It’s election time again and, as usual, this one is being touted as the most important election ever. Ever? Sounds a bit dramatic, especially coming hot on the heels of the 2008 history-making election of a black man to the Presidency of The United States. Now, that was friggin’ dramatic, a political, social and spiritual earthquake of global proportions, a real game-changer in world history, and one hell of a tough act to follow.
Which is not to say that these 2010 midterm elections are not important, far from it. All elections are vitally important and everyone eligible to vote should do so every time, if only because you can. Not every nation gets to do that. In 2008, the country not only voted for a black president, but for his plans to take the country in a different direction, sort of like Ronald Reagan, only not really old and dopey.
And as always when a president gets swept in with a new broom, the midterm elections are filled with voices of those getting cold feet about the new direction they voted for 2 years ago. These things happen, and the political party that finds itself on the outside looking in after one of these sea changes always works overtime to undermine the party in power.
That’s adversarial democracy at work, and the greater the president, the more vociferous the opposition. No president had more volatile critics than Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln, two men who took this nation in new directions in a very big way. Those comfortable with the status quo, no matter how awful, are terrified by new directions and the talented people who want to lead us there.
And fair is fair, everyone gets to speak their mind around here, and no president is infallible, or immune from vigorous criticism. Only trouble is, this time around, too many of the people opposing President Obama’s agenda are idiots who are also completely out of their fucking minds.
Having purged the Republican Party of the sane and the reasonable, the right wing went so crazy after being voted out of power in 2008 that not even daft old Ronald Reagan could be a Republican today. Even he wasn’t that crazy. Now, we’ve got people running for office either because they’re angry or because God himself told them to. Beyond their rage or zealotry, they’ve got nothing, no plan, not even a clue.
Hell, plenty of people are angry, or religious nut jobs. Or both. No reason to elect them to anything either. There’s something awful fishy about bellowing dunces all of a sudden amassing millions of dollars in campaign funds. From who? Jerry Lewis fans? Did somebody somewhere decide that government needs to be a source of entertainment?
Is this the idea: Democracy would be really great if only we could get a bunch spiteful lunatics elected to high office? Hardly seems reasonable. Especially in a nation where there’s an amazingly broad variety of entertainment available at our fingertips every minute of every day.
Or maybe these dimwits are fronts for someone else with lots of money who wants to buy political power, like Bush The Younger was for Shotgun Dick Cheney. That would have been as funny as our comedians seemed to think it was if it wasn’t for all the catastrophic policies of the Cheney Administration.
Entertainers have their place, and so do dopey people. That place just doesn’t happen to be in the halls of power. We already tried the elect-the-buffoon strategy, and his “handlers and advisers” screwed up the richest, smoothest-running country the world has even seen in their 8 years in power. Generally, only dancing bears, prisoners and mental patients require handlers. Having a stammering dunce for a president wasn’t all that funny after all.
The joke was on us, and now these assholes want us to fall for it again. Get out and vote this November. Whatever the race, whatever the state, whatever the office at stake, the choice is clear: vote for the sane person. There’s serious work to be done in America. Send the ridiculous people back to wherever it is they came from, and let the grownups get to work.