Sounding Off

Are the pundits, pollsters and proletariat starting to get on anyone else's nerves these days? We live under an oppressive regime, allow ourselves to be controlled by fear and apathy, willfully give up civil liberties in return for greater bureaucracy and repression, and we're going to endorse another four to eight years?!?!?! Jeremy and I are looking into options to work and live abroad should the McCain-Palin ticket actually succeed. We're done. We've had it. As my dear wonderful grandmother, a lifelong Republican who changed her party for this election, said, "Enough is enough."

And what I really don't get about this whole thing is why we are still buying into the same old tired nonsense that's entirely responsible for skyrocketing healthcare costs, massive pharmaceutical influence in politics, the abrupt failure of the housing market and the plodding recession we are, apparently, doomed to wander through until we have a President we can believe in. When's the last time we had one of those? Oh, right, it was a little over eight years ago, when Clinton presided over the greatest period of economic prosperity in the history of the United States.

Don't give me that Republican malarky about how George H.W. Bush was responsible for creating that economy. Like everything else, the global marketplace turns on a whim these days; people sink money into markets they believe in. When there's nothing to believe in, the market fails. Proof positive: George W. Bush's delinquent economy. Clinton's brilliant balancing of the budget and creation of a federal surplus. Oh my God...and it took less than a year to undo, as Bush said, hey, let's pretend to care for the people and "share" the money with them! WHat did we get? A check for $300. Wow.

And I'm sick of the public terror created around the concept of socialized healthcare. Oh my God, they're almost four-letter words, aren't they? "Socialized healthcare"...I was reading the Rocky today, a really stupid thing to do during an election year as they fly their Republican Red like it's Economic Doomsday Pride week and they're celebrating. One more idiot talking about the terrors of a socilized system where doctors are at the beck and call of the federal government and they won't be allowed to practice where they want and healthcare will be sub-standard and...oh, no, my heart pounds just thinking about what terrors may come from a healthcare system steeped in socialist ideas.

And then I remember, oh, wait, all of the systems in this country that are socialized, and that we are so grateful for. Like the fire department. Police services. Post office. The military. And let's not forget the most recent arm of the federal government, created by the esteemed anti-big-government George W., the Department of Homeland Security. That one I'm not so grateful for, but mostly because the passing of the Patriot Act brought with it a mandate on pseudoephedrine, and I now have to take a rectal exam to get my allergy medication from my pharmacist.

But that aside...another comment in today's Rocky instructed us crazy radicals to ask Europeans what they thought of their healthcare, and its petulant tone led me to believe they'd all agree thta socilized healthcare was the modern-day equivalent of the bubonic plague upon their fair societies. Funny, I don't know a lot of Europeans, but one I do know pretty well, who now lives in the United States, owns his own business, and through the growth of his business provides jobs for Americans, laughs when I've asked him if he'd become a US citizen and looks at me like I've lost my mind. All he has to do is start talking about how much healthcare would cost him in this country, when he simply has to fly back to France and be taken care of for free. Now, given the escalating costs of jet fuel, I'm sure it's not exactly "cheap", but when you consider the astronomical cost of US healthcare, I bet that plane ticket is well worth the expenditure.

And let's get to that, there, too. Last night unknown-before-last-Thursday Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, while waxing rhapsodic about running mate John McCain's war buddies, made yet another attempt to malign that great shining beacon of liberalism and intelligence who happens to be running for President and whose win will ensure MY future stake in this country, dropped as low as to rail on him for supporting a withdrawal from dependency on foreign oil AND offshore drilling. As if there isn't another alternative. As if you have to be FOR one, and AGAINST the other, or the equation fails altogether. Give me a break. This kind of logic is, well, it's entirely faulty. Unsecure. Failing. Oh well let's just say it: she's LYING TO YOU, PEOPLE!!! Leave it to the American public to actually buy into such a farce. How about alternative energy expenditures? Exploration of sources of fuel that don't rely on fossil fuels? Well, there's an idea...but it's not enough to invest the American Dream in, even when you throw in the fact--FACT!!!--that any tapping of offshore reserves won't benefit us for at least a decade, and your precious Wallybucks are still going to be grimly parted with to fill your enormous, gas-guzzling SUV. Aren't you glad you bought that Expedition after all?