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I am not, by any means, educated enough to argue about why our government system is awful and why I, in general, dislike republicans. But I do read enough to justify my opinions, and occasionally others say exactly what I wanted to say:


"The current Democratic party is Socialist, to the extent that they favor using public money to provide services to people that private companies could have provided - like health care, education, construction, retirement benefits, etc.

The current Republican party is Facist, to the extent that they favor using public money to benefit large corporations and their leaders, and they collude with the media to keep the public in a misinformed frenzy.

I'll take Democratic Socialism over Republican Facism ANY day."





"many Americans truly, honestly believed that Bush was the better candidate

What does that have to do with anything? Many Americans believed Ross Perot was the better candidate, but nobody argues that he deserved the job or - if he managed to force his way into office - that we should shut up about it.

I voted for Bush for various reasons

Ahh... now I see where you're coming from.

The fact is, about a half-million more Americans voted for Al Gore than for George Bush. As for who was more partisan, consider the relentless smear campaigns carried out against Bush opponents Anne Richards ("she's a lesbian!"), Al Gore (everything you can think of from "he claims to have invented the Internet" to "he grew up in a fancy Washington hotel"), and John Kerry (the Swift Boat liars).

Consider the shenanigans carried out in Florida in 2000 that exposed the weaknesses in American democracy and showed just how open to abuse the system is. The Republicans were simply more partisan, beating on the system without regard for the spirit and principle of the rules to get the result they wanted.

Consider the (more subtle) shenanigans in the 2004 election, particularly in Ohio, where voters in Democratic districts had to wait as much as 8 hours to vote and had their right to vote challenged in massive numbers by Republican partisans at the polling stations. This was made possible by Republicans in the Governor's office and Republicans in control of the election. Voters in Republican-leaning districts did not face these modern-day Jim Crow measures.

Now, consider all the shady stuff that's so difficult to prove - it took years just to get logs from these electronic voting machines, and they're FULL of suspicious data. Consider the 11th-hour "correction" in the voting data on election night 2004 - we're asked to accept that the exit polls were way off for the first time in history, and somehow the numbers jumped just enough in just the right places (all at the same time!) to put Bush over the top. Yet anyone who talks about this is smeared as a "nutjob"...

Who is more partisan? Republicans. One of the great failures of the Democratic party in the last 5 years has been to underestimate the ruthlessness and lack of principle on the part of the Republicans. Anybody who claims "well, both sides do it, everybody is partisan these days, a pox on both their houses" has either not been paying attention, or has drunk the Republican kool-aid."



"George W. Bush is a symptom of what's wrong with the US today, not the cause."


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