John Edwards for President

On the way back from Mills' house after watching the Tenacious D movie I was listening to C-Span radio. They were broadcasting John Edwards speaking to a group in New Hampshire. This man needs to be our president. Immediately. Bush should get rid of Cheney, name Edwards as his replacement and then just resign. Or maybe he and Cheney could do a murder-suicide deal, I don't really care at this point. The main thing is to get Edwards into the Oval Office as soon as possible, so the healing can begin.

It was like a dream listening to this guy. Universal Health Coverage. Bringing troops home from Iraq. Engaging Iran and Syria to contain the meltdown in Iraq. Cracking down on carbon emissions and seriously investing in alternative energy. And not pie-in-the-sky bullshit either. No, "if elected I promise to have the tooth fairy give everyone $400 every year". No, "I will pay for my new programs by eliminating fraud and waste without raising anyone's taxes one penny"! He explained how his plans would work and said that yes, he would roll back the Bush tax cuts to help pay for them. Basically, he will require everyone to get health insurance. Employers will either have to insure their employees or pay into a general fund to be used for a government insurance plan. If your employer doesn't provide insurance, you'll either have to buy a private insurance plan, or sign up for what he called a "Medicaid Plus" government insurance plan. Both of which will be subsidized on a sliding scale based on income. So, you pay so much based on how much you make and the government pays the rest.

It sounded like he was hoping that eventually everyone would just sign up for the government plan and we could have a single payer health system, but again, he's more interested in getting it done then in bullshit, so if a compromise is what it takes, then he's for it. It was just so refreshing hearing a politician talking to people like they were grownups. Saying, "yes, you'll have to pay for this. it is not free. but it's necessary, and it's worth it". After however many fucking years of having to listen to Bush just lie. Or not even bothering to lie, just playing the recording of himself saying "Terror, terror, freedom, stay the course, freedom, terror", that everyone's already heard a million times.

And Edwards' plan for carbon emission caps... wow. The balls on this guy to even suggest something like that. He wants to have a solid emission cap, if people don't meet it voluntarily he'll mandate it, and he wants to shrink the cap every year. I wish I could quote him exactly, but something to the effect that this isn't a problem for the future, this isn't a 20 years from now problem, this is a today problem. And if you're for baby steps and incremental change, then you're for someone else, because that's not what he'll do as president. I can't remember ever hearing a politician talk like that.

His plan for Iraq... he wants to bring 40,000-50,000 troops home by the end of the year. Pull a bunch more to Kuwait to keep a presence in the region and send the rest, I guess, to Afghanistan to get a handle on that rapidly deteriorating situation. Basically, he would turn the country over to the Shiite and Sunni leaders and then involve Iran, Syria, the U.N., NATO, etc. - the international community in other words - in containing the inevitable shit storm that follows. Because a shit storm there will be. Whether it's this year or 5 years from now or 50 years from now, whenever we leave Iraq, that place disintegrates. Saddam held it together by terrorizing the population, but he's gone and we've destroyed the means he used to terrorize the populace, so whoever ends up taking over for him is going to have to start from scratch whenever we leave. God knows how long that'll take, but it can't even start until we leave. Edwards, at least, has the brains to realize that the main thing is to keep it from becoming an all-out Shiite-Sunni war engulfing the entire region, rather than sending our army over to get blown up just to delay the inevitable.

We need John Edwards. The next president of the United States will have the uneviable job of digging this country out of one gigantic fucking mess. I'm not sure why anyone would even want the job that George W. Bush and his cronies are going to leave the next president. Be that as it may, we can't afford another caretaker president. We can't afford someone that's going to let us just drift along in the direction we're already going, the direction we've been going since Reagan got elected. We can't afford another center-right business lobby front man like the first Bush or Bill Clinton. We need someone with big ideas and real beliefs and the courage to act on them. Even if John Edwards can't deliver everything, or even half the things, he's talking about now; we can't afford not to have him as our next president. Because even if he can't do it, I guarantee you he'll try.

I don't have anything in particular against Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama. We've had worse presidents then Rudy Guiliani or John McCain would be. But, honestly, I can't tell you why any of those people want to be president. Just to win? Because that's the highest job available? To give their friends cool jobs? They haven't really said. Not really. They just all spout the same bullshit all politicians spout about keeping our country strong and creating jobs and fighting crime and blah, blah, blah. They sound like they're reading from the same cue cards sometimes.
John Edwards says he wants to become president to help people, and here's how he'll do it. Sounds good to me. Sign me up. We need to make this man president.


Over and out.


Big Aristotle

YOU'RE FUCKING SHITTING ME!!

PLEASE TELL ME THAT YOU'RE SHITTING ME!!

Wow. I seriously can't believe this. Is this really happening? I'm completely disoriented here. I feel dizzy. Am I actually reading that the Adminstration's claims from 2002 - 5 fucking years ago!! - about a North Korean uranium enrichment program were so much unicorn farts and moonbeams!??! I mean this is post 9/11 stuff here. They decided we didn't have enough on our plate and it was time to antagonize North Korea!!? We're talking the world's easiest to manage genocidal lunatic dictator, so they decided to try it without a net this time? Did they think they were playing Doomsday Dipolomacy: The Videogame or something? This is what I read in Dan Froomkin's White House Watch blog on the Washington Post website this afternoon.

"It now appears that the White House in 2002 used dubious claims of North Korean uranium enrichment as an excuse to break a Clinton-brokered deal, thereby allowing North Korea's poisonous dictator to build up a stockpile of plutonium, which in turn led to the building of as many as a dozen nuclear weapons, one of which he exploded in a nuclear test last year.

And consider the incredible irony of the timing.

News about how unfounded those uranium-enrichment claims were may be emerging now because North Korea's renewed willingness to admit international arms inspectors threatens to expose to public view all the evidence to the contrary."

So, Bush uses bogus claims about a uranium enrichment program to cancel our deal with them that ended their plutonium enrichment. They predictably pick up their plutonium enrichment right where they left off and test a fucking nuke a couple years later. And we did this on purpose? Even when we thought that they might have had a rudimentary uranium enrichment program, it still seemed retarded to let them restart the plutonium program, and now that it looks like they didn't even have a uranium program... Where does this leave us? Does our government even know what's going on, do they understand the stakes here? I mean, a fucking lunatic has the capability to obliterate Hawaii now. Why did George Bush let this happen? No, why did George Bush make this happen? He invited Kim Jong Il to do this. Why?? Someone tell me why a U.S. president would do this. He all but called Kim Jong Il a pussy and DARED him to develop a nuclear arsenal.

And the best part is that it seems the only reason we're finding out about this now is that they were afraid someone else would rat them out when North Korea brought back international weapons inspectors. Who would then see all the non-existent evidence of North Korea's non-existent uranium enrichment program. The real enemy, it seems, isn't terrorists, it's international weapons inspectors. They've done more damage to the Bush administration than any terrorist. I can't wait to see what the international weapons inspectors find in Iran. You know, after the invasion.

I can't believe the contempt they seem to have for everyone. After lying about Iraq having nukes and getting caught, and now having to admit lying about North Korea's uranium enrichment program, they still have the fucking nerve to go to the international community, and the American people, and start talking shit about Iran's nuclear program. Hell, right now, I'm not even sure I believe Iran HAS a nuclear program. Everybody I hear talking about it is a fucking liar. How can anybody possibly trust them?

Here's the thought for the day. Right now, at this point in time, if you STILL believe something that any member of the Bush Administration says about ANYTHING, then you are fucking moron and it will be your own fault when you wake up naked in a burned out field that's about to get nuked. And I'll have no sympathy. You were warned. Repeatedly.

I'm going to try and think about something else now.

Big Aristotle

End Transmission