Lies, BS and Stupidity

I just got done watching the major speeches from the Republican convention tonight, and I couldn't be more disheartened.

What a huge pack of lies, half truths and reasonable sounding solutions that won't do anything, and a good portion of the electorate of this country is swallowing it whole.

I'd go through it point by point, but we'd be here all night, so let me just ask you this:

If you hired a mechanic to work on your car, and he made the problem worse. If you repeatedly told him he was making it worse, and he persisted in doing even MORE things to damage your car even further.

Would you then take your car back to that mechanic, if he came to you and pointed out all of the things that were wrong with your car (that weren't before he took it in the first place) and said "I know how to fix all of those things"?

That's what Republicans are saying when they point to high fuel prices (the direct result of the Iraq war, which we had no legitimate justification for) and the housing crisis (the direct result of some of that "smaller government" deregulation that Republicans are always telling us will cure the nations ills and bring about utopia). They wrap it all up in flag waving and "rah rah, only we really love this country" BS, and then promise to keep us safe from terrorists, when the aforementioned Iraq war has largely helped to breed the next generation of Muslims who hate America.

I think Mitt Romney said it best (although he mistakenly believed he was saying the reverse) when he said "It's time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother". Let's see, Big Brother is the term we use for when government spies on us, as Republicans have pushed for increasingly since 9/11.

Let's be clear, I don't much like the Democrats either, I've made it abundently clear to anyone who would listen that I wholeheartedly support breaking the two-party system by moving to a system of run-off elections.

But as long as we've got what we have today, we need to swing back and forth between the parties to keep the country on an even overall trajectory, and to deflate each party as they become corrupt by throwing to the only other option at that point, the one who at least temporarily has the humility of having been the smaller kid on the playground for a while.

Right now, our country has a lot of problems, and a significant number of them are the result of Republican policies over the last 8 years. It's time to tack Left for a while.

But more than that, it's time for our populace to recognize truth from happy sounding BS.

Tonight, I do not feel particularly proud to be associated with the American electorate, if the polls which show Obama and McCain running more or less evenly represent the level of awareness of the electorate.

Tonight, I'm not particularly proud at all of our election system.

Liam.