bummer

as most of you already know, john edwards has formally withdrawn from the race for the democratic presidential nomination. he was the only real democrat of the three front runners in my humble opinion and i, for one, was looking forward to voting for a candidate i actually respect, instead of the lesser of two evils, in the california primary on february 5th. so fuck it all to hell and back, and a big "pooh" to the national media whose reporting of edwards was so bad that there are still people who think clinton came in second in iowa.

i do not get what people find so inspiring about barack obama. he's a great orator and he has great rhetoric, but his actual proposals... they're not all that different than clinton's or edwards's are/were, they're just more conservative. i'm including links to some paul krugman op-eds that have influenced my opinion, and no, krugman isn't the only person i read and consider, it's just he makes so much darn sense! anyone (well, okay, some people) can give a good speech, but if barack thinks that his good intentions to change the tone in washington are going to make the partisan atmosphere go away, or make the insurance companies play any constructive role in providing universal health care, he's day dreaming into that fairy tale that bill clinton was talking about. then again, his health care plan doesn't actually provide for universal health care, so as it stands, he doesn't really seem to think it's important (this krugman op-ed, the mandate muddle, is quite good and i can't find anything else to link it to, so it's in-artfully inserted thus.)

that said, he's pro-choice, he was against the war, but i truly think he's in for a rude awakening about how he can change the tone by playing nice. republicans and right wingers don't play nice. that's how they've fucked this country up so much in seven short years. they will not go down without a fight, and a good old-fashioned, bare knuckles political battle is something that democrats seem to have forgotten how to do. where's lbj when we need him? he understood how to get legislation passed and it wasn't by playing nice all the time. if lbj had played nice there wouldn't be any civil rights act or voting rights act, and there certainly wouldn't have been the war on poverty. but who am i kidding? poverty is so passe these days anyway. if one brings up how the middle class and poor people are systematically screwed by the wealthy elites in this country, well, one is accused of waging class warfare, and that's just not done in polite society. but if you wage your class warfare silently, steathily, and with such subtlely that the vast majority of people don't even know it's happening, well, that's okay. in fact, it's not really class warfare when it's from the top down, it's just the way things are.

christ on a bike! i mean, really, how else does one respond to that shit?

i think hillary sucks, too. don't get me wrong... she and barack, republicans lite that they are, would be vastly better than even the most progressive of the republicans who are actually members of the republican party. i want to be excited at the prospect of getting to vote for black man or a woman who is a viable candidate for president, for the first time ever!!! or in my voting lifetime at least. but hillary and barack... they're raining on my parade. that said, me liking a candidate is, i am coming to fear, the kiss of death to their candidacy, so we may well end up with hillary or barack in the white house.

i'm just so tired of choosing between the lesser of two evils, because in the end, it's still choosing evil.