Swing-Vote

Elections

OK, so it appears I have my wish (and then some).

I did vote Democrat in the only US congressional race in my district, the House of Representatives of course (no senate seats up this time in my state).  I'm in a pretty die-hard red state though, so mine was not one of the House seats that was up for grabs.  Seems that it didn't matter though, as the Democrats won the House by quite a margin, and it appears the AP is now saying the remaining Virginia Senate race went to Webb (D) to give the Democrats control of the Senate too.

Wow, swing voters were pissed!

I would have liked to have seen the House go to the Democrats, but the Senate evenly split.  Oh well, can't win them all.  I am relieved that the next 2 years won't be a fully Republican Congress and White House. 

Here's what really gets me though.  Why is it that when a candidate/party wins by an ever-so-slight margin, they read it as a mandate from the people for their agenda.  Pelosi did it today.  Bush said the same thing after he was re-elected 2 years ago. 

It's not a mandate.  It's a 2 party system. 

Somebody has to win and it's usually the lesser of two evils (as seen by us swing voters, party voters always vote the same way).

Anyway, I'm generally pleased to see the GOP take a face dive like this.  They will be back though.  Just wait for the Democrats to do a series of stupid things over the next few years.

PS.  I think the whole election yesterday was worth it for one thing if nothing else.  Rick Santorum lost his senate seat.  Yesssss!!!!! 

Did I say that?

So I just posted the other day that I'd likely go Democrat in the upcoming midterm elections.  Then, yesterday I was riding in the car and listening to NPR when they brought a startling fact to my opinion.  If Democrats take control of the house, the Speaker of the House (3rd in line to the Presidency) will become Nancy Pelosi.  That frightens the bejeezus out of me.

If my voting strategy in national elections is based on not giving complete control of Congress to one party or the other, I'm in a world of hurt.  From what I hear, it's not likely that the Democrats will take control of the Senate.  There aren't enough seats in play.  This, of course means that my only chance to help prevent another couple of years of Republican railroading is to inadvertantly support Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House by voting democrat.  Arggh!  Do we have to go to extremes all the time?

At least a Pelosi led House would stop the right wing Republicans from passing everything Bush wants.  We'd definitely have checks & balances again, which is what our forefathers intended, right?

Upcoming Elections

So, this blogging thing was more work than I thought it would be.  I'm probably not going to renew (boo hoo).  Not a big deal, as I don't think anyone ever saw this blog.  I'll continue on anyway.  I've got about a month left, maybe something can come of it, if I have the determination to stay with it...

So, it's late October now.  Daylight Saving begins (or ends, I can't remember) soon, and mid-term elections are coming up.  What to do, what to do.

I'm not sure.

I'm never sure until I'm in the booth.  Right now, I'm thinking that even though I have largely supported the President (I supported Clinton too), I'm going to have to vote Democratic for Congress.  I still have a little homework to do on the issues, but I want to go that way.

Why?  I want the Democrats to take back control of Congress.  No, it has nothing to do with Mark Foley.  That sicko could have just as easily been a Democrat.  It's the recent bills that have passed.

The first one that made me ask WTF was the one where Congress voted that the President had the power interpret the Geneva Conventions.  One man.  What he says is the law.  Wasn't this country founded so that this wouldn't happen?  The Geneva Conventions have been around since 1949.  Shouldn't we have an interpretation by now.  If not, shouldn't the Supreme Court do the interpetation?  I'm no expert, but the Geneva Conventions, since we ratified them, are essentially international law.

The second one that caught my attention was the Anti-Terrorism Law that Bush signed this week.  I'm all about holding terrorists.  I don't think torture is reliable, though strong interrogation is.  The part that really got me is the one about not requiring ourselves to charge a detainee with a crime to hold them. 

I'm certainly not saying to let potential terrorists free, but at least tell them what they are being held for.  That is a basic tenant of US justice.  It's what this country stands for.  I know these people are not citizens, but if we really believe in our system of justice, shouldn't we believe in it for everyone?  I do.

So, Democrats in '06.  Who knows in '08.

Gay Marriage Amendment? Don't we have anything else to debate?

Last week, the US Senate debated an amendement to the Constitution to ban same-sex marriages in the US.  What a waste of my tax dollars. 

There are too many things going on in this country and this world to waste time like this, just so Republican Senators can show their conservative constituents that they really do share their "values".  Take your pick of better topics: Iraq, Immigration, Education, Poverty, Darfur, anyone remember that North Korea has nuclear weapons now?

It's not that I think the Gay Marriage amendment isn't important.  It means everything to some folks.  I just know that even if the religious right Republican party managed to pass it, it would never be upheld in the Supreme Court.  No matter, because the Republicans don't even have the votes to make it debatable.  Doesn't stop them from debating it though, does it?

Now, as far as my personal feelings on gay marriage, I say let them have it.  Marriage is more of a religious institution than a governmental one.  And the government cannot, and should not, make rules based on the views of a few (not even all Christians think homosexuals are evil).  If your church doesn't want gay people to be able to commit themselves to each other for life, then don't let them get married in your church.  You can't take the whole option away.  Of course, you don't even hear the Democrats taking that argument for fear of losing votes.  At least they don't want to write it into the Constitution.

Thank You Dover, PA

The good citizens of Dover, PA have flipped their entire school board.  Why?  If you haven't heard, the previous school board was forcing 9^th grade science students to learn about Intelligent Design as an alternative to Evolution. 

I don't have a problem with Intelligent Design, I may even agree with it at some level.  I just don't think it should be offered as an alternative to real scientific theory. Let me explain.

I studied science in college, Biology in fact.  Yes, I learned about evolution, and I have read The Origin of Species a couple of times.  I believe in natural selection and evolution just as much as I believe the sun will rise tomorrow.  It just makes sense to me.

To go even further, I believe that ultimately all species on the planet evolved from a single organism. I even think that the first single-celled organism may have been formed by accident.  Scientists have recreated the environment of primordial earth in a lab and have successfully created organic molecules from non-organic substances.  Non-organic to organic is a smaller leap than organic molecules to organisms.

I believe in everything that science has to offer on this subject, all the way back to the big bang. That's where I think Intelligent Design comes in.  Science can't explain, and I can't imagine, what existed before the big bang, before existence itself.  To me, the only logical explanation is a supreme being of some type who set it all in motion, but we will never find evidence of that. 

To sum it up, I believe in Evolution and Intelligent Design.  Some supreme being out there created the processes of evolution and natural selection, and just let it work. They aren't exclusive, they compliment each other.

But that's not how it's being taught. The school board in Dover, PA wanted to offer a theory based on “faith” as an alternative to one based on evidence and fact, in a public school science class no less.  If they wanted to introduce that idea in a comparative religion class, that's fine.  But please, don't dismiss the facts, that's what science is all about.

Political State of the Union

OK, so last week I spouted opinions on Iraq.  It's a big subject, and those 3 posts certainly can't convey all of my thoughts on the subject, but this is "Swing-vote", not "What's the deal in Iraq"...

I thought I'd write a little today about my predictions for the political future of America.  Does anyone remember that Bush ran as a "uniter" in 2000 against Al Gore?  I do.  I remember hearing great stories of how he was able to get Texas Democrats and Republicans to work together to accomplish some pretty great things.  He wasn't a "beltway insider", he was from the real US.  A candidate for the masses, right?  I think it was a combination of that willingness to work with both parties and the fact that the average American was ready for a tax break that won him the election.  People like me who were undecided could have easily swayed his way, and most likely did since he won the election.  (I didn't, I voted Libertarian that year, but that's another post).  Let's not forget, however, that he barely won.

In 2004, I would have voted for Bush just because, as I stated before, I still support the Iraq war.   I wasn't sure about Kerry's ability to handle it correctly and that was probably the biggest issue of the election.  (Again, I didn't vote for Bush in '04, but this time some confusion involving my absentee ballot caused caused me to miss the vote altogether, I'm very ashamed of it).  By this time, I had already given up on Bush's ability to unite Congress.  The country seemed more divided than even the post election battle in 2000, but we were in the middle of a war. 

Well, in 2008, Bush can't run again.  With some of the things he and other Republicans have done recently, I really don't see any way that they can stay in power.  Several of us swing voters are out there who are not comfortable with the conservative right calling all the shots.  We like a healthy balance.

My view of the current state of national government is that the moderate swing voters gave Republicans power in a time of war to prevent changing hands in the middle of a delicate time.  The Republicans read that as a mandate from the masses to strengthen their conservative agenda, and now we find ourselves having the debate about Creationism in schools again.  That is certainly not why I (planned to) vote for Bush or any Republican.  I could care less about the religious rigth conservative agenda.  I don't agree with it in the slightest.

So, what's a swing-voter to do?  Eight years of either party is too much for me.  If I learned anything in the 2000 election, it's that every vote counts.  Even though I'd rather vote for someone than against someone else, when presidential margins come down to a few hundred votes, I may have to relax that stance a bit.  I'll likely vote Democratic in 2008. 

...That is, unless Hillary runs.  I don't have a problem with a female president, I just don't like her.  Ah, I'll vote for whoever sounds the most moderate at the time.

The Future of Iraq

I don’t think anyone has the answer for the future of Iraq but the Iraqi people themselves. As I stated before, I think we need to get out as soon as we can, but we can’t just vacate by an arbitrary deadline. My feeling is that most Iraqi citizens are embracing democracy, though they are still a little timid from years of oppression. That can’t be changed overnight, or even in 2 ½ years. It takes a while. I don’t think there is any question that a strong Islamic democracy in the region can be a very powerful and good thing for the whole world. We need to support that effort until the Iraqi people can take it over themselves. In the long rung, we need a friend in that part of the world.

We recently passed the 2000 death milestone, which is a very very sad thing. A lot of people wonder if that is worth it. I don’t know anyone who has died in Iraq. I only know one person in Iraq right now, and we aren’t terribly close. That is why it is difficult for me to weigh in on the “is it worth it?” debate. I have to think that all of the Iraqi people who have lost thousands of loved ones to the Hussein regime are incredibly grateful for our fallen men and women. So, in that sense, maybe it hasn’t been worth it for us as a country, but it is as world citizens.

I mentioned in my last post that I don’t fully support the administration any more, but I still think we are doing a good thing in Iraq. So, although I don’t agree with some of the administration's answers, I do think that “stay the course” is probably the best idea for now.

Iraq, Now

Now that we’re in Iraq, I think we have an obligation. Fundamentally, I completely agree with the idea that if we leave with the job unfinished, Iraq will be worse than before.

I believe it was foolish to think it would be done in a matter of months. The American Revolution went on for 7 years, I’d say that a comparison can be made between the technology advantage that the British had over us at that time and the technology advantage the coalition (including Iraq) has over the insurgents in Iraq today. And we won, we don’t want the insurgency to win. If you think about it that way, how can anyone expect this to be done so quickly? It’s the same kind of fight in a different time.

Having said that I support the war, you may be surprised to read that I don’t necessarily support the administration. One of the main things I dislike about this administration is that they routinely give the same answer over and over. They try to drill their answer into the head of the American people.  If the answer is challenged, the same answer comes back again and again. It seems akin to raising your voice when talking to someone who speaks a different language. If they don’t understand, saying it louder won’t help.

The idea of “fighting the terrorists on their own turf” sounded good at first, but I don’t buy it any more. It is known that the 9/11 attackers and the London bombers (and the Spain train bombings, I believe) were all western educated, and in many cases, western raised. These are different terrorists than the ones setting roadside bombs in Iraq. I’m no expert, but I don’t think the average terrorist in Iraq is going to wake up tomorrow, put on western style clothes, shave his beard, and say in the fluent western language of his choice, “I think I’ll go bomb a train today”. We are fighting some terrorists on their own turf, just not the ones we should be most concerned about.

It also seems logical to me that since the average Islamic fundamentalist in the region despises our presence in Iraq, there will be a continual flow of incoming insurgents until we vacate. It is very easy for radicals to recruit new insurgents when there is a foreign force occupying their country, or a neighboring country. Once we are out, and the average Muslim sees that the Iraqi people are the ones they are fighting, the insurgency train should lose steam.

I also don’t like the administration’s answer about timelines.  Whenever the question is asked, “when can our troops come home?” the answer is always, “it is dangerous to publish timelines”. I can follow that. I agree that we don’t want to set a hard date, but that’s not much of an answer. If we were to say, “US troops will withdraw from Iraq on June 1, 2006”, the insurgency would probably quiet down, and rise up again after we leave, destroying Iraq in the end.

What’s to stop us, however, from making statements such as “when 80% of the Iraqi forces are trained and self-sufficient”, or “when the Iraqi forces are able to sufficiently patrol all areas that US troops are currently patrolling”? That may take 1, 2, or 5 years, but it’s a goal, and it’s a goal that doesn’t open the door for insurgency once it’s met.

We can’t just get up and leave, the Iraqi people don’t want that, the insurgents do. We need to finish the job, not give up. That’d be un-American.

Iraq, The Beginning...

Because it’s probably the biggest issue of our time, Iraq is a great place to start.  I began writing an essay on Iraq, but found it becoming very long, so I'm breaking it up.  This post starts at the beginning.  In the future, I'll talk about the present situation, and what I think is best for the future.

As a swing voter, you may think I once supported the war, but then changed my mind. However, swing voter doesn’t mean flip-flopper. The fact is that I support the war in Iraq, still.

At the very beginning, in March of 2003, several Americans supported the impending war in Iraq. Not only that, but several Congressmen supported it. All of this support was based on intelligence. The intelligence is widely accepted as wrong now, but at the time it was widely considered to be correct throughout the government and the public. There were a few who thought it didn’t justify the war, but even they didn’t doubt it’s authenticity. I think there are very few people out there who can legitimately say “I told you so”. Most have just switched sides.

Everyone, even the President, now freely admits that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I, on the other hand, haven’t given up hope. Why? We all know that Hussein has had weapons of mass destruction in the past, and that he has used them against Kurdish people in his own country. UN Resolutions were passed repeatedly to get weapons inspectors inside Iraq to ensure he was destroying these weapons, and Hussein repeatedly kicked them out. If he had no weapons, why kick the inspectors out? If he felt that he shouldn’t be open to inspection as a matter of pride, maybe he also thought he should be open to make WMD as well. Saddam had every opportunity to comply with the UN and the international community, and failed to do so. In my mind, if nothing had been done, the UN would have lost all credibility in matters of international security.

I believe Hussein was hiding something. I think in the months leading up to the war, while the rest of the world was arguing resolutions and debating on whether or not it was time to invade Iraq, Hussein was either hiding, moving, or (let’s hope) destroying the WMD he had. Since there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of his destroying all of the WMD, I believe that he either hid them so well that we still have not found them, or he moved them across the border to Syria. Either way, I think they exist somewhere.

Even if the WMD argument is eventually proven to be false (that he didn’t have them in the first place), I think there was more reason to invade. Not that the US should be policing the world (that’s the UN’s job), but Hussein did very very bad things to his own people, including genocide, and those people had no way of stopping it. History has shown that sometimes people need the aid of another country, even in the form of military assistance.  Even us. Don’t forget that the French helped the US win independence from Britain.

In short, I think we got into Iraq for the right reasons.

First Post - Introduction

In this, my first post (which I’m sure nobody will ever see), I thought it’d be a good idea to give an idea of where I stand on general issues and where I am on the political map, real quickly. Not much detail today.

I think I’m right in the middle, what Rush Limbaugh would call a “moderate”. I can see good and bad points about both sides, but I don’t subscribe to either.

I really think I would be conservative if conservatives weren’t so blind to science and so tightly coupled to the religious right. The right makes sense to me on some issues, specifically taxes, smaller government, free-market, and the like. They tend to lose me when it comes to issues like creationism in public schools and global warming.

I usually side with the left on issues of civil liberties and the environment. My problem with the left is that I don’t really like the idea of big government.  The left seems to believe that the government should solve everyone’s problems, and should be big enough to do so. That’s where I part ways with them. I guess I’m too self sufficient.

Winston Churchill said, “Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.” At this point in my life (nearing 30), I think I’m somewhere between no brains and no heart.