I was torn this past election. My instincts told me to vote Republican. Like most, I considered myself a Democrat until I grew older and wiser. It didn’t help that the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left that they are in danger of falling off the face of the Earth.
Their last candidate, John Kerry, was a laughingstock. I’ll never forget his Lurch-like mumbling, “I have a plan.” He never gave any details whatsoever of any plan, just that “he had a plan.” His only plan was pointing out that Dick Cheney’s daughter was gay and attempting to make President Bush look stupid in debates. Making President Bush look stupid was not a hard task in any circumstance. Bush did, however, shine in the 2nd and 3rd debates. No matter how dumb he tried to make Bush look, Kerry could never overcome the fact that when he asked why he voted for the war, he replied that “he voted for the war before he was against it.” Huh?
Then there’s the ACLU. The ACLU is the heart of the liberal movement. They’re the ones that want to take the Ten Commandments and God out of your lives. The ACLU’s attempts to remove God from our lives date back to the Scopes Monkey Trial in which they convinced a substitute teacher to teach Darwinism in a Tennessee school. At the time, teaching evolution was a crime. This set the stage for the endless debate of creation vs. evolution. Liberals and supporters of evolution will call you stupid and make fun of your beliefs if you believe in God and creation. I don’t care what anyone says, “I didn’t come from no ape.” I don’t support that whole Big Bang Theory or the claim that dinosaurs once ruled the Earth either.
Nevertheless, liberals and the ACLU represent the opposite of traditional values that this country was founded on. Take the recent Miss California USA debacle. Miss California merely stated her beliefs on what marriage should be. She was ripped to shreds for her beliefs. While I understand the plight of the gay community, I don’t understand why someone should be condemned for disagreeing with their stance. Since when is the norm of marriage not a man and woman? It’s almost as if the ACLU is forcing their views upon you. Next, we’ll be burning books.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I believe in traditional morals and values. Although I wanted to vote Republican, I honestly feel that a John McCain administration would have been more of the same administration that we had for 8 years. The ACLU and liberal views in general have been compared to Socialism. Another Republican administration would have been a move toward Socialism as well. We must have change in our government to minimize government control.
Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t vote Republican. The whole Sarah Palin sideshow was nothing more than a desperate attempt by McCain to gain female voters that Obama might have lost with his tough primary battle with Hillary Clinton. I must admit, however, I was enamored with her after her speech at the Republic National Convention. She delivered a fantastic speech. Subsequent interviews with her, however, revealed that she only "delivered" a good speech. She definitely didn’t have a clue to what she was saying. The Katie Couric interviews are painful to watch. I commend whoever wrote her RNC speech, but someone should have prepped her for the subsequent interviews and press dealings.
Further proof that the Palin sideshow was a fabrication is her recent family issues. How lovely they all looked on stage at the RNC. It was heartwarming to know that young Bristol and her boyfriend would be “doing the right thing” when the baby is born. It is also such a coincidence how quick the boyfriend left and made the talk show circuit after the election was over. My guess is that they had been split up for a long time only to see themselves forced together on a national stage to save face when the announcement that Bristol was pregnant was made.
I gotta be honest. I got tired of the whole “hot for teacher” look anyway. In the Van Halen video, the teacher takes her glasses off and lets her hair down. Had Palin threw the glasses down, threw the bobby pins to the crowd, and threw her hair back like Tawny Kitaen in the Whitesnake video, Here I go Again, McCain might have stood a chance. Instead, she just looked like, well, a librarian.
I was not that confident of Obama, though. For one, he reminds me too much of Nicolae Carpathia, the Anti-Christ in the Left Behind books. Like Nicolae, he rose from nowhere with rock star-like status very quickly with promises of peace. For those of you that have not read the books (the movies don’t do them justice), the comparisons are downright eerie. There were even some people that proclaimed Obama as the savior.
Despite my doubts, Obama has made some good decisions. For starters, he has surrounded himself with good and smart people. He has a very impressive cabinet. Good leaders always surround themselves with good people.
He also made a wise choice in not releasing supposed torture pictures. Why would we want to release those pictures? Are we as a society naïve enough to believe that this is something new? There are no rules in war. Never has been. The only difference between now and earlier wars is that now we have instant communications, liberals and the ACLU with a conscience. The only people that should have went to prison for the Abu Ghraib pictures are the people that leaked them to the public. I would have settled for not knowing. Like Johnny Lang used to sing, “Lie to me, tell me everything is all right.”
I questioned Oprah and Beyonce crying at the inauguration. While I don’t discount the significance the election had to African-Americans, I think Obama’s election has a much larger significance. In America’s early years, it was known as the Melting Pot. It was the place where different ethnicities would come to live harmoniously. E Pluribus Unum. Out of many peoples, races, religions and ancestries has emerged a single people and nation. That was the concept anyway. Unfortunately, racial discrimination in multiple forms has never let this happen completely. Barack Obama, however, is the epitome of the melting pot. Born from an African-American father and a Caucasian mother, schooled in Indonesia and Hawaii, Obama is the first “real American” to ever hold the presidency.
Some economists have stated that the U.S.is slowly becoming a third world country. I beg to differ. Things have changed, no doubt. We must, however, be willing to change as well. America has and always will be the land of opportunity. Obama, once again, is the epitome of opportunity in America. Who would have thought that he as a youngster would become the president of the most powerful country in the world? The same opportunity exists for everyone. I tend to see things like water in a pond or stream. If it’s not moving, the water becomes stale and stagnant. It must move to remain fresh. The same thing applies to our minds. We must enrich our minds or else we become stagnant.
Obama is not the savior. He is a very charismatic person who had an incredible political machine running his campaign. Charisma is what we need in a leader. Like Johnny Lang said, “lie to me, tell me everything is all right.” If people believe everything is going to get better, it will. As long as doom and gloom is spread across the media, consumers will not spend money and the economy will never get better.
Obama is a breath of fresh air in an environment that was becoming stagnant. I think he’ll do all right.
