Oh, so there was a debate on tonight. I didn't watch it.

You could say that this is careless of me, that I should be paying more attention to the election because one of those two men is going to be the next president. Ehh. Whatever.

I don't know if this could bother me more than it does now. There is no way I could support either one of them - Bush, while arguably the more conservative of the two, is a lightweight, a buffoon, and a toady to those who would have the U.S. be even more of a police state than it is now. Gore is, well, a liberal, and seems likely to do the most expiditious thing in any given situation instead of the right thing. I also can't approve of anything Tipper's ever done towards the goal of censorship, so he's tainted by that as well.

But I was thinking about this, and I think there's less danger of Gore fucking up the economy than there is of Bush fucking up what few civil rights we have left. So I guess I'm less afraid of Gore than I am of Bush. Gore is smart enough to keep his hands off, where Clinton was also smart enough to keep his hands off, and I think as long as he does so the economy will do just fine.

And frankly, despite what the Republican party seems to believe, I don't want a tax cut. I want the government to get the hell out of debt while it can. Save the tax cuts for when there's money actually in the bank (treasury), eh?

Clinton has been getting credit for the shape the economy's in, but there's nothing original (or traditionally liberal) about his fiscal policy at all - he's benefitting from an economy that was built by 12 years of Reagan and Bush. Think about it. Did Clinton change anything? Is there any economic policy in effect now that can be attributed to him? Aside from how he spent the peace dividend that appeared during his tenure, the answer to that question is no. He kept Greenspan, he kept the monetary policy, he toed the old Republican line on taxes and welfare (pulling the rug out from underneath the GOP, which is why they detest him so much), and pretty much kept the country going in the direction Reagan pointed it in. It's hard for the GOP to run against Clinton when so much of what he's done has been copied straight out of their platform.

So anyway, I don't think Gore's stupid. I think Bush is. I think either one of them has the potential to be dangerous, but I think Bush presents a more immediate, severe, and long-term threat to the country than Gore does. The combined dangers of the looming police state, an ill-conceived tax cut, and the possibility that he could shift the balance of the Supreme Court to the right, are a little too much to take.

I think the only saving grace for Bush would be that "conservative" Supreme Court appointees have mostly turned out recently to be not quite the conservatives their nominating presidents hoped they'd be. The glaring exception to this is, of course, Clarence Thomas, but O'Connor and Kennedy were Reagan appointees and Souter was a Bush appointee, and they've turned out to be quite unlike what was expected. You could even argue that Breyer was a conservative nominee for Clinton - I never could figure out his logic, unless he just wanted to get somebody in that he could stand but who would make it through the appointment process unscathed. So the fear of a Bush appointee (or appointees) to the Supreme Court might be unfounded. Then again, it might not. Only time will tell.

Me, I'm an actual conservative. Not a social conservative. I want the gubmint both out of my back pocket and out of my back yard. But the way our political system is polarized, if you want fiscal conservatism you have to get legislated morality along with it, and if you want social freedom you get socialism in the bargain. I don't like those choices. I guess this makes me a libertarian (with a lower-case 'l') in our warped political world.

So to get back to where I started, I didn't watch the debate, and I won't watch the others. I don't really care what the candidates have to say, as I've made my mind up about both of them. I'm not voting for either one. If one of them has to win (and one of them does, that's the way our political system is built), I guess I hope it's Gore, but I can't bring myself to vote for him. He'll carry the District regardless, so it's not like my vote will affect the outcome of this election one bit.

I'll be voting for a third party candidate. I protest voted in 92 and 96, and I'm doing so again this year. I don't like the system. It's broken. I think that gridlock is better than the alternatives we'd get if either major party were wholly in power, but I'd like to see a government that was actually capable of doing the right things instead of the easy things, and I don't think that will happen unless the current system goes away. Which means it won't ever happen.

Protest vote, here I come.

(4 oct)