This post is for all of the lefties out there, or for anyone who has a favorite lefty friend still convinced that that an Obama re-election will ultimately make them happier than if Romney were to win on Tuesday. There are a lot of issues that are driving your decision to vote for Obama. We know that there's the right to pay for the contraception for future one percenters, hating chicken sandwiches, making our country a welcome home to illegal immigrants, telling us how much salt or sugar we're allowed to consume, or ensuring the right to cast fraudulent votes. Do you know why you care about these issues? Because you can.
That's a bit of an oversimplification, but there is a simple reason why you're able to think that these issues are important. It's because the issues that truly matter aren't things that you've had to worry about in your lifetime. With the exceptions of a few terrorist attacks, both successful and thwarted, we've never faced a serious threat of our country being invaded. We've faced economic downturns, and if we continue on our current path things are going to get a lot worse, but as a country we've not had to endure true economic hardship since the Great Depression. This is why we take these things for granted – we've never lived through these problems, and we've lost our sense of history and take for granted that peace and prosperity are the natural state of society. And that is why you're able to pretend that these trivial issues truly matter in the larger scheme of things.
So why would what I just said make any Democrat want to vote for Romney? Two words: Global Warming. Or Climate Change. Or Global Climate Disruption. Or whatever the newest term for it is. Remember when this was a critical, eminent threat and we had only days left to start responding? Yes, I remember those days too. Something weird happened over the last few years – people stopped caring. Granted, part of this is due to the fact that the sky keeps stubbornly refusing to fall, or all of the scandals that keep blowing apart what the Global Warm Mongers swore was accepted dogma. But there's something bigger than that that happened.
fault, and no matter how many times you close your eyes and click your heels while chanting hope and change and change and hope the reality is that our economy is not improving, and the president's policies are making things worse. Somehow CGI polar bears dropping dead from the sky over city streets seems kind of trivial when your former job was in the coal industry that our president promised to bankrupt. For some reason blindly clinging to a hockey stick graph based off of worthless data pales when you're a laid off supplier for a pipeline that can't be built because our president has to court the Big Green branch of the anti-prosperity lobby. And oddly enough, when your business that depended on servicing the now banned offshore oil rigs is dying, for some reason that half degree rise in global temperature that may or may not happen over the next century and may or may not be caused by human activity seems trivial.
And to take this to a more graphic example, look at what the people of New York and New Jersey are experiencing now in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. I doubt that if you hand a family that's been without heat or electricity for a week a bag of hot chicken sandwiches they won't care what the owner's opinion is on gay marriage. Bring them a case of bottled water and the fact that it came from a multinational big box store who doesn't enforce that its third world supplier only buys its plastic bottles from fair trade unionized shops doesn't really matter.
Yes, belief in Global Warming has seen a recent spike thanks to Hurricane Sandy, but these surges always happen after acts of nature – it's how people rationalize when bad things out of the ordinary happen. Although I wonder if Oliver Stone and Chris Matthews realize how much their self righteous finger wagging comes off like the old fire and brimstone preachers who shouted that AIDS was God's way of punishing gays.
Back on topic though, the issues that you think are important really aren't. When you're out of work, without heat and electricity, or in any way wondering how you are going to provide for yourself and your family you're not worried about all of the trivial issues I mentioned at the top of this post. And sorry lefties, but expanding unemployment, food stamps, and disability rolls is not compassion. These are temporary stop gaps and to use a favorite phrase of yours, not sustainable. If you want to help people who are looking for work vote for leaders whose policies will help them get back to work. On Tuesday cast your vote not for the politician who claims he will create the most jobs (politicians don't create jobs), but for the one who will do his best to get the government out of the way of job creation. If you haven't figured it out yet, that would mean voting not for Obama, or for any other Democrats (or Republicans) who consistently vote to support his policies.
Only when our economy is right again will the majority of Americans be ready to care about the throwaway issues. If you consider those things important, and I know you do, you have only one choice come Tuesday:
Vote for Romney.
Cross posted from Brother Bob's Blog
