You know, this is going to be a rough eight months for me. The elections will hit in November and for the first time in a while the choices are hard for me. This is the first of what will no doubt be a serious of blogs looking at the candidates and issues as I struggle to make my final choice. Go ahead and read on if your curious about my concerns or if you too feel like this is a important one.
My “core issues” are…
- I am an ardent believer in capitalism, small government and free trade.
- I fully support a strong military, an unwavering dedication to the eradication of those who would inflict violence upon my nation and the use of force to achieve our policy ends.
- I am socially liberal, favoring abortion and same sex marriage just to start with. As a man in a poly relationship with strong ties to the BDSM community who enjoys pornography and pretty girls you can imagine how I feel about the religious and feminist extremists, both of whom want to tell me what I can or can’t see, hear and think.
Normally , that leads me to evaluate any election on those three legs…
- Financial policy
- Foreign policy
- Social policy
When you add it up, the Republicans usually win two out of three (1,2) while the Democrats tend to waver a whole bunch on the social policy front. The split on social policy is usually because Democrats have a social policy defined strongly by [[wp:Political_correctness|political correctness]] and extreme feminism. So imagine how bad things have to have gotten with the Republicans that I now consider their social policy so radically out of line that it may bring me to vote against them.
See, I evaluate every presidential election on the basis of a fairly simple question: Which one of these guys has the least potential to ruin my country?
The USA is an anomaly. We are the longest standing democracy in human history (if I am wrong [[let me know]]) and that status is fragile. Once a nation is gone it is gone, and you can’t get it back. Freedom can be threatened from without and within and neither of those threats can be ignored.
So my question is usually an easy one to decide: Pick a Republican who will (generally) protect my nation from external threats and cause me minor problems socially or pick a Democrat who will cause me problems socially and completely gut my foreign policy and defensive ability. No brainer right?, pick the Republican cause if the country gets ruined by a foreign power or becomes impotent on the international scene we are screwed.
This time, it’s not that clear cut. The current administration may well be a threat to the nation I hold so dear that I am willing to accept some foreign policy risk to save my social policy. There are important things in motion that I cannot ignore… and that are going to be impossible to reverse if they happen.
- The ill conceived [[wp:Patriot_Act|Patriot Act]] is dramatically eroding my civil rights and protection under the law. When a US citizen can be secretly arrested and detained indefinitely without trial something has gone horribly wrong in my country.
- Outside the Patriot Act there is a drive to expand the ability of the FBI to monitor and spy on our own citizens that I will not be at all happy about.
- The introduction of a bill to allow the Supreme Court to be overruled by an Act of Congress is, especially in the light of the Patriot Act, unacceptable to me as a matter of concept. It won’t pass but the fact that if it did this President would sign it without hesitation concerns me deeply.
- The attempt to pass a Constitutional Amendment to ban same sex marriage indicates to me that the religious right has far too much influence in this administration for my taste.
Am I willing to risk electing someone who might leave this nation vulnerable to external attack and make too many compromises to appease foreign leaders in order to prevent the potential gutting of the freedoms and protections that keep this nation unique? I may very well be… it might be worth the risk but it’s a lousy choice to have to make.