The nation, or at least certain retrograde elements that reside within it, (and ones that I wish would vanish immediately without a trace), obsess about the fitness of candidates for the highest office in the land based on one issue above all others. Unfortunately, this issue shouldn't even be an issue. In truth, due to its very private nature, abortion, like religion, should have no part in public life at all. But lamentably, here in Freedom's Land, it does, and so, John McCain, who knows he must attract crazed Jesus freaks and their ilk to his cause, lest Barack Obama trample him at the polls, offered- in what is becoming a typically pandering approach- to thunderous approval from a congregation of evangelicals, his view that life begins at conception. Obama, perhaps a bit less desperate than his shriveled Republican rival, and one hopes as a result of being in possession of a mind capable of grappling with complexity, sensibly offered his thoughts on when life begins with something less designed to cause myopic and fevered evangelicals to twitter with unbridled joy. Just so. And this development is, in some sense, a microcosm of the choice facing Americans at the polls in November.
Don't get me wrong, I'm hardly an enthusiast for Obama, and am deeply skeptical of any good coming from our shabby and corrupt two party system, but how can one in good conscience vote for a candidate who would pander to fundamentalist wing nuts? Were McCain being nominated for President of a newly formed nation inhabited overwhelmingly by fundamentalists, (of any stripe), why I'd happily pull the lever for him. But, alas, such is not the case. In the meantime, we have very serious problems, make that crises, crises that far outweigh the non-issue issue of abortion, and we can't afford to elect any more officials who act as ombudsman for the cretinous agendas of the dumbest of the dumbed down.
No comments:
Post a Comment