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2012 Campaign: What is our purpose?

Anyone who watches the news knows the army building for the 2012 campaign has begun. Not much has changed in the past 4 years in the political ring. There is still the huge financial deficit, the massive corruption in American politics in general, and the large unemployment percentage. I have a lot to say about what's going on. Get a drink and strap yourself in, this will take a while.

The past 4 years were unproductive and chaotic. On the fact that we had the first non-white in office alone, some radical and racist lunatics lost their shit. The Secret Service was stretched thin dealing with the 400% increase in death threats from the Bush Administration, and we had a laundry list of domestic terrorist attacks that were committed by homegrown Muslim and non-Muslim extremists, the most recent one being the Tuscon Shooting back at the start of the year. The far right was going to insane lengths to try and connect Obama to Reverend Wright's teachings, Bill Ayers, Hitler, the entire political lineage of the USSR and Chairman Mao, desperate as all hell to get someone, anyone, to assassinate him, and then pull away acting like they were innocent while singing "Ding dong, the negro's dead!" in their heads.

What did we fix during the Obama Administration? I can't really think of anything significant. We had a mess of problems that needed fixing, only to get any proposal filibustered by the Republicans and anyone bought by big business.

Healthcare: No universal healthcare or even a public option. Insurance almost became a mandate.

Immigration: Worsened. Due to the exploding racism in the country, Arizona temporarily adopted a policy where anyone "Illegal-lookin'" to fork over their birth certificate or get taken into federal custody. Joe Asshole used this as an excuse to start arresting "Illegal-lookin's" en masse for even small things, like a broken taillight or driving one MPH over the speed limit, which got him put under federal investigation.

Same sex marriage: Still banned in some areas. The attempts to equate LGBTs to child rapists, terrorists, Satanists, and murderers still continues, even as the avid anti-gay activists are thrust out into the light as gay in a sex scandal.

War on Drugs: Worsened. The drug cartels are using even more sickening and underhanded methods, killing more and more civilians every year, and even though most of America has declared the war a failure, we still think using brute force to win the War on Drugs is the only possible solution. This is in good part derived from people who have been fighting this war since the Nixon Administration, and have invested so much of their lives into this war, legalizing things like marijuana would make the past 40 years pointless.

War on Terror: Worsened. As I already said, Obama being in office sent the far right into a crazy spiral. We had a huge escalation in domestic terrorism since 2008, and now our own media is spearheading this effort. Fox News and their local Loofah is responsible for the murder of George Tiller, even if they weren't the ones who pulled the trigger.

War in the Middle East: Mixed. On one hand, we finally killed Osama bin Laden. Yay? More like a Pyrrhic Victory on the largest scale. We killed Osama bin Laden at the cost of well over a trillion dollars, our values as Americans, our reputation in the world (Yes, that is really fucking important!),several thousand, maybe more, civilians in the Middle East killed by collateral damage and even our own military, national or private. We created in ourselves an embryonic police state, making our own Constitution and its supposedly inalienable rights arbitrary if the government so chooses, and can declare anyone an enemy combatant and hold them indefinitely without trial and subject them to medieval tortures.

Meanwhile, the Republicans really don't want to give any kudos to Obama, but rather Bush, under the farce that he started the hunt for bin Laden, when it was actually Clinton who started it during his administration. When his presidency ended, he left behind a cohesive plan to continue the effort, but the Bush Administration threw it out. Then September 11 happened.

Taxes: Worsened. The super rich had record-obliterating profits the past 4 years in the middle of a recession and borderline depression, and yet still pay almost nothing in taxes due to huge loopholes in the tax code or paying the Senate to change the rules for them. All under the guise of "they create jobs!" This part of the argument for me is really fucking stupid, and I really wish someone in the media, doesn't matter who, just tears into the opposition with this:

"

Of course the super rich create jobs. It's part of an investment to make more money. If they don't hire people to turn the gears of their organization, the organization doesn't make money. If the organization doesn't make money, the owners don't make money. So of course they have to hire people! That's how they make more money. This idea that it excludes them from tax breaks is bullshit.

To make matters worse, we still don't understand that taxes are a GOOD thing, god dammit. It depends on where you're spending the money, not if you're spending the money. The way I see taxes is basically a group agreement. With taxes, we agree that we don't want to have to worry about certain services, like trash collection, education, roads, police, infrastructure, and so on; this also explains why we want to adopt a universal healthcare system. In a theory of mine, that's why I suspect the super rich don't want to pay taxes. The services they get in return don't validate the amount they'd have to pay. Reasonable, understandable, but still not an excuse. At some point, you have to pay back into the system that you are inevitably a part of, and if you use the Communist or Socialist card, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Eliminating taxes and public services is unacceptable, and I will fight against any effort to do so. Privatizing certain services would lead to a profit motive-inspired disaster, especially in this corruption-rampant world we live in. Hell, we've seen it with privatizing the jail systems. The more inmates private prisons have, the more they get funded. This gives them a profit motive to start trying more and more people for longer sentences on harmless charges (Oklahoma has a life sentence for making hash, a marijuana compound, and has the most privatized prisons in the country). This can easily happen in other privatized systems that can hold a monopoly on the industry, which might be tolerable for some services, but on things we take for granted, it's something we cannot afford.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Revoked. That's good and all, but ultimately a hollow victory in light of everything else in this list.

There are many other topics I'd like to address, but I'm almost 7000 characters in and I have no idea how to categorize them. I'll sum up my message into one short monologue.

What is America's purpose now? Our first decade in the 21st century has not been a good one. We've utterly bastardized and ruined everything we stood for in the past decade. We're all divided on even the most basic issues, further exacerbated by the people who want us to be divided and remain divided, even among our friends. The right wing has gone crazy and drove their ideological platform off a fucking cliff. What are our goals? What do we hope to achieve as a nation? What makes us get out of bed every morning? To what end do we strive for?

We need to have a unifying goal as a nation, something to work towards. We will not have a good future in a country full of paranoid, wide-eyed social islands ready to kill anyone for any reason, if there's even a future in that. The rest of the world is moving on without us. We need to find our place in this world that isn't a police state. If we don't come up with a plan and continue to drive the country into the ground, we will lose everything.

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Added:	14 years, 1 month ago 19 May 2011 20:40 CEST

6 Comments on this Journal

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frostcat

14 years, 1 month ago

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I've pretty much skimmed most of the journal and read the last part.

I do agree with you that even though we've taken care of Osama, everything else is still messed up back at home.  In the days I grew up during the 80s to mid 90s, no one worried that much about who's dating/sleeping with who, or what race someone is or anyone prying into someone's personal affairs.  At least not to the point to just hunt them down and arrest/kill them.  Prices for everything was stable and affordable.  Education was actually valued as well as experience on certain fields that employers actually look for.  And even though crime was still around, it's wasn't as bad as it is now.

Of course, all of those mentioned are just hearsay and from what I gathered.  But even the simple things such as cartoons, video games, and even daily activities are put at a major screening by everyone because there may be innuendos in cartoons and kids movies, too much violence in games yet the under aged/parents buy them anyway, and parents being paranoid because the news, Oprah, and other day time TV shows keeps talking about pedophilia day in and day out.  Not to mention the animal diseases that spreading everywhere if you're not healthy enough to handle them.  Swine flu, bird flu, mad cow, west nile, chicken pox, all of that.  Tag on what you mentioned about same sex marriage, Dont Ask Don't Tell, and Immigration laws (which Customs by themselves are complete dicks to those that want to simply visit the states with passport and everything)  and that's the US of A of today.  There are so many stories I've heard from fellow fur and friends alike that have Associates, Bachelors, and Masters degrees and yet they either can't get hired by big name companies, work at a low budget retail stores, or are unemployed from one of the two if not both.

All in all, I really don't see any good future in the years ahead.  I don't even know who will be the candidates for 2012 will be as far as presidency is concerned. Of course it'll be Obama going for the next term, but Trump is a vague possibility.

Either we keep the president that has proven to everyone his nationality after all the bickering and who finished the job that the Bush administration completely ignored only to try and go back to and failed.  As well as hope that he finally pulls through on what he promised he would do.

Or...

- We go for a rich snobby republican who has the potential to get us out of the finical debt but can quite possibly destroy everything else that we the people try to stand for. The fight for equal rights/same sex marriage thrown out the window, unfair rules towards immigration and customs (as if they weren't bad enough already), etc.

Even if our "great" nation finds that unifying goal that everyone can agree upon and actually focus on lowering crime, bettering our education, and opening the doors for better employment, I'm afraid it will be too little too late for us before that actually happens.

MaximilianUltimata

14 years, 1 month ago

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@ frostcat

Actually, Trump dropped out of the campaign, going by word of his mouth. He was petty, coming out swinging at Obama with remarks that bordered on racism, and then masturbating his ego when Obama released his long form birth certificate. Not a good way to start your introduction in the political spotlight. He also dropped out because running for presidency would require him to release his financial records, which are not as awesome as he claims them to be.

My default vote right now is Obama because so far the alternatives are terrible. But what are we going to do for 2016? I don't see the right calming down anytime soon. Hell, they use Reagan as their political Jesus, but if they took a trip back in time to the Reagan administration, they'd disown him for being "too liberal".

This also rings bad for foreign policy. We're lucky that there's no more USSR or Nazi Germany, and "our enemies" are a scattered group whose members range in the triple digits and have about as much military strength as a local militia. Imagine wading through another Cuban Missile Crisis scenario with today's lunatics at the helm. We'd be royally fucked.

And then there's the fight to end Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. I don't know what's worse, the fact that our government is openly saying that they don't care to take care of our own, or that the people who benefit from these programs are trying to end them, who have been - for lack of a better word - indoctrinated to believe that these programs or anything even slightly liberal will equal instant Communism, death panels, gas chambers for the elderly and young, and the return of The Schutzstaffel.

kamimatsu

14 years, 1 month ago

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The blame lies solely with the people who not only voted against Obama's policies, but blamed him when their ideas didn't work.
News flash! The president is not the king. He has no absolute power and he is only failing because YOU make him. Half of what he was blamed for wasn't even him, and the other half isn't true.

Let's not forget the US involvement in Iraq's combat is OVER! It ended last year and nobody noticed. Then Obama reveals a birth certificate he never should have needed to reveal in the first place because assholes thought he was the foreigner when McCain really was. He kills Bin Laden and you complain about the price of gold going up as a result. Then you complain his birth certificate, signed by an actual doctor who, it can be proven, was in that hospital, was a fake.

People expected him to be Jesus. Well, they were right. He did all this great stuff, saved the freaking planet, and then got tortured as a result. I'll bet he doesn't even get credit when he fixes everything the conservatives broke.

tl;dr version: Obama is awesome and it's the Conservatives' fault.

MaximilianUltimata

14 years, 1 month ago

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Edited 14 years, 1 month ago by Owner

@ kamimatsu

Obama was too obsessed with bipartisanship. There were several occasions that he could have easily pushed through a good reform bill with a majority vote, but kept trying to get bipartisanship from the GOP, the Party of No. I see him attempting a Faustian covenant with the GOP, trying to get them to work with him, that will end disastrously. They'll wring him like a dirty dish rag and leave him to the wolves once they get what they want.

Depending on who gets elected, there's a chance Obama could be impeached. Why? Who knows?

Recently, something new has been sprouting up. The Republicans since March have been trying to pass legislation to ban college students from voting, since most college students tend to vote liberal. In fact, among the other groups that would be banned from voting, either directly or indirectly, are the unemployed, "the poor", people who don't have a driver's license, minorities, even members of the military. They're trying to change the rules to prevent people who generally vote Democratic from voting. It's disgusting, unconstitutional, and unethical. No honest party would take extensive measures to prevent certain groups from voting.

kamimatsu

14 years, 1 month ago

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@ MaximilianUltimata

I agree on that. Obama is way too optimistic, as is anyone who sees hope in the world at this point.

DragonPen

14 years, 1 month ago

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In truth i agree. The country is going to shit and it doesnt seem people care to blame those that truely deserve the blame. I have seen rich people in my area laugh and get away with shit that anyone else wouldnt. I see how they look at me as i wear my dirty work cloths while going to pick up something for my dinner. They who did not have to work a day in their lives look down on me just because i was a bit dirty from work.

Oh and all those tabloids spouting that "Obama isnt an american...birth certificate is a fake." What the fuck is wrong with those people? For fucks sake they would not have let him run for president if it WASNT real. But instead they just want him to look worse. I admit the current administration needs to get their heads out of their asses and fix a few things like why some govenors are getting away with making the people in their states suffer. In the state i am in they are letting companies get away with posting "If unemployed need not apply" when it comes to job applications. So that just makes things worse. They would rather hire those that are employed other than helping reduce the unemployment rate.

Its times like these i wish i could go live in japan or something. But i dont have the money to move thanks to my hours getting cut in half.

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