at long last, a political post
A lot of readers have e-mailed me, and asked why I haven’t talked more about politics this election season. It’s mostly a time issue, but the real reason is, there are other sites out there that say the very same things I want to say, and they say them better than I do. As I wrote back in May: “Salon, DailyKos, Atrios, Josh Marshall, The Daily Howler, Juan Cole, and Kevin Drum are just a few of the sites I read at least once a day. I do a lot of nodding along in agreement when I read them, and they always say what I would say, with more eloquence and passion than I can currently muster.”
In that entry, I also said, “There’s enough anger and strife in the world right now. I’d rather put my time and energy into reflecting on the things that make me happy, than the things that piss me off.”
Then I got an e-mail this afternoon inquiring why I haven’t written about the most important election in our lifetime.
The most important election in our lifetime.
Boy, did that strike a nerve with me. This is the most important election in my lifetime. Forget the concept of holding the Bush administration accountable for the lies and incompetence for a moment, and just think about the very real possibility of a Supreme Court stacked with Bush appointments: goodbye freedom of choice. Goodbye freedom from religion. Goodbye equal rights for homosexuals.
Presumably, you’re reading this website because you want to know what’s in my head, and a lot of you have asked how I feel about the election . . . so here it is: I’m pretty sure that John Kerry will win this election. I am pretty confident that the majority of Americans are fed up with the lies, corporate sell-outs, and reality-defiance of the Bush administration. I am pretty sure that I’ll wake up on November 3rd and tell my wife, “Our long national nightmare is over.”
But it will still be close, and it’s possible that the GOP’s disgusting efforts to keep voters away from the polls will work, and we’ll end up with four more years of George W. Bush.
Last week, a reporter from Salon invited me to contribute to a story that asked, “What will you do if President Bush is re-elected?”
I struggled to find the best way to express how important I feel this election is, and I tried to articulate some of the main reasons I believe that Mr. Bush does not deserve a second term, but there were so many, I kept ending up with over 1000 words. One draft was close to 1700 words, and that was just trying to understand how President Bush and his supporters seem to live in some parallel reality where up is down and we have always been at war with Eurasia. (Or is it East Asia? Doesn’t matter. War is Peace.)
What I came up with, in the editing and soul-searching, and the worrying, is this: I believe that we much reject George W. Bush and the direction he’s taken our country. Even if we (hopefully) end up with a new president tomorrow, it will take decades to repair the damage George Bush has done in just four years: damage to our civil rights, damage to our economy, damage to our national standing with the rest of the world (doesn’t it bother anyone that the vast majority of the world viscerally hates America because of George W. Bush? I’m not talking about “The Terrorists.” I’m talking about our traditional allies in France, Spain, Germany, Britan, and pretty much all of Europe. On September 12, 2001, the entire world stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us . . . but look at how our country is viewed now.) If he gets another four years to wreak havoc on America and the world, we may never recover from it.
Here’s what I ended up sending them:
I’m Wil Wheaton, and I approved this message:
There are so many reasons that George W. Bush doesn’t deserve four more years, it is staggering to me that the question “What will you do if George W. Bush is re-elected?” can even be asked. This shouldn’t be a horse race. This should be a Kerry blow-out.
This election is a referendum on the policies and leadership of President Bush. On November 2nd, we will take a simple test: will Americans succumb to terror? Or will we stand up and take our country back?
Our hopefully soon to be ex-president once struggled to say, “fool me once, shame on
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Draft my butt. No one would be stupid enough to install the draft again, because people would actually start to care, and our stupid government certainly can’t have any of that right now.
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! LIVE IT OR LIVE WITH IT, YOU TALENTLESS HACK
Will someone please explain to me why this washed up has-been thinks anyone cares what he thinks about politics? This is the ultimate in narcissism, thinking that we are held in thrall by the prodigious outpourings from his lil’ pin head…Well, having followed the blog trail to here, I now eradicate all traces of it from my web browser, and leave him (and his hapless band of syncophants) to quietly contemplate seppuku, preferably as soon as possible, thereby freeing up bandwidth for the web celebrations that are about to start up..
“Inflammatory comments will be deleted.” I suggest you start with your entire blog. You’re a waste of good bandwidth. Right after you sit down and have a good cry, that is. Here’s a kleenex.
Our long national nightmare CONTINUES.
Very disheartening.
But oh man, John Kerry . . . what a class act in conceding.
Interesting… “goodbye freedom of choice. Goodbye freedom from religion. Goodbye equal rights for homosexuals.”
You do have a choice, the choice to practice safe sex. There is no such thing as freedom “from” religion… it’s freedom OF religion. In the words of Jefferson, “Congress shall pass no law respecting religion or prohibiting the free excercise thereof.” Thus… freedom OF religion, not FROM it. Also, homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else. A gay man can marry a woman and a lesbian can marry a man, just like anyone else.
No chance of a draft???? How do you know that for sure? Because you believe everything they tell you? I can’t believe how many adult human beings are so naive.
Bush also said that he didn’t want to privatize Social Security…..he’s already talking about doing it and he was only re elected 2 days ago. He’s a crooked career politician, just like all the others. I’m going to drag my handbasket out and fix the holes in it because I don’t want to fall out on the way to HELL, ’cause that’s where we’re headed.
Sigh…
Now don’t you feel kind of stupid? If not, give it some time and you will. Grow a backbone and find a new hobby. Maybe that will help.
Just to correct some misconceptions in the comments here:
1) Yes, it’s the democrats that pushed for the draft; there’s no way there will be a draft. After Vietnam, any politician passing a draft faces political suicide. Since politicians only care about getting elected/re-elected, there will be no draft.
2) The whole Social Security thing is ludicrous. First of all, it’s not Bush’s plan; it’s one of three reform models proposed by a BIPARTISAN committee in 2001. Bush hasn’t even chosen which reform model he’s going to pick yet. (www.factcheck.org)
Wil:
I hope that our nation can start to heal now.
I have spent 13 years in the USAF and believe me the last thing we (the active Military) wants is a draft.
The only Bill introduced to start a draft was started by congressman Jim McDermit and NY Sen. Charles Rengal. The vote was like 99-1 in the Senate against a draft.
You kids seem safe from a draft.
Kerry would have not been the choice. The man is as about as much of an idiot as Michael Moore. Stay the course with Bush, and you will see a better America. As far as the crying goes? Get the Fuck over it.
Y’all need to realize that lots of Americans don’t buy into the progressive ideal. We don’t like having our noses rubbed in your perversions. We’re not homophobic, and we really don’t care what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home, but hey, do try to keep it out of our courthouse.
People keep going on about how Bush is evil incarnate and Kerry was the Great White Hope. Some of us found this strange, since Kerry admitted to being a war criminal, a serial killer, and a mass-murderer. (Please note: War criminals are people who kill innocent civilians, as Kerry admitted to doing. That’s murder. And doing it repeatedly as Kerry claims to have done in his four month tour makes him a serial killer. As to the mass murder bit, that’s killing two or more people in one incident, again, which Kerry admits to) Some PEACE candidate there, eh?
To top this off, Kerry went far beyond merely protesting the Vietnam war, he committed treason by providing both and and comfort to our enemies. He doesn’t deny this, but basically claimed that “Treason is Patriotic.” On top of that, the records he posted on his site make it appear that he was actually given an “Other Than Honorable” discharge from the military in the early 1970’s, and was essentially “pardoned” by the Carter Administration in 1978. FYI, if you get an OTH discharge, you can apply to have it upgraded after 5 years have passed, and that’s EXACTLY what it appears Kerry did.
Democrats have been going further and further into the complete tinfoil-hat loony-bin left. They’ve abandoned the middle. For example, there are leftists out there who are claiming that Kerry lost because he was too mainstream, despite his being considered to the left of Teddy Kennedy. They’re talking about Dean being the head of the DNC. And they’re talking about running Hillary in ’08. The problem isn’t that Middle America has moved to the right, the problem is that the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left. They’ve alienated huge parts of their historic base, with issues like gay marriage (“We’re here, we’re queer, get over it!” doesn’t play well in much of the country) and gun control. The left portraying religious people as being America’s version of the Taliban didn’t help either.
The Democrats are marginalizing themselves. Until they stop doing that by abandoning the freaky-far left, they will NOT receive the support of the majority of Americans. And Europe and Canada can go fuck itself.