It’s almost that time, that time when we must pick our national leader. The grand old United States of America is rounding the bend into the November 2nd elections, and the trumpets are sounding along both party lines. Their respective conventions are now done and over and now it’s up to us, the people, to decide whom it is we want to follow in the next four years of our future.
Hopefully we won’t make the wrong choice.
In a normal election year, it wouldn’t matter which side you aligned yourself with and voted for. Democrat or Republican, it was your choice to form political biases and vote with whatever candidate best fit your leadership criteria.
But this is not a normal election year. This is an election year when the fate of our land hangs in the balance. Not to sound too hyperbolic about it, but if – and here’s to hoping it is only a snowball’s chance in hell it happens – if George Walker Bush is once again crowned President of the United States of America, then this country may not survive.
No president has done more to undermine the safety and liberty of this country than the man they have derogatorily christened “Dubya.” The information is by now old news to most everyone from dyed-in-the-wool liberals to rabid conservatives grasping at straws to deny any implication of Bushian wrongdoing. Bush has taken our economy from one of the biggest surpluses in history to the biggest deficit, and sacrificed millions of jobs in the process. His environmental policies – those ironically named “Clean Air” laws – have done more damage than protection. His preemptive war, a violation of international treaties, racks up the casualties day after day and will result in a generation of citizens crippled – whether emotionally or physically – by the horror of an unjustified war.
He’s cut funding to programs designed to help women’s shelters and is pushing legislature to deny homosexuals the right to marriage. He, and the Republican Party, are angling to deny workers overtime pay and are attempting to make it harder for workers to unionize. He has denied connections to the Swift Boat campaigns that were meant to smear and tarnish John Kerry’s war record, yet evidence shows that members of that campaign have connections to the Bush family.
People still believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. When in fact, no Iraqi has harmed an American on American soil in terrorist-related violence. In fact, the members of al-Qaeda that attacked that fateful day were all Egyptian or Saudi – a country Bush has strong allegiances to.
People still – STILL – believe that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. None existed.
People still believe that this war isn’t about oil or power or pride. And Bush still tries to demolish our civil rights one by one.
Bush seems like a great guy to have a beer with. He’s charming and accessible. But those aren’t the qualities that should be priority in the make-up of a president. Kerry may not be the most charismatic man in the world – he may act like a block of wood, with a melting face to boot – but I doubt that he is as dangerous and corrupt as a member of the Bush clan. We need a leader who isn’t going to “cowboy up” and become a trigger-happy loon when crisis arises. We need a leader who can bring back our old allies and make new ones, patch up old wounds, and dissolve hotheadedness and big business corruption. I don’t know if Kerry is that guy, but Bush definitely is not. We have to make that gamble that he isn’t going to be the worst president in our long, uneven history. Since Bushies like to call into question the patriotism of liberals, how about I leave any supporters of the Bush regime with this remark: a vote for Bush is a vote against America.
Johnny Donaldson is a Collegian columnist.
