[FoRK] How Barack lost my vote forever

[Luis Villa]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Russell Turpin <deafbox at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>  sdw:
>
> > Anyway, although I believe McCain is a lot more rational, I cannot vote
>  > for the party of theocrats.
>
>  The Republicans nominated McCain four years too late. They should
>  have nominated him in 2004, when it became clear that the
>  incumbent was a war criminal.

I'll give them some credit; it wasn't really clear until fairly
recently that the entire administration was legally culpable. Three
years ago a friend spent the summer working on war crimes indictments
against Rumsfeld; at the time I thought it was fairly implausible, but
it seems likely at this point that most of the key players should not
travel to Europe after they are done with their terms.

[That said, they should have nominated him in 2004 because it was
obvious Bush was incompetent.]

> In my view, THE chief issue in this
>  election is how to undo the damage of Bush's "unitary executive."
>  The damage to our Constitution. The damage government processes.
>  The damage to American reputation. The damage to the nature of
>  political discussion in this nation. I still find it surreal every
>  time I read a Republican defending torture. It is as if I stepped
>  from a sane and civilized nation, into some weird dystopic fiction.
>
>  Obama, unsurprisingly, is the only candidate who has said much about
>  this. He has said that one of his first three acts as president
>  would be to order a review of all Bush's executive orders, with the
>  goal of rescinding those that are Constitutionally questionable. He
>  has said his attorney general will investigate the conduct of the
>  Justice Department under Bush for criminal activity related to
>  torture policy. Taxes continually bump up and down. But what Bush
>  has done to our political process is unique in my lifetime, and it
>  needs to be unrolled as much as possible as soon as possible, before
>  its position in our political culture is fixed. That, truly, would be
>  Bush's worse, evil legacy. If Obama does those two things AND raises
>  my taxes by 5%, I'll still be pleased with my vote for him. Of course,
>  if he does the latter and not the former, I'll be pissed.

+1.

Luis