I've come to a decision...

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Last night, as I was burning some calories on the elliptical machine, I was thinking about which candidate would get my vote in November.

I have read speeches, I have read debate transcripts, I have seen commercials and listened to interviews and one thing is so painfully obvious it borders on absurd - there is no way in hell either of these candidates should even be considered for the office and the fact that these are our choices makes it clear that the entire American political system has failed.

Saddam Hussein was 'elected' by 100% of the votes in several Iraqi elections during his tenure. We all laughed at the notion that his 'election' was anything other than staged. What kind of election is it when there is only one man on the ticket? Well, what kind of election is it when we have two chose between two morons from the same political aristocracy? Is that really an election? An election should be a chance to choose between two or more alternatives but we have gotten to the point where there is so little difference between them, despite all of their bloviating to the contrary, that their really isn't much of a choice. To offer a simple analogy - After dinner you can choose to have ice cream or pie for dessert. Both choices are obviously 'sweets' but they are very different kinds of 'sweets'. We no longer have this kind of choice available - in this election we have vanilla ice cream and chocolate ice cream, but they are both still ice cream. Henry Ford once said that a person can have any color car he wants as long as its black. In America, we can vote for the candidate of our choice - but he or she must be part of the political class.

I voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore and John Kerry, not because I thought George was a great statesman, but because he was better than the alternative - and boy was I correct in both of those assumptions. But, I can't do it any more. I can't cast my vote for the lesser of two idiots because all you get is an idiot. I can already hear the arguments: 'don't complain if you don't vote' and 'if you don't for for X then Y will win' and 'our right to vote is a big part of what makes America great,' etc. I've said them all myself. And I was wrong.

An Iraqi that stepped into the voting booth and cast a ballot for Saddam Hussein was not voting to give himself the right to complain because he had no real choice. His vote did nothing but give legitimacy to a corrupt system. We have no real choice and I am no longer going to cast my vote to give legitimacy to this corrupt system. My vote, and all the lives that were lost to protect that right, is too important to me to waste on either of these numskulls.