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