Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Election Wrap up

Edit: Daily status: the DJI has dropped 1,664 points since the bailout passed on October 3rd. Your Federal tax dollars at work!

Well, as near as I can tell, no one I voted for who was actually opposed managed to win this time around.

OK, I'm going to vent. Democrats and liberals, don't bother reading this. You won, be happy. You're not likely to be unconstitutionally arrested sometime in the next few years (unlike, arguably, the last few years when we were both likely to get arrested).

Well, I'd like to congratulate Obama on beating Bush and Palin in the presidential race. I'm sure that was very hard to do, especially since neither of them were running for president. Of course, Palin doesn't have the experience to be president, but if she winds up with Steven's Senate seat in four years she will since four years in the senate is plenty of experience.

I'd also like to congratulate Joe Biden, but I'm not sure who he is since he got less press attention than Joe the Plumber. Apparently scrutinizing the Democrat VP candidate isn't newsworthy.

I will sleep more soundly at night once we swear in as commander in chief someone who's never served in the military in any capacity and has a whopping four year's experience in the federal government. He opposes defending ourselves against nuclear missiles and developing FCS for the army, which includes active defense systems for vehicles and numerous other technologies aimed at saving the lives of US soldiers. We'll have plenty of opportunity to see him as CinC; he already wants to get us into stopping genocide in Darfur and elsewhere as soon as he pulls us out of fighting terrorism in Iraq. Hey, the last non-military CinC we had worked out great, right? So he killed a few of my friends for nothing, no biggie.

However, this only begins our president-elect's qualifications. He's not only used marijuana (OK, let's be fair, he might be in the majority there), but also cocaine. Luckily he's also for universal healthcare, because that's worked out well for every country that has tried it, so someday all the country's cocaine users (who will also be helped by improved "social safety nets") can hope to be president.

Obama's opening speech tells us of a long, hard road ahead. Right, it will take years to escape the legacy of Bush, but 9/11 which happened less than a year after Bush was sworn in was all Bush's fault and not Clinton's at all.

Children have already been taught to sing the praises of our great leader, bringing to my mind the fictional Nehemiah Scudder, elected president 2012 (though he got 81% of the electoral vote and Obama is somewhere around 68%).

I welcome as the next leader of the free world Barack Hussein Obama II.

"Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?" - "John Adams", 1776

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We are not going to agree on this now.

But in four years, we *will* see who gets to say, "I told you so." Perhaps sooner, depending on how things go.

And maybe, in the meantime, we can see what common ground we still have. I'm tired of the us-or-them what has been built up over this election cycle. It's not helped the country at all. If you hate me because I support the wrong candidate, then what possibility do we (and by extension, the country) have?

Gridley said...

No, no we're not. We're probably never going to agree on this.

But you're right that we should try to find some common ground. For the record, I don't hate everyone who supports Obama. I hate the people who support him solely because he's not Bush, or because he's black, but not people who think he will take this country in the right direction because they agree with his stated policies.

I want the Patriot Act repealed. I want the TSA either disolved or massively reformed. I want us to build nuclear power plants and get off foreign energy resources. Do you agree with me on those issues? What else do you think we agree on?

Anonymous said...

We agree completely on the Patriot Act and the TSA being fixed. I don't know if they have to be removed, but fixing them would be a good first step.

I support measures that allow the country to stop contributing so much greenhouse gasses into the atmostphere, whether they're wind, solar or nuclear. I do hope that whatever method is used, there are safety measures in place, because even the wind option has problems - birds keep flying into the blades, and that isn't helping us any :(

I don't know if we can actually stop using foreign oil, simply because the infrastructure requires so very much of it right now. I would be happy if we could get it down to some smaller portion of the total, but that is going to take decades to work on. I know the proposed offshore drilling was only going to be a tiny portion of the total oil used, and that was projected to take a decade to actually make an impact, so....

I hate what our country has become - a nation divided against itself. A land of us-and-them, if you're not with us, you're against us. Closemindedness, that thinks that the other is wrong simply because they are different.

*sigh*

I'm hoping all I can that things are better. And if they aren't, I'll keep doing what I can to make them so. But I'm only one person.

Gridley said...

Yeah, wind power has serious issues. I'd rather not see us putting too much money into that.

We could easily get off foreign oil if instead of putting $700 billion into Wall Street we'd put that into nuclear power; we could take the coal plants offline and use the coal to make fuel oil (established tech, just not as efficient when oil is available). Yeah, it'd take a decade to ramp up, but no changes would need to be made to the average person's life.

I too would really like to see us pull together instead of pull each other apart, but I don't know how to do it either.