The Cowtown Chronicles

Anachronistic throwback to agrarian times?

OR

Great equalizer for the under-represented rural area to this day?

Go!

Republicans.

How can one honestly call themselves a Democrat (and by implication that they support the same policies and positions as the Democratic Party) and then vote for McCain?

Don’t give me that “experience” bullshit. We don’t align ourselves with political parties or causes because one or the other is more experienced. We do it because they share our worldview and promote positions that we agree with. To call yourself a Democrat and to be willing to vote for a Republican (particularly one that so violently disagrees with Democratic positions) is the worst kind of dishonesty with yourself.

I think it goes back to fear. Some people are so convinced that we’re under immediate threat of attack from anyone and everyone that they’re going to go with the guy (or woman in the form of Hillary Clinton) who says that they’ll take the fight to the enemy and all that macho BS. It’s sad, really.

I should know better than to read the letters to the editor in the Star-Telegram. It’s like the editors pick the MOST loony letters sent in each week in order to illustrate just how crazy both sides can be.

Take this one for example:

Scares liberals

Gov. Sarah Palin is a Christian. She is a strong supporter of her family. She is a moral person. She thinks killing babies is a poor form of birth control.

She thinks government should be of the people. She thinks Washington politics should be free from graft. She thinks we should be free from being held hostage by foreign oil-producing countries. She thinks terrorists should be dealt with harshly. She thinks the people of this country should elect the president, not Hollywood or the media.

Palin is everything liberals hate.

— Joe Cole, Weatherford

What an insanely ridiculous and simplistic string of assertions and implications that because Palin is supposedly “for” these things that so-called “liberals” are against them.

Barack Obama is a Christian, so is Joe Biden. Both men are strong supporters of their families (Biden was a single dad for a while, does that make him better than Palin?). Barack Obama and Joe Biden are presumably moral persons. I have no evidence (and I’m certain Mr. Cole doesn’t either) that they’re not. Both have made mistakes in the past, but that doesn’t make you immoral, just flawed. Barack Obama and Joe Biden think killing babies is a horrible form of birth control. In fact, it can’t even be classified as a form of birth control, because killing babies after they’re born isn’t exactly “birth control.”

Obama/Biden think government should be of the people, but I’m guessing those people are different people than Mr. Cole wants. Obama/Biden think Washington politics should be free from graft — who’s ever come out in favor of graft? Obama/Biden think we should be free from not only being held hostage by foreign oil producing countries, but also by domestic oil producers. Why can’t otherwise smart people grasp the concept of MOVING THE FUCK OFF OF OIL?!? (sorry mom) Obama/Biden think that terrorists should be dealt with harshly — Obama supports pursuing them across the border into Pakistan when there’s actionable intelligence, a position that McCain rejects and calls “naive.” (Side topic: When you’re a warmonger, every problem looks like the only solution is war. Terrorism is a CRIMINAL ACT, carried out by non-state actors. Our military is not equipped or trained to fight terrorism, nor are they the appropriate people to be doing it legally or from a policy standpoint. The FBI/CIA should be doing their JOBS and working with our allies in the region to flush out the terrorists, and THEN maybe we could look at military strikes.) Obama/Biden think that the people of this country should elect the president, not Hollywood or the media — the last time I checked, “Hollywood and the media” have WAY fewer votes than “the people of this country.”

I do agree on one point though — Palin is everything liberals hate. She’s a poseur, a small-town mayor (or a small-state governor) who stumbled into the governorship and now presumes that she can hold the second highest office in the land because she “didn’t blink” when she was asked. I’m sorry, but I expect more of the people who run for the highest offices in our democracy. Obama may be lacking experience, but he certainly isn’t lacking intellect or education, two areas that so far Gov. Palin has demonstrated are not her strong suit. She also apparently can’t see past religious dogma when framing her policies, and that’s simply unacceptable.

Everyone who tells you that this is the most important election in history is exactly right. Never before has our country faced such a defining and definite choice: Do we want to continue on our path of glorifying willful ignorance and irrational stubbornness, or do we want to expect more from our leaders and demand that they apply intellect and reason to problems instead of dogmatic homilies and simplistic answers?

The choice is ours — I hope we get it right.

You might have heard all of the gnashing of teeth by the McCain-Palin campaign over Obama’s use of a tired old metaphor.

Disregarding for a second that Republicans are the ones who YEARS ago decried the modern taste for “political correctness” and all of the immediate cries of offense that poorly chosen words would garner, I posit this question:

Which is more offensive?

Saying that the McCain-Palin campaign is more of the same and that you can put all the lipstick you want on a pig (or a pitbull?), and it’s still a pig.

OR

Ridiculing someone for making a deliberate choice to take a low-paying, extremely difficult job as a community organizer instead of the much more lucrative fast track that Obama could have taken to Federal Court clerkship or a six-figure salary at a BigLaw firm? (I have no illusions that Obama made his choice for purely altruistic reasons, just like McCain hasn’t stayed in public office for 30 years because he’s so in love with his country.)

Is using a tired old homily of the “lipstick on a pig” sort automatically sexist because the opposing campaign happens to have a woman on the ticket? Isn’t it just as sexist to ASSUME that she’d choose to wear lipstick and would automatically self-identify with a crack made in regards to lipstick?

Okay, so I feel compelled to write something about this, sort of to get my opinions out there and to hopefully spark some discussion or at least some deep reflection on the part of folks who might be considering this course of action because Hillary wasn’t nominated.

Don’t fucking do it.

By declaring that because Hillary didn’t win the nomination you “are thinking about voting for McCain” or “are definitely voting for McCain” or “Obama is starting from scratch with me,” what you’re really saying is “I never gave a shit about what Hillary stood for, or my fellow Democrats, I just wanted Hillary to win the nomination, so to punish the rest of you, I’ll demonstrate my pettiness by talking shit about the Democratic nominee.”

Here’s the thing: Hillary and Bill get it. They don’t like it. I GUARAN-FUCKING-TEE they don’t like it. But they know that if they raise a major shitstorm and don’t fall in line, they’re DONE as party power-brokers. If the kind of shit that Hillary supporters are talking about stirring up happens, Obama loses the general election, and there’s even a HINT that Bill or Hillary or anyone in their organization is encouraging it, the party will crucify them. They won’t be able to get jobs as junior staffers to the lone State Democratic Congressman in South Dakota (or something equally lowly).

Sure, they could just go off in their dotage and retire somewhere that they can happily diddle the maid and pool boy, leaving a demolished Democratic Party in their wake, but that’s not how they work. They’re patriots through and through, and they’ve devoted their lives to the United States and the Democratic Party. They enjoy unprecedented influence and major power broker status, and i guarantee they’re not going to give that up easily.

More than that, and more importantly, is that Bill and Hillary really do care about the United States and all the things they’ve devoted their lives to working for. I can guarantee that no matter how disappointed they are that they lost the nomination, they would be absolutely gutted if Hillary supporters defecting to the other side (or not turning out for Obama) caused him to lose the general election, not to mention the affect it would have on down-ticket races.

Barack Obama is not Hillary Clinton, but he’s a hell of a lot closer than John McCain could ever be.

Please, take the time to be angry and disappointed. Get it out of your system, vent to your friends, do whatever you feel like you need to do. But when the time comes, show Hillary and Bill that you really do support them by putting your effort behind the party and the issues that they’ve devoted their adult lives to.

If you want to get an idea of what the ad wars will be like during the general election, you need look no farther than the ads that are starting to show up on the right side of this site. The day after I wrote the negative post about Hillary, AdSense started serving ads paid for by Johns McCain and Cornyn.

I’m not looking forward to the fall.

Now she’s promising she’s going to create 3 million jobs.

Allow me to translate that into “regular folk” language from the original “politician.”

When she says “It’s time for a different approach. I’ll fight for every single job in America — and create millions of new, high paying jobs that can’t be outsourced. We’re trying to run today’s economy on yesterday’s infrastructure — and we’re jeopardizing tomorrow’s prosperity. So I will rebuild America — by rebuilding, repairing and modernizing our infrastructure.”

What she means is: “I’ll put more money into contracts to large government contractors who will hire a few more people to inspect bridges or whatever, but mostly they’ll pocket the cash. My advisers say that if the contractors actually did the work we’d be paying them for, they’d probably need to hire about 200,000 people, and the other 2.8 million will find jobs helping those people do their jobs.”

She makes the same kind of impossible promises that politicians have always made. I think we’re tired of being placated to, which is part of Obama’s appeal. He doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he says he’ll help us figure out how to fix it ourselves instead of promising to wipe our noses for us.

I’m proud of the discussion we’ve been having about the national election and the viability and relative benefits of the various candidates. (Okay, we haven’t been talking about the Republican candidate, and I don’t expect us to.) I composed this post initially as a comment response to Suzette’s comment on the “Am I Sexist Because I Support Obama?” post.

Go read the full comment thread, but I’ll copy Suzette’s most recent comment here for your convenience:

Evidently, we have “differences of opinion” on several levels and several issues here. On a side note, now we can understand WHY politicians don’t say how they “really” feel about people and things because if they did they would always offend somebody, somewhere. That’s why they all talk in that “politically correct” carefully thought out lingo. I have called Obama “Bama Rama” and all sort of, what I think, are funny names. To me it’s deserving. I suppose I coulda shoulda have put the “O” before “Bama” but I have such little respect for the dude that…….I can’t bring myself to do that. I didn’t think my comments were “tacky” and as far as them being “offensive,” that’s sort of like beauty…it all depends on the individual who’s looking, reading and/or hearing. Like I said Pete, on the Presidential Candidates, I think it’s fair to say, “we see and hear things very differently.” However, I am glad we can express it here and hope I don’t wear out my welcome. I’ll understand though, if what I say, becomes “too much,” tacky, offensive or whatever. Life goes on.

Here is my response:

I have no problem at all with you saying what you really feel, Suzette. I was just disappointed that your real feelings for your party’s potential candidate for President are so low that you’ve resorted to calling him childish names.

I’d like it if you could explain those feelings to me. No one has been able to successfully explain to me why Clinton is a better candidate than Obama using facts and reasoning based on their proposed policies and statements.

Where you see waffling and double-dealing in Obama, I see unprecedented truthfulness and pragmatism. For example:

This week, Clinton has been bashing him because his former foreign policy adviser (who has been right WAY more often than she’s been wrong if you go back and read her policy papers and books) told the truth in an interview. She said that Obama would evaluate the situation on the ground in Iraq once he takes office and has access to more information than he can currently get as someone who’s not in the administration, and make his decisions about troop withdrawal based on that information.

Clinton says that means Obama is not serious about his stated goal of getting our troops out of Iraq in 16 months. In fact, her stated position is in most ways NO DIFFERENT from Obama’s. The difference is that she is unwilling to commit to timetables, unlike Obama.

So, does that mean that Clinton will NOT listen to her advisers and the military leaders on the ground and will just yank people out of Iraq as soon as she takes office? I hope not. She’s telling people what they want to hear in order to get elected. Period.

If she doesn’t intend to listen to her advisers (which she has made comments to the effect of), then that frightens me for two reasons:

1. If she’s the kind of president who is “the decider” and doesn’t surround herself with or listen to people who disagree with her and provide her with honest and accurate assessments of situations, then I fear we’d be in for another 4 years of Bush-like autocracy.

2. If she’s the type of leader who says “This is going to happen.” and then proceeds to make that thing happen regardless of means used to achieve it, then again, we’re in for another 4 years of autocratic rule.

You know what pisses me off about Bush more than ANYTHING else? It’s not the fact that he’s destroying our public school systems in favor of public funding for religious schools, nor that he’s systematically neutering regulatory agencies by appointing industry lobbyists to lead them, although those are two of the many things.

What pisses me off the most about George W. Bush is that he COMPLETELY and BLATANTLY ignores the will of the People of this country. People he’s supposed to serve. The People to whom he’s ostensibly accountable, although that accountability goes through a cowardly Congress which is unwilling to check his power because they ALL want a piece of it.

Hillary Clinton comes from that tradition. The tradition of ball-busting, winner-take-all politics that has gotten us into the multiple messes we’re in now. She has demonstrated repeatedly that her own personal ambitions are more important than ANYTHING else. She has demonstrated that the ends (winning the Democratic nomination) justify the means (her scorched-earth tactics against Obama) in her campaign, and I think that’s a pretty good indicator of both what her administration would be like, and how she would approach policy decisions, both foreign and domestic.

No one in their right minds, including Barack Obama, is going to deny that he’s ambitious and seeks power. That’s the nature of people who run for any national-level political office. The difference is that he hasn’t demonstrated that he’s willing to destroy everything in his path to get there, which Clinton has repeatedly done. She has been DIRECTLY CONFRONTED (as usual it’s buried at the bottom of the article) about her misstatements and occasionally outright mistruths about Obama’s past and his policies, and she has brushed off those challenges as “difference of opinion.” This is the same logic that Bush has used to ignore global climate change, among other things. Bush sees FACTS as opinions upon which people can disagree. Apparently Clinton does, too.

To me, Hillary Clinton represents the old guard school of politics. I see her bringing more of the same partisan conflict (with the added bonus of infighting within the Democratic Party) with her presidency. I don’t think she has the political will to fight for REAL progressive initiatives, because I don’t think that’s what she sees as important. To her it seems the only important thing is that she be in power and that her party gets the opportunity to exercise the same kind of stranglehold over the legislative process that the Republicans have for the last 12 years. That’s not how politics should work.

So, there you go. I’ve laid out part of why I prefer Obama over Clinton. None of it has anything to do with “he inspires me!” or “he’s a great speaker, I’m under his spell.” I think both of those sentiments are valid, though, just as my generation’s parents did with regards to John Kennedy.

We’ve suffered through 8 long years of crushed dreams, disappointment, misery, and death. What’s wrong with some hope for a change? Why does the candidate who reaches out to people to help them up get made fun of for being “deluded” and “naive?” Isn’t that “hand up instead of a hand out,” as Obama puts it, all that Americans have been asking for since we rose up against King George III?

(I had initially titled this “The Best Argument For Why I’m For Obama, and while that is true for all of the reasons that Grayson lays out, he’s really laying out the argument for why Hillary doesn’t really understand what the country wants when they demand change. Her offer of change is simply for a change on the letterhead, from Bush to her. Obama is offering REAL change to our country’s policies and outlook on the world.)

Grayson Harper puts it best on his blog. Seriously, how much talent and insight can one person have?

One of the ads that’s been showing up in the Google AdSense ads lately is one for “Men for Hillary Clinton,” and it encourages me to “Ditch your sexism. Elect qualified women now.”

By that standard, are white women who support Clinton are both sexist AND racist?

I’m not saying I’m better than anyone else because I support the black guy and I happen to be white, and I reject the assumption that I don’t support Hillary simply because she’s a woman. Her gender makes no difference to me. I’m a child of a single mother, I have NO problem with strong women.

I just don’t think she’s the best candidate.