An amusing letter-to-the-editor is making the rounds which offers a number of obviously sarcastic arguments for voting Democratic in the coming election. Allegedly authored by someone named Robert A. Hall, it offers such “reasons” as the following:
“I'm voting Democrat because Congress has done such a wonderful job under Democrat leadership the last two years, that I want a lot more of the same.“
"I'm voting Democrat because I want to get my health care from the same competent, efficient, cost-effective, customer-service-focused folks who run the US Post Office, the Pentagon, FEMA and the state Registry of Motor Vehicles.”
It is hard to believe that so many well-meaning people still believe that the Republicans represent the “lesser evil.” Here is an alternative (and equally sarcastic) “argument”:
I’m voting Republican because John McCain and George Bush are so obviously superior to the Democrats—they have done so much to curtail the size of government, the power it exerts over our lives and to further the cause of freedom—and such pragmatic “benefits” clearly outweigh the long-range cultural damage of promoting religion as the foundation of capitalism, which is the philosophy of the Republican Party (as symbolized by Bush and now Sarah Palin).
For the record: I am not voting for either, but if I wanted to vote for the lesser evil, I would vote for Obama.
Please don't miss Craig Biddle’s excellent article, McBama vs. America, in The Objective Standard.
2 comments:
I'm the "alleged Robert A. Hall" who sent the "Why I'm Voting Democrat" piece to my e-mail list, which was picked up to my surprise by several websites. I’ve now posted it on my new blog, http://tartanmarine.blogspot.com/.
It is not entirely mine. There is a similar, but I thought, outdated piece circulating on the net. I updated that. About 16 of the items on the list I wrote and added, including the two you quote. I deleted a few. About half of the rest are as I got it, half I re-wrote. My name is on it as I sent it out. (When I write something original, I put the word count, publication rights and contact info on it.)
I understand the argument for not voting for either candidate. In fact, it's pretty easy to compile a long list of why none of the four--or anyone else--should hold national office. (Probably including me, though you'd have to stretch there!) But someone has to. Not voting is like saying in an emergency, "I can't save both children, so I won't choose, I'll save neither." It’s been since I was in the USMC just before I volunteered for Vietnam that I read Ayn Rand, but I was more Dagney Taggert than John Galt.
For me, the key issue is who will be most likely to keep Islamist terrorists from exploding an a-bomb in Washington, destroying our economy, creating a real world wide depression, and guaranteeing an overwhelming majority for putting security ahead of individual rights. If in 30 years the combination of a stealth jihad at home and violent jihad from overseas results in Shari'a law in America, Rand will not be on the allowed reading list.
So don't vote. You can use the time to shop for Burkas for your granddaughters, who will be chattel.
Robert A. Hall, CAE, MEd
Cpl, USMC 1964-68
SSgt, USMCR 1977-83
Massachusetts Senate, 1973-83
tartanmarine@comcast.net
I frankly question the Republican commitment to the War on Terror. I find it impossible to believe that we could not find and kill Osama bin Laden if we truly wanted to. As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, it was Obama who declared that, if necessary, he will go straight across the border into Pakistan to get bin Laden, and all McCain did was attack him for being “naive” and disrespecting an alleged “ally.” Hitchens feels that Obama is growing and improving while McCain’s choice of Palin demonstrates that not only are his mental powers somewhat diminished but that stopping terrorism is no longer his primary passion. Choosing a woman with zero foreign policy experience to take over in his absence suggests otherwise.
A quote from Hitchens:
“I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that ‘issue’ I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke…”
http://www.slate.com/id/2202163/
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