A rchive Date
[ 30-10-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Michael_Coren/2004/10/30/692593.html
I'd have to pick 'none of the above'
By MICHAEL COREN - For the Toronto Sun
Sat, October 30, 2004
I do envy those liberal and conservative writers who are so confident of their party loyalties and always know for whom to vote. No doubts for them, no wonderings and wanderings about the issues. It's all clear and obvious. For me, however, it's not so easy. I'm just not as bright and clever as those stalwart partisans.
If I could vote in next week's U.S. election, I would be in turmoil. Neither of the major presidential leaders speaks for me and neither party offers opinions I can wholeheartedly endorse. Perhaps that is the nature of democracy. If so, democracy is increasingly disappointing.
George Bush is a decent man and has done many good things as president. He has given $16 billion to fight AIDS in Africa. He is sound on American sovereignty and he believes in liberating tax dollars for middle- and lower-class families.
He has also stood firm against embryonic stem-cell research and opposed abortion, thus protecting the lives of the most vulnerable in any society. He has tried to protect genuine marriage and attempted to amend the constitution so as to maintain the authentic meaning of husband and wife.
Yet he has also refused to increase the minimum wage. He has rejected new and progressive ways to provide people, especially poor and marginalized people, with dependable health care. He refuses to consider the abolition of the death penalty, even when some of those executed are mentally ill.
He has done a great deal to make the United States, a fine and noble country, the subject of increasing hatred and contempt throughout the world. He did not invent anti-Americanism, of course, but he has given every anti-American a reason and en excuse.
Washington could have done almost anything it wanted after the obscenity of 9/11. When Afghanistan was justifiably invaded, only zealots objected. Then came Iraq. And in a short space of time the United States managed to lose the bulk of the respect and sympathy it formerly enjoyed.
John Kerry, on the other hand, is a hypocrite. He claims to be a faithful Roman Catholic but rejects fundamental Roman Catholic teaching.
Unlike Bush, he condones abortion and embryonic stem-cell research. He utters fawning platitudes about homosexuality and affirms late-term abortion, where fully formed children are ripped apart as they leave their mother's womb.
Kerry is also part of a liberal culture that has done so much to create the moral decline of the United States. A culture that listens to pop singers and movie stars rather than philosophers and theologians. Kerry is the tame lion in the circus of Hollywood and lip-syncing intellectualism.
But he is also prepared to fundamentally reconsider American foreign policy. He is opposed to the slaughter of American and Iraqi men and women in Iraq, a faraway nation that was never a threat to the United States.
Kerry has used his military past shamelessly, but at least he has a military past. Kerry had used his knowledge of world affairs shamelessly, but at least he has a knowledge of world affairs. Kerry has used his commitment to the inner cities shamelessly, but a least he has a commitment to the inner cities.
The idea of gangs of vehemently liberal and emotionally obsessed hacks within the Democratic party filling The White House is frightening - but so is the prospect of so many more years of pointless and painful foreign intervention by American troops in countries that hatefully reject them.
Whatever the outcome of the election, the process and result of the vote is a disaster for the country. America is more polarized than at any time since the Civil War. Whoever becomes president will not only be disliked but hated by 40% of the people he governs. No country can function to its best, if at all, on such a basis of reluctant acceptance.
I do not blame Bush and Kerry for the mass mess of contemporary democracy, but the twisted system and bloated society that has made it inevitable. We don't think straight anymore.
Goodness me, we don't think at all. Thus we will be ruled by people who don't deserve to rule at all.
Michael Coren is a Toronto-based writer and broadcaster. He can be emailed at info@michaelcoren.com and his web site is michaelcoren.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to: editor@tor.sunpub.com Home Page
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