upholding the oath he took when he became a senator where he said he’d uphold and defend the constitution. I wonder if there was some kind of caveat in his oath that didn’t include the fourth amendment.
Hope, the alleged basis of Barrack Obama’s campaign, is really nothing but a mirror of the man himself: disappointment. How many other positions can we expect him to sell us out on? McCain or Obama? Does it really matter? At the end of the day, you’re still going to get sold out and so long as you’re part of either of these maniacal engines of fear and tyranny—the Republican Party and the Democratic Party—you’re nothing but a cog in the biggest political blight on the planet. Get out while you still can.
