Politics

I am often asked whether I am a democrat or republican. I am both and neither. It's not that I can't tell the difference between the two, or that I like straddling the fence. It's that I'm not very good at yeah-saying and every time I think I'm starting to align with a party, they do something so egregiously extreme or objectionable that I find myself running the other way.

Who says we need to be one or the other anyway? Granted as an independent, in most states, you become useless during primary season unable to vote for any candidate until the general election. But is this a bad thing? I suppose if the masses were independents it would make consensing on candidates very difficult. But for the minority, I see some benefit. If your candidate has a shot at the title, he* should be able to convince his chosen party that he's electable whether or not you get to vote for him in the primary or not. So being independent is a way of saying, there's a chunk of us in this country who aren't inclined to join your party but also aren't members of the party that's diametrically opposed to your politics either. Your party has vetted you, now impress us.

Now that I think about it, it would be better if more of us were independents, and we left the vetting to minorities. Or maybe we should do the vetting and not leave it to the masses (who tend to be woefully ignorant). I don't mean this to denigrate any particular socio-economic class, group or demographic. But I stand by that statement, the masses are ignorant. So we (the relatively less-ignorant ones) should vet the would-be-kings before they are presented to the popularity contest that is the general election.

If I had to sum up my politics, I'm a realist. Sometimes this means I like conservative ideas, sometimes liberal ones, sometimes neither. It would take too long to give every one of my (current) political stances but I will take a few minutes to comment on something almost everyone has some opinion about: the war.

I think war sucks. It's unpleasant, tragic, regrettable, and leads to the untimely deaths of our own brave young men and women along with those of innocents in wherever the war-torn territory happens to be. Nobody but the "bad guys" deserve to die, and collateral damage should be avoided if feasible (but not at all costs). Yet sometimes war is necessary and a strong leader must be willing to go to war in those situations.

Our war is not like that. The current war was begun under ignominious circumstances, and continues to be handled very poorly. I was uncomfortable with the evidence presented to go into war, the vague claims of WMD, and the general feeling of the righteousness of kicking arab butt in the region because of 9/11. I particularly hated having my intelligence insulted with the insinuation that we were fighting in Iraq to retaliate for 9/11. Now we're in, and I would like us to leave the region better than we found it, you know with some dignity, but even that seems more and more remote.

The war is also a huge drain on our economic resources and will continue to be for years to come, and rather than bolster our effectiveness at fighting terrorist and/or nuclear regimes by showing "them" not to push us or we will get medieval on their a$$es, it has had the opposite effect - weakening our defensive and offensive capabilities in every other region of the world. It is now common knowledge that we are short on personnel, in debt up to our eyeballs, and seriously out of confidence in our ability to fight this "new" kind of enemy quickly, and effectively - like we did in the first gulf war. In other words, we prematurely blew our wad.

Does my lack of support for the decision under which we went to war and its subsequent mismanagement make me a dovish peace-mongerer? If you think that, you're as guilty of group-think as the rest of the ignorant masses. Contrary to the hippie bumper-slogans, war can be the answer and sometimes you cannot afford to give peace a chance or you'll end up dead. But let's go to war when necessary and only for the right reasons.

Well, that's a sample of my politics in a very large and rambling nutshell. As always, I reserve the right to change everything, including this sentence, on a whim.


*The gender preferences here are used solely for convenience and not because I am opposed to the concept of a female president.