The economy is supposed to be the biggest issue in this election. Certainly I feel the effects of this Bush anti-regulation, pro-greed, tax cuts for the wealthy, windfalls for the oil companies, outsource your job economy.
I'd like to visit my grandchildren more often, but I can't afford the gas.
I'd like to visit my sons in Seattle but I can't afford to drive or fly.
I'd like to sell my house and move into a one story as my old knees don't like climbing stairs, but I can't because of the mortgage crisis. If I sold now (and I probably couldn't find a buyer) I wouldn't make a profit.
I'd like a little extra money to fix up my bathroom and eat out from time to time, but our income has been cut by 20%.
So the economy is a big issue for me, which is why I can't imagine putting another Republican in office for four more years.
What does McCain promise to fix the economy?
1. Continued tax cuts for the wealthy. How does that help me? McCain says these tax cuts will produce jobs. How so? What jobs have they produced in the past eight years?
2. Drilling for oil offshore and maybe producing 3% more oil in ten years. (How does that help me now?)
3. Eliminating pork projects in bills. How does that increase the value of my home? How does it get back the 20% in income we have lost?
4. Privatize Social Security. How does that keep Social Security solvent so I can have a secure old age?
I don't hear one proposal from McCain that will improve this economy in the next four years, or lower the price of gas, or solve the mortgage crisis or end the greed of speculators. I only hear the same old conservative line - no regulation, free market, lower taxes for the wealthy. These have all been in place for eight years, and they have all failed.
This ought to be enough to discourage anyone from voting for the Republican candidate this year. But even with all this disastrous economic news, clearly the responsibility of Republican policies, there is an even more important reason why no one should vote for John McCain this Fall. In fact, this one issue is probably the single most important judgment call that either presidential candidate has ever made - the decision to support or oppose the waging of war against Iraq.
Six years ago, when the president was beginning to beat the war drums, many of us knew it was wrong. Many legislators knew it was wrong. Anyone who had been reading and listening to what insiders and former insiders were saying knew that from his first day in office, Bush had made war in Iraq a priority.
The administration only needed an excuse.
Daddy Bush had not, according to little Bush and the neocons, finished the job and removed Saddam. They were itchin' to do it, the neocons because it was part of some grandiose ideological view of the world they were selling, and little Bush because it would make him a "war president," which he believed would give him unlimited power and enhance his legacy.
When 9/11 happened, it gave all of them an opening. According to both Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke, Bush was asking his experts to connect Saddam to 9/11 on the day after the attack. When the experts couldn't do that, even with the Niger-uranium forgery and false rumors of a Saddam - al Qaeda connection, they settled on weapons of mass destruction. Saddam had weapons, they claimed, that he could use against us or give to terrorists, and so we had to invade his country.
It would be a cake-walk, we would be greeted as liberators, the children would throw flowers and candy, we were told. Only it wasn't a cake-walk. It started with looting, then turned to an insurgency against the military, then turned into sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing. To this day, suicide bombers still kill fellow Iraqis. Only they don't kill as many American troops because we are paying them not to.
No matter what political party you belong to, or even what you think of the military, or their tactics, or David Petraeus, the fact is that the Republican President of the United States, with a Republican dominated Congress, made the decision to invade a country that had not attacked us, not threatened us, and did not even have weapons that could threaten us. Whether or not Bush knew the third fact (and I believe he did) he most definitely knew the first two facts.
The President of the United States took the nation to war illegally and immorally, caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and he spent hundreds of billions of dollars for what? For his legacy? And why did so many in Congress go along? We may never really know.
We do know that John McCain went along. John McCain is as responsible as the President of the United States for taking us to an illegal, immoral war. As such, in my opinion, he has disqualified himself as a future president. He lacked the proper judgment on what will turn out to be one of the biggest foreign policy disasters, not to mention war crimes, of our lifetime. He does not deserve to be President and he cannot be trusted with the office.
Barack Obama opposed the war and still maintains it was a mistake. Whether or not he supported the surge is not nearly as important as the fact that he opposed an illegal, immoral war from the beginning.
Yes, the economy will be the issue most Americans vote on, because it is what affects most
Americans personally. The war only directly affects those who serve in the military, and their families. However it indirectly affects all of us, and our children and grandchildren, because we will be paying for it for a long time.
Even more importantly, it has brought shame on our country. It has tarnished the values we stand for, the lofty ideals that we have always promoted. By starting a war against a country that had neither attacked nor threatened us, we have hurt our nation in ways we will feel for decades. There is no way we should ever elect someone to the presidency who approved of that decision.
