Dems, Now You've Really Ticked Us Off

This excellent post from Ani over at NoQuarter ust about sums up what I have been feeling & thinking for the last few months -- except that she is more more eloquent than I ever could be. She elucidates an emotion I have felt a few times in my life -- and I am feeling it now every time I hear or see Barack Obama.

RAGE
These past eight years, every time I saw George Bush on television or heard one of his idiotic sound bytes, I felt the bile rise in my throat. What horrid nonsense is this snake oil salesman spewing now? What other inanity can spring forth to pretend the economy is fine or that we can say “Mission Accomplished” about Iraq? And if he says the word ‘nuke-u-lar’ one more time, I will scream!!

At the start of 2008, I felt buoyed by a sense of hope. I took out the “Bush” countdown calendar someone had given my husband and actually started leafing through it. This was challenging in itself, because, unlike some stand-ups who use Bush-isms to provide endless fodder for their comic diatribes, I could not laugh. What he and his cabal have done to this country is too sad to be funny.

I was elated in January. Change is on the way. Hope is on the way. But hope for change did not come in the package of Mr. Hopey-Changey, Senator Obama, because it took me about ten seconds to figure out he was another snake oil salesman just like George Bush.

Hope for change was my Joan of Arc in a pantsuit, Senator Hillary Clinton.

Let’s not rehash the horror show of the last eight months. You can recite it yourselves in glorious detail, I am sure. My joy at the prospect of good, true Democratic leadership has been ruined. So let’s move on to what’s left and pick up the pieces. I have to look at the Democratic Party objectively, for the first time in my life, I might add, and ask myself if the corrupt fixers who are now in charge of the henhouse have anything to offer me.

Let’s see what they did offer me after kicking Hillary in the teeth in favor of the endlessly dissembling Barack:

1. Get over it.
2. Where else are you gonna go?
3. Vote for us or they’ll overturn Roe v. Wade.
4. Vote for us or they’ll appoint 8 more Scalias to the bench.
5. Vote for us or we’ll call you racist.

Nice.

I’m supposed to vote for a man guilty of filthy campaign tactics who has never governed anything, and spent 143 days in the Senate before running for President; something he said he would not do.

I’m supposed to vote for a man who won’t produce his own birth certificate, medical records, senate or college records yet demands everybody else stand up and account for themselves thoroughly.

Someone who flip flops on everything he ever stood for and appoints as his VP a good ol’ sexist of the Senate with a lobbyist for a son.

And now I am supposed to stand with a party that is vilifying, demonizing and trashing yet another woman – Governor Sarah Palin. And they are dragging her seventeen year old daughter through the mud. And they are dragging Governor Palin’s child with Down Syndrome through the mud as well.

I may never be a Republican, but both Senator McCain and Governor Palin have already shown they’ve got lots of grit in taking on the big boys and corruption. Whether I agree with their agenda or not, they each have more character in their little finger that Senator Obama does in his whole body.

It is not important to me that our leaders agree with me at all times. It is important that they can and are willing to make a good case to me for what they believe and what they are doing. It is important that our elected officials have a spine, and character to do the right thing when the going gets tough. We don’t have to agree on every issue to move this country forward.

Obama promising to filibuster FISA in February and capitulating six months later told me all I need to know about his grit, his honesty, his character – or his lack of all three.

I don’t need another Bush in office. Guess what? Obama is Bush3, a man lacking in humility. No one is anointed by God. I don’t need someone so arrogant that he does not bother to do his homework and suppresses all dissenting voices by playing the race card continuously. Nor do I need a leader who advocates gutting someone and pretends he had nothing to do with it, standing nobly above the fray with his nose in the air.

Rage. I feel rage.

Senator Obama and Pelosi, Dean, Brazile, Kerry, Richardson, Edwards, Dodd, Kennedy, Rockefeller, Reid, Clyburn et al have accomplished something I didn’t think any Democrat could ever accomplish.

They have enraged me MORE than George Bush.

Impossible you say? Let’s think about it. I expected to be betrayed by George Bush. I smelled that he is not a man of good character, therefore I was not surprised.

I did not expect my ideals to be betrayed by the Party that taught them to me.

We’re supposed to be the good guys: Democrats. Not the sexists. Not the demagogues. Not the liars. We are supposed to stand for something. When any Democrat goes the way of Rove-ian tactics and starts sounding more like Ann Coulter than anybody I’d recognize, I’d say it’s time to leave the Party. And I did.

I will not stand with anyone who stands for this type of behavior. There is an element of this Party that no longer represents anyone’s interests but their own. They have become what they abhor. If I vote for them or with them, then I become what I abhor, too.

I will not do it.

A dear friend, albeit a very apolitical one, just innocently passed along some propaganda about Palin that she received from MoveOn.org. I wrote back and set her straight. It is shocking to me that people who are so used to thinking that EVERY Republican is evil could never believe that ANY Democrat COULD be also. Hopefully, enough people will do their homework and find the real information before it’s too late.

The truth about McCain and Palin’s actions, policies, beliefs and record is nothing like the crap being spewed by the likes of the far left at the moment. But how to convince some of the blinded, kool-aid drinking Democrats, who, desperate for a win at any cost, have decided to adopt the filthy tactics of those such as Rove that got us here in the first place. And those desperate Democrats have taken to eating their own, as in the case of Hillary, or Wes Clark for that matter.

I remember the week before the 2004 Election, Wes Clark, Kevin Costner and Richard Belzer were the panelists on Real Time with Bill Maher – back when I watched that sexist pig’s show – before his sexism was as blatant. Wes took on Bush in a way I had never seen before, which was great and most everyone else was Bush-bashing and encouraging us all to vote for Kerry.

Costner, who I considered at the time to be a bit of an arrogant ass, was advocating voting for Nader and said that he might do so “if he had the balls”. I rejected this notion, saying it would be a wasted vote. He, too, like Nader, felt the parties were too similar and were both corrupt and too beholden to corporate interests.

Wow. If I had known then what I know now!

While I would not vote for Nader then or now, I owe Kevin an apology. He made a very good point: Sometimes you have to lose to win. He also felt that a President should run for only one term – without having the obligation of getting re-elected. That person could just get in there, clean up and be beholden to no one. Ironic that’s what McCain, the conservative maverick, says he wants to do. Picking Palin, the conservative spitfire reformer, was certainly a maverick move, too.

I’m not advocating voting one way or the other. Hey, McCain could be lying, too. But he certainly has a record of working across the aisle and of being a lot more honorable than my other choice.

And my rage tells me that if I acquiesce and vote for the sexist, homophobic, inexperienced liar Obama and put up with the DNC’s treatment of all of us – we render ourselves powerless. Our votes, our participation mean nothing.

We send the message that, not only can the Republicans game an election, the Democrats can do the same. Worse, we send the message that we will put up with it. And just keep bloggin’ on our blackberry and fillin’ up our gas tank and watchin’ American Idol.

No.

That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I want to live in.

If I have to lose to win, so be it. A lesson must be taught and those with integrity must be encouraged. I can think of no better way to do that than to send every corrupt thug packing on November 4th.