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In reply to the discussion: An open letter to folks like myself who cannot in good conscience vote for Obama [View all]brush
(53,778 posts)Last edited Sat Sep 22, 2012, 11:59 PM - Edit history (1)
It amazes me every time I read or hear one of these "I can't vote with good conscience for Obama" screeds. Where do you think we live? This is not the "Socialist Republic of Utopia." We live in THE most capitalistic country in the world that, to be frank, stole land from Native Americans and labor from African Americans for centuries. We also, for over a century beginning with Hawaii (Dole), used our military to either just take over and annex countries or impose dictators on and prop them up so that our corporations could exploit their natural resources, the latest example being Iraq (oil), which is certainly not ancient history. We don't have clean hands here and we can't expect a president in office for 3 1/2 years to change everything about how the country has operated for over a century. Hell I would imagine that every time a new president is inaugurated he is "briefed" by corporate and military honchos about how things actually work. I'm thinking that if the President had tried to jail Bush/Cheney/Rice/Rove/Rumsfeld he would have been warned that the country could not take that kind of wrenching internal examination without flying apart at the seams and be reminded subtly but not so subtly, if he persisted, about what happened to JFK? We are who we are even though many chose to forget it or don't know much of the country's history. The current Democratic party has been the one responsible for most of the incremental improvements for worker and civil rights (FDR, Kennedy/Johnson etc.) so I say lets keep them in office and hope for more incremental changes because that's probably the best we can expect. The repug route is the short cut to total fascism as they've been trying to get rid of FDR's New Deal laws (Social Security, Collective Bargaining, Unemployment Insurance, Wall Street Regulation, etc.) since the 30s.