Well the time has come, or nearly. For once I wish I didn’t live in our beloved Newton, MA, arguably the bluest of the bluest communities in our great country. Thank God for our congressman Barney Frank. But I would like to cast my precious vote in another state, one where it might tip one race or another.
While it is probably too much to hope for a sweep of both Senate & House, despite years of gerrymandering and other manipulations, it really looks like the Republican party is going to lose the House.
Sadly, this is more a comment on the criminal incompetence of the current administration than an endorsement of vision from the Democrats.
No matter what happens we’ll have two more years of this radical, dangerous and incompetent president at the helm of the nation. At least we’ll have some checks on his more astonishing betrayals of American civil rights driven through the Republican dominated congress in the name of his misguided (to put forth the most generous interpretation)international policy.
I’m not one of those who think all we in the West need is to back off, perhaps retreat inside our borders to end terrorism. We are entangled in a complicated international ideological struggle. It includes on the one side our Western liberal ideologies, our grasping for stable sources of oil, and our support for Israel, a Western-style democracy seen as a Crusader toehold in the Middle East, all blended together and often seen as one thing by both friend and foe. On the other side is a proud civilization in long decline, filled with resentment, driven by consipiracy theories, folded into a fundamentalist version of Islam, often seen as one thing by both friend and foe.
What we’ve learned so far is that an American policy driven by a combination of neo-conservative imperial design, simple and naked mercantilism and fundamentalist Christianity is not going to be successful. We need someone leading our response to this conflict who in the wake of the attack on the twin towers, knows the difference between what were real immediate threats in Afghanistan & a petty regional tyrant in Iran who had pissed off the president’s father. Instead leaving the Kurds protected under an armed unbrella to be the seed of a future revolution & perhaps turning up the screws on Saddam Hussein’s evil administration while focusing on what really needed doing; we now have this sinkhole, where the best we get is the death of a dictator while a nation falls apart and our enemies are assured in their belief the West is both imperialist and incompetent.
We’re desparate for a new vision.
The midterms won’t give us that. (Although I feel the stirrings of hope in the person of Barack Obama) But it will put a check on the more outrageous adventures dreampt up in the West Wing.
So, please vote. And whatever you do, don’t vote Republican for any congressional seat. I say that even though I think some Republicans are on balance the better candidate. But there is one vote no Republican will cast, and that’s for who will run the House (or, oh distant fantasy, the Senate…). And that’s the vote that counts…
Almost as much as yours.
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