The American Election

Good Lord, is this still going on? Does it ever end?

The highly superficial yet wall to wall coverage of every unimportant move, gesture, cough and wardrobe choices continues. Ad nausea…

Thousands of trees were sacrificed one month so that every newspaper from coast to coast could dissect and trisect the word ‘bitter’ sixteen ways from Sunday…

An informed critique of foreign and economic policy was foregone in lieu of an extended navel gazing exercise as to ‘why doesn’t Obama wear a flag lapel pin’. Erm, I didn’t know it was mandatory to wear one? And is the not so hidden insinuation supposed to be that people who don’t wear one are somehow not as ‘patriotic’ as those who do?

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/19/roland.martin.05.19/index.html

Hillary promises to drop atomic bombs on Iran and commit genocide on an entire people just to score political points with ‘national security’ Republicans. Did this strike anyone else apart from me as reckless / insane / war-mongering / pointless sabre-rattling etc.?

We all know that regardless of whom gets in nothing will change...Neither Republicans nor Democrats are going to leave Iraq. Even Obama has conveniently left a back door to duck out by saying ‘That’s my standpoint, but of course I’ll leave it up to the Generals…’. Once elected, whoever's in will be quietly persuaded by the various security, foreign policy, strategy types why the status quo should well, remain the status quo.

National Health care will be strangled at birth by the giant medical industry leaving the U.S. the only industrialised country in the world still without full coverage for all its citizens. Lots of fear talk about 'socialism' and untrue anecdotes about 'long waiting lists'. Not so much talk though about the lower cancer survical rates, higher child mortality rates and ruinous costs compared to those 'awful' Europeans and their 'government' medicine...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/27/opinion/main3105523.shtml

Billions of taxpayers’ dollars will continue to be spent on boondoggle science fiction weapons programs/missile shields that don’t work instead of roads, bridges, schools etc., even though the U.S has a defence budget and more tanks, ships, bombs and planes than the rest of the world combined. And the White House will chastise other nations for ‘worrying’ arms build-ups yet meanwhile continue to weaponise space themselves much to everyone else's concern. It 's a bit like the Elephant saying he's 'really worried' about a little mouse...

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm

http://www.acronym.org.uk/space/congo.htm

The President will continue to bemoan rising petrol prices and oil dependency but do nothing to curb America’s outrageously excessive consumption by increasing gas taxes on fuels, implementing incremental carbon taxes on vehciles according to size (especially on monster SUV’s), or offering rebates on smaller economic cars and funding public transport infrastructure.

Dear God just let it finish soon…