Barack Obama, Worthless Bastard Extraordinaire

My hope that the course of America might change was crushed when "my" candidate was exposed as yet another sleazy politician who cannot be trusted. Obama's promise to fight FISA abuses was only that, a promise, and he broke it, flatly and openly. His astonishingly weak justification for his vote to support Bush's evisceration of the Fourth Amendment was just so much predigested oatmeal. What else did he promise just to get my support and the support of people like me? He's just another hollow, self-serving politician whose only agenda is personal aggrandizement. The worthless bastard!

I'm going to vote for him anyway, because I have no other choice. I certainly wish I did. McCain is the incarnation of evil, in my book, because he is Bush with a different patronizing tone; there is no way I would ever vote for him. The "third party" candidates don't represent my views and, if they did, I would not jeopardize the possibility of getting a Democrat elected by supporting them. I hate that, but until we have much stronger and more attractive alternatives to the Democratic Party, that's where my support will go. It chills me to think I'm backing a person and a party I hold in such contempt.

I wish there were someone on the ballot who shared my beliefs and attitudes and had not made politics a career but...because of the person's principles, capacity to lead, and deep desire to take this country in a completely different direction...had decided a run for the presidency was his or her civic responsibility. Who the hell would that be, though? It's downright terrifying to realize that no one comes to mind as a leader I would trust with this country's future. It's too late now, anyway. Once the two mainstream parties have settled on a candidate, the options virtually disappear.

We desperately need a viable third, and perhaps fourth and fifth, party. As annoying as I find the candidacies of Ralph Nader and Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin, I understand the frustrations that led to their parties' formation. Frankly, if the Libertarian party would adopt positions on social welfare that more closely mirror my own, I might well explore giving them my support, though I see in them, and in the "other" parties the same inclination toward lifetime politicians as in the mainstream.

While I'm talking politics and Obama, I'll throw in my two cents about the uproar that Jesse Jackson's sotto voce comments caused. WTF? Who cares? Must supporters of every candidate be 100% in lock-step with the candidate? Having witnessed Obama's disingenuousness about FISA, I can well appreciate Jackson's ire at his perception that Obama was selling out his own people. Give it a rest. This kind of sensationalism is absurd. Jackson's comments are not the big story; Obama's abandonment of his principles is the big story.