General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: An open letter to folks like myself who cannot in good conscience vote for Obama [View all]Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)is that I have read many posts by people in a similar quandary (they also suffered much abuse for their views) and I hoped to offer them a reason to vote FOR Obama, rather than someone else (or to abstain). These are people not swayed by "lesser of two evils argument", so I offered another choice. Not a perfect choice, mind you, but as perfect a one as I could come up with. I then presented it to people in my situation who would find the argument relative.
If you read through the thread, you will find a number of people who did see my solution as useful. The only people who got upset about it, were those folks who didn't like the fact that I dared differ from their orthodoxy.
So, they "why" was germane to the people I addressed the post to, and irrelevant to those who had always intended to vote for Obama regardless (BTW, I work in a very blue collar, conservative company and spend quite a bit of my time explaining to folks why it is NOT in their best interest to vote for Romney, no matter how much they hate Obama. I also spend a lot of time dismantling unjust lies about Obama they pick up from the usual sources).
I agree with you that we have only two choices in America elections, and we must hope that those choices will result for incremental change for the better. But the choices have not been between "better" or "worse" but between "bad" and "worse" for some time now. If we were making any aggregate move back to the left, that would be one thing, but we continue to move right, with the only choice being one of how fast.
To vote for a conservative Democrat is to vote for a conservative. If I am attending a wedding party in Iraq and and see my family slaughtered by a Predator drone, whether the person who ordered the attack is named Bush or Obama is really not important to me.
If I am sitting in Guantanamo for 11 years without a trial, does it really matter that Bush put me in there, if Obama keeps me there?
If my husband was murdered in Abu Ghraib, is their a difference in guilt between the person who murdered him and the person who covered it up?
Yes, this is the real world as some many people take great pains to point out to me. But I tend to hear this argument when being told why I MUST vote for someone, or I am a fool/traitor, but the arguments of reality are absent once I start looking to hold accountable those with blood on their hands. THEN I am being "unrealistic".
In the end this thread has run over 400 posts. A cursory perusal of the thread finds about a dozen people expressing support for my view and/or an intent to vote for Obama which was absent or questionable before reading my post. So, by your own metric, did my action result in a better outcome than would have occurred if I had not written the post?