Sigh...

[bobquasit]

Obama's announced that he'll be supporting the FISA "compromise". The leadership will work with him so he can "try" to remove immunity in the Senate, fail (what a shock that will be) and decide to vote for the compromise as-is. He's already announced that.

So I'm looking for a new candidate. Any serious suggestions, please? My vote won't make a difference anyway, here in Rhode Island, but I need to make a statement. Right now there's not a single candidate that I can stand.

I'm willing to write someone in, but ideally it should be someone who might get another few write-in votes too...enough so that someone, somewhere in the party hierarchy might actually hear that there were a few protest votes for "X". Any suggestions?

Please, no jokes. I've pretty much lost all hope for the future of this country right now, and I'm just not in the mood for jokes.

Comments

[klyfix.livejournal.com]

It's disappointing a lot of people. Near as I can tell, there was no reason to fiddle with the pre-Bush FISA law in the first place, and any issues the telecoms that cooperated with the government might have faced should have been resolved in the courts (that is, they may have had a defense but that should have been thrashed out in court). There was no need for this compromise.

Obama seems to be trying to pull a Clinton, Bill that is. Something akin to Bill signing the "Defense of Marriage Act." He seems (I suspect) to fear that going against this will cost him middle of the road votes so as Clinton would do; he jumps on and tries to spin it.

Having said all that, I'll still vote for Obama. For all this, I do think he's intelligent, basically decent, and would be as good a president as we've had since maybe Roosevelt (note that I'm not necessarily all that impressed with JFK).

Here's the big thing: I'm not convinced that "safe" states necessarily are this time around. For all that a Newsweek poll showed Obama ahead by fifteen points I have to not totally discredit what one paper's pundit observed (and was snarked on by liberal blogs); that Dukakis was ahead by that much at one point. After the conservatives drop the equivalent of the La Brea tar pits on Obama, and with the media loving McCain, and who knows what other missteps Obama will make, we could very, very, very easily end up with the equivalent of a third Bush term and we can't afford it. As was said in a Lousiana governor's race several years back when the choice was between white supremacist David Duke and corrupt former governor Edwin Edwards, "Vote for the crook; it's important." This time it's "Vote for the pandering politician; it's important."

But as for alternative votes. Hmm. One could vote for the Green Party person if nothing else. Honestly, this go-round I'm not aware of anybody on the Left who is seriously going to be noticed beyond of course Nader, although it is not impossible that a lefty challenge is going to pop up now, which of course would hand the country to the Republicans.