For the first time in two generations, I'm splitting my ticket. I was always taught that it was virtually a sin to split your ticket, i.e. to divide your vote between the Democrats and Republicans. I come from a family that generally voted Democrat and didn't split their tickets -- but of course, there was the famous time that my parents voted for Nixon (!), probably the only Catholics in their parish, at a time when all the Catholics voted for John F. Kennedy. I don't know what drove them to do that -- they even had a letter from Nixon thanking them for voting for him which is long lost. I remember my brother and I used to fetch that document out of the big oak roll-top desk and even try to rub the ink on the signature to see if it was real -- it was.
Why shouldn't you split your ticket? Well, because you don't want to destroy the unity of the party, see. I guess that's the thinking. So why did I split mine -- the only time in my life (except, of course, for the post 9/11 vote for Governor Pataki).
Easy. Because I don't like Obama, I don't like the professional left, I don't like the "Restoring Sanity" rally, and I don't like Paul Krugman. If I was hesitant about splitting my ticket, Paul Krugman's column put me over the edge.
I don't want unity.
I definitely want there to be a split, and one in which Republicans in the Congress can act to curb the radical president from the Democratic Party and his cronies.
I surely wouldn't vote for Palladino in New York State. God, he looks like death warmed over, for one, from some creepy horror movie. His hate-speech against gays has been atrocious. If you are a liberal of any sort, centrist or leftist, you couldn't possibly vote for a man who has so outrageously slammed LGBT, not only in opposing gay marriage, which can be a common position, but actively opposing the gay parade and saying things like "children shouldn't be brainwashed into thinking being is acceptable" and gay people “would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family,” than being gay. This comment was widely condemned, from conservative groups like the Irish Republicans, even. There doesn't seem to be anything redeeming about him, so you "have" to vote for Andrew Cuomo. I don't feel overly enthusiastic about Cuomo, but it is what it is, and you only get to chose between two -- obviously, although my rent is "2 damn high," I'm not going to be voting for the idiot from "the Rent's 2 Damn High" party who is merely sopping away votes from the Democrats like Ralph Nader.
In the past, when it came to the congressional part of the ticket, I would even vote for David McReynolds of the War Resister's League (and old friend) or somebody from the Green Party, because I really loathed the "machine" and the DELUGE of junk mail, most of it negative advertising, and robo-calls.
The other day I lay down for a nap after coming home from a job and before preparing for a night of work, and who should wake me up but...Gloria Steinham. Good Lord. I didn't even wait to hear who she was stumping for, because it was just too damn wierd! I except Koch and Hillary to be calling next.
But this year, because of Paul Krugman, because of so many other things, I voted for the Republicans for House and Senate. On purpose. To ensure pluralism. As a defensive measure. To restore *balance*. Because it has become insane --the New York Times has become unreadable.
I honestly don't know much about Joe DiGuardio or his daughter who is apparently an American Idol judge (I don't have a TV so don't watch it). But he's Republican, running for Senate from NY State, so he gets a circle marked on the ticket (my absentee ballot is already sent in because I have to go out of town). I was especially happy to see that a main staple of his campaign against Kristen Gillibrand was to question her support of the sub-prime mortgages which she advocated as a way for the state to help the poor. Of course it is terribly politically uncorrect not to blame Evil Bush, Capitalism, Amerika, Wall Street and assorted other Evil Forces for the mortgage crisis that led to the recession (and Cuomo was supporting the moves to bail out Fanny Mae and such), but surely there was a role played by those who hustled poor people with NINJA status (no income, no job, assets) for politically-correct reasons as well as greed, into mortgages they couldn't afford. Lefties will say this is scape-goating. I don't care -- they don't want to look at *all* the root causes and this is definitely one of them.
What I especially don't like about Gillibrand is that I am "supposed" to like her, as she is "a conservative Democrat," a woman in politics, and the NRA backs her pro-gun stance. Well, no thank you. I'm not pro-gun. And I don't care if you are a conservative Democrat because "I"m mad as hell".
What I especially loathed about this Paul Krugman piece was the "unite for unity" stuff, like that old parody of a socialist song by Abe Brumberg (hilarious!). We don't fail if we are "divided"; um...we have a *democracy* when different people with *different perspectives* can deliberate in the Congress. In fact, it would be great if we had more than two parties so that the more radical democrats could calve off and frankly form a socialist party that would then have to earn its keep instead of using the stealth tactics of the "pragmatic socialists" to sneak into power.
I'm reading Stanley Kurtz's Radical-in-Chief about the socialist background of Obama. Yes, *socialist*, and that's ok, because he was definitely within the socialist movement. It's terribly interesting to me to find out that he went to the same Socialist Scholars' Conferences that I did in the 1980s (he was at Columbia University at the time). Stanley has a best-selling book and is a respected researcher at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, not some loon that people can easily dismiss. He methodically researches the documentation and the events and personalities of that era and situates Obama within exactly the tendencies I always suspected he was in, with the people I knew myself (since I used to attend the various events sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America and related groups in those years).
When I read Obama's college essay about nuclear disarmament, and saw his policy on arms control with the Russians, I was shocked that he was parroting what we saw as blatant Soviet propaganda in those days -- "no first use". Actually, not shocked, since he articulated exactly the position of the left running the peace movement in the 1980s, with perfect pitch. He doesn't appear to have leaned toward the more anti-Soviet European Nuclear Disarmament perspective -- and I'd love to find out more about that from him. I don't remember Obama at these meetings, but then, they had 300-400 or more people at them at Cooper Union and then later at the BMCC. The socialists running these meetings in those days didn't tend to have many blacks among them -- they were white professors, many of them New York Jews, or Irish Catholics, with only Julian Bond, for example, to stand out as a black. I was at the conference with the famous Piven -- but I only remember something different about these meetings than what Kurtz has captured -- I remember that it was about *single-issue organizing*. That these hardcore Marxists, these Trotskyists boring from within, these socialist democrats and democratic socialists realized with the waning of the 1960s mayhem that they would have to regroup and reorganize and accomplish their revolution differently. So they seized on single issues like health care or education (sound familiar?!) to organize in, burrowing into schools, non-profits, hospitals, etc. to push the socialist agenda just in these one areas, so it wasn't in full-blown recognizable, complex -- and sectarian! -- form, but just seemed like it was "for the community".
I remember in an interview with Steve Gillmor, when I frankly mentioned Obama's socialist ideas that were detectable in the campaign, like the "guns and religion" concept, or the idea that racism is at root not a moral problem but a capitalist economic problem, or the superficial focus on the single issue of health care as a tactic, he immediately shut off the mike. He automatically moved to censor me and shut me up from revealing the stealth-tactic instincitvely, as a red-diaper baby (his father was a communist, and he is horribly sensitive to the idea of anybody engaging in "McArthyism".)
What always came across to me from the socialists of that era was their cool, cerebral, over-educated and arrogant assurance that just a committee of the "smart people," just a sort of central planning body but with "democratic participation," of course," could run things "better" than messy markets, or "paid-for politicans" who were bought out by "special interests". I never bought that line; it was so transparently a grab for power and so nakedly unaccountable.
Oh, says the Paul Krugman commenter. But the Republicans got us into this mess. How could you vote for them? Easy. Because I don't see it that way, and because I think more than anything there has to be a debate, and a clash, and not a guided social movement run by the wired elite.
Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, MoDo as they call her (ugh) -- they've done more than most to stampede hatred of the right, fear of the Tea Party, and smearing of every conservative thinker or supporter as "racist" (among the reasons they supported Obama to make him a bulletproof candidate to stampede guilty liberals with) or "fascist". Sure, there are figures with loathsome ideas. But there are also figures who just have a different perspective than you and are entitled to it (like Sarah Pallin).
Jon Stewart jumped the shark not only for me (I've always loathed him, too -- he's just so cunning and nasty) but for others wondering whether it was appropriate for him to mimic Glenn Beck as a talk show host and entertainer, essentially, and go out and run a political rally. I especially loathe the notion -- so much like those socialists in their perfect imagined committees of the 1980s -- that "smart people" who are "surrounded by idiots" can "restore sanity" because the other people are "crazy". It's the *incessant* delving for facts to goad and expose and pillory people from the opposite political movement that really starts to wear thing after awhile. At first it seems impressive, but then with its sheer malicious relentlessness and zealotry, it becomes part of the Soviet pseudo-science that's so disturbing about the Obama administration in a number of respects -- the belief that "just the facts" are accessible only by this over-educated and wired elite, and that anyone who disagrees is stupid, or believing in "myths," or suffering from "distortions" brought on by "guns and religion", etc.
I'll never forget the time Jon Stewart did a show in which he talked about how Sarah Pallin had a "little box of crazy under her bed". I instantly said to myself, "and what about the little box of socialism under *your* bed, Jon?!" And I don't have far to look for that.
So looking at the Obama picture where we are now half way, why I am less than thrilled? When you see criticism of Obama in your SL circles, it's likely to be from the hard left who are disappointed he isn't *more* radical and *more* like European socialists and *more* anti-business. That's not my problem with him; my problem is that I feel he is smuggling in an agenda, as he was long ago taught in his community-organizing and socialist scholar days, and that it is one that is too radical, too unrealistic, and too impractical -- being covered up with phony stealth-socialist pragmatism.
Yes, there's the socialism. Like any normal person, if socialism *worked*, I might be for it. But...it doesn't:
o despite all the health care hoopla, I don't have health care nor any prospect of it, and instead, I face the prospect of a *fine* for not buying what will be health care likely somewhat out of my reach
o such low-cost health care as I did have for my kids was removed during one of those endlessly repetitive documentation and needs-testing exercises that are designed to shake loose anyone who seems to draw anything from the system. I definitely don't mind paying for health care -- *I pay for it*. Thousands of dollars of it. Because I don't have insurance, and even such child health care insurance that I had did cost me something and had many extra costs (i.e. how about $1000 for an anesthesiologist for an operation? Of course, you need anesthesia for an operation -- it's not optional. But it's a separate bill, and health care plans wind up not paying for it).
Would the purist find those making use of the state's child health care plan freeloaders? Well, did you know that to innoculate your child for school costs *one thousand dollars*. Imagine that. It's frightening. And some of the shots seem so unnecessary and have bad side effects and seem to be pushed on you by aggressive drug companies more than anything. *One thousand dollars*. That's not capitalism; that's extortion.
Have you ever been hit by a car? Before treatment even begins, you will be paying at least $450 and more like $750 for the ambulance ride. Blood tests are $150 or more a piece -- and they might easily do 6 of them for this and that at a checkup. Like those cabs that seem to ratchet up to $4.50 before you've even gone half a block these days, a visit to the doctor just to check your blood pressure and have your heart listened to is $250.
So yeah, something needed to be done on health care, but in the zeal -- the *greed* -- to make it the perfect 1980s socialist stealth plan "single payer option" learned by rote at the Young People's Socialist League Summer Camp, we instead have a huge mess, and a mess that may never even go into effect in any way. The "public option" kills the market system. The market system isn't perfect and is "distorted" as the socialists say, but the answer is to enable low-income people to purchase cheaper insurance from private companies. I could never understand why the child health care plus program of many states wasn't ever used as an argument for ObamaCare, and why no one ever just said "let's expand this to adults".
o war in Afghanistan -- the surge is only making the Taliban now move to the north, which was relatively peaceful. This Wall Street Journal interactive piece is a dramatic indictment of the surge.
o the Russians -- too soft, too vague, too much like Soviet propaganda of the 1980s on arms control, especially given the Russians' worsening behavior at home, cracking down on dissidents, the media, and tolerating bloody rule in the North Caucasus -- and betraying Eastern Europe for no reason (although I don't support the armaments in Eastern Europe, better supportive rhetoric against Russian encroachment and no-visa policies should be put in place for East Europeans due to their support of the U.S.)
o education -- missing in action, and maybe that's a good thing if it means more warmed over Ivan Illich theories from bygone decades
o fining BP -- sorry, but they suffered enough with the losses they incurred and the payouts they have to make, I'm not against capitalism or oil companies just because they extract oil from the earth that people use. Call me when you have everyone using Second Life for their meetings and they don't drive cars anymore.
o appointing even more radical people than himself (paging Beth Noveck in the White House Office of Science and Technology) and also being painfully slow to appoint even some of them, letting a year or more of his term go by without key posts filled (USAID, where he almost put in the socialist Paul Farmer but then picked a technocrat instead).
o green jobs -- what a scam -- cronies, professors, Silicon Valley -- all fake
o couldn't stand up to the Trial Attorneys of America, who donated to his campaign -- the lobby you really have to stand up to if you want to reform health care, since their malpractice suits are what fuel a lot of the heavy expense of medicine, forcing doctors to stock up on huge malpractice insurance policies
o But aside from the Obama problem, for me, the real problem is the professional left and the professional leftist media. They've become blatantly partisan, as the debacle with NPR firing Juan Williams has shown us. There's no longer even a pretense of impartiality or "good news judgement" if the rare black on their team can't say what others think -- and say the more important thing (which has been overlooked in this furor) -- that Muslim states are a threat to the West. They are. I want to hear this not only *admitted*, I want to hear plans for how to deal with Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia (besides selling arms to them!), etc. And I never hear them from the Socialist Scholars and the Community-Organizer-in-Chief.
What this hate-mongering and incitement of fear on the left resolves to is a lack of real public debate on the issues. You can never debate, say, whether shale should be mined for gas in New York State, because you have to endlessly gasp at the public scandal of gay-bashing instead. Yes, it's terrible. No, don't vote for him, then. Could we have some other issues now, please?
I was especially appalled at what the evil geek wired media did to Christine Donnell, which was preceded by a disgusting SNL skit some weeks ago. And sorry, I don't buy the rationale offered -- that if Christine Donnell's stance is one of a chaste Christian candidate that this is somehow "imposing views" on other people, or somehow not worthy of upholding if she had a past where she once had in fact a virginal one-night stand with a loser who wrote about it for money. Sorry, no sale. It isn't that her sex life is irrelevant (it should be, but never is, for a politician); it's that gawker.com thinks it's the public conscience whose mission is to expose candidates who run on a morals ticket as "liars" -- and I find that an unpersuasive role.
What the secular humanist gawker.com wants to do isn't really play the role of an investigative newspaper (it's not one) or the upholder of morals from being sullied by wayward Christians (what a crock); it wants to undermine Christian values any way it can because it loathes them, and believes no form of public morals is necessary, and no one should ever take a public position on how people should live. It has a right to do that, but it shouldn't try to prettify their secular crusade with the guise of "journalism". It's just a partisan anti-religious campaign and anti-morals jihad, of the sort we see a hundred times everywhere these days from Christopher Hitchens and all the rest. Unimpressed.
I notice the left used this same argument for why they've hacked into emails and pried into the lives of other candidates, even the Democrat John Edwards. It's always about a claim that these figures of the conservative right are "telling other people what to do with their sex lives" so they "deserve to be outed when they are less than perfect". We have to hear endlessly of Pallin's daughter pregnant out of wedlock as if it is a Big Story...and as if somehow it still isn't ok to oppose teenage pregnancies and try to prevent them -- and as if gawker.com is out there stumping against unwed pregnancies.
Now, I personally wouldn't vote for Donnell because of her anti-gay beliefs. But...I can oppose her and not vote for her (were she in my state) because of her anti-gay beliefs. I don't have to chase, stalk, savage, expose, and pillory her. And yet that's what the cynical geek male left does, in every campaign. No thank you. That is why I am sending a Republican to the Congress.
The only way this country will be saved is if the DNC and GOP are both voted out every election to the extent they are so marginalized they lose the support of the corporate dollars. Vote out all incumbents. Never elect another democrat or republican until the 2 party system is destroyed.
When they start saying "in 2 years you have the right to vote us out but not now" then it is time to vote them all out. And the democrats have made such statements that we have no right to vote them out this time around.
Vote them all out.
Yes We Can.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | 10/31/2010 at 05:02 AM
ive split my ticket between what Ive perceived as moderate democrats and moderate republicans for years....
to use Stewarts words..even when one "AMPLIFIES" a POV... it doesnt make it any better.
geeks should know that 11 on the amp -was a joke... not a business plan.... so sad
Posted by: cube inada | 10/31/2010 at 01:36 PM
Voting democrat or republican is downright stupid. They both are bought and paid for by all the same people. The differ on only the unimportant issues, but they are all pro-war, pro-NAFTA, pro-GATT, pro-drug war, and pro-bigger government.
Posted by: Joseph Ferraris | 11/01/2010 at 04:47 AM
Wow, what a traitor to the party! Bow you head in shame and walk away.
Posted by: Ronald Hax | 11/01/2010 at 11:42 PM