Mid Term Election Issues

The 2006 Mid-Term election is twenty days away as of this date. Many independent and Republican voters are wondering whether or not they should get out and possibly vote for a Democrat. Or are they? What are good reasons to vote for a change of power in the Congress ? Why should you vote for a Democrat or a Republican? Is your incumbent congressman or Senator part of the culture of corruption in Washington D.C. The answer is most likely a resounding yes. Yes your Congressman has been doing the bidding of corporate America. This applies to Democrats and Republicans alike. Not too long ago there was a proposal to change the personal bankruptcy law. Who wanted this law passed? MBNA and other major credit card companies wanted to have the congress bail them out of their failed business model of risky consumer lending. So they arranged to have their very own people write the law making it much more difficult for ordinary consumers to successfully declare bankruptcy. They wrote the law. They have been giving millions of dollars to congress for years and they convinced the congress to pass their very pro-business bill. Even the most well known Democratic Senator supported the bill.

This is one tiny example. The energy bill giving billions of dollars in subsidies to the oil industry is another example of an openly corrupt congress. Why does the congress feel that it can arrogantly do whatever it wants and still keep the Republican or Democratic majority? The congressional districts have been so gerrymandered that incumbents in many districts are not even a little concerned about losing their seats.

So we come back to who do we vote for and why?

The biggest and most painful issue facing American voters is the war in Iraq.

Now if you are a Republican partisan you want to correct my terminology and call the war in Iraq the global war on terror. Now how does this influence your vote?

What are the Democrats going to do about the war in Iraq? Let us all be honest the United States of America is going to have to have troops in Iraq for years to come no matter who controls congress. So what would be the benefit of having the Democrats control the House of Representatives ? The answer that I have is to bring some accountability to the foreign policy of the United States of America. Instead of giving people like Don Rumsfeld who have failed our country the Medal of Freedom we should be asking him why he has waited until November 13^th 2006 to begin to change the course in Iraq.

We can stop pretending that Iraq represents fighting the terrorists over there. We can all admit that the policy of attacking Iraq and pretending that it had something to do with the attacks of 9-11-01 is simply a propaganda lie which the administration to this day continues to put forth. The mantra that Iraq is the central front in the " war on terror" is a fine cynical ploy in which the Neo-sheep are lulled into a world where they now believe that it was necessary to attack Iraq.There are even a few Republican congress people still trying to pretend that there are WMD's in Iraq. Weldon of Pennsylvania is one of them.

So in order to bring clarity back to the debate over Iraq you should vote for Democrats.

Now on the other hand if you are living in your world where attacking Iraq in 2003 was the absolute correct foreign policy move to make the United States safer than you should vote Republican. You should also vote Republican if you feel that the President and his administration has handled the Iraq war in an efficient and competent manner. This also assumes that you feel that the Republican controlled congress has taken good care of it's over sight responsibility regarding foreign policy.

A separate issue confronting the voters is the actual war on Islamic extremists who are once again gaining control over large parts of Afghanistan. While we were sending much of our military force to Iraq the Taliban has been re-building it's forces to the point where they control large portions of Afghanistan. For the voters you must decide is this a successful and well managed war against Islamic extremists? Are we killing more terrorists then are being recruited ?

If you believe that Afghanistan is a huge success story vote Republican. If you believe that we should have put more resources into finishing the job in Afghanistan and that we need some accountability then you should probably vote Democratic.

On the economy it is quite simple if you are wealthy and will be greatly profiting from being in the stock market and getting the massive tax breaks you will of course be voting Republican to reward them for looking out for you. If you are like most people who are middle class and perhaps struggling to survive you know that the current people in power are not looking out for your interests. Another issue which gets little attention is the federal budget deficit. Has the government been spending your tax dollars wisely? Do you care that the future tax burden on the people will likely eventually amount to half of a person's income to pay off the debts that this current government is running up. So if you are old and rich and do not care about the debts that you leave behind for future generations than you will likely vote Republican and be happy to do so. If you are living in the real world where you know all this money that we are borrowing from foreign sources will eventually damage our economic future you should be looking to vote for some accountability for all the excessive pork barrel spending that has mushroomed in the last twelve years. It is quite clear that absolute power has corrupted the Republican congress absolutely. So if there is a change of power perhaps the new congress could get some accountability in our federal spending.

If you are a voter who has true conservative values you currently have a serious set of questions to ask? Where are the fiscally conservative Republicans? Why have the Republicans been spending borrowed money in massive amounts for twelve years now?

Why are we suddenly in the very costly business of nation building when our supposedly conservative leader specifically stated that he was against nation building in foreign lands? Why are the so called Religious conservative Republicans in Congress protecting Pedophiles and Homosexuals among their top leadership? As a person of moral values who believes that our conservative leaders should be protecting our children ;you must ask yourself why is protecting their political power more important than protecting our children? Why has Speaker Hastert not resigned ? Why has the President and his closest advisors put forth the idea of Faith Based Initiatives as a cynical ploy just to get Evangelical votes? Why did they then turn around and refuse to fund the initiatives when it came up in their spending bill? Why does the White House court the Evangelical leaders in public but refer to them privately as ridiculous and nuts? So many conservatives who have real moral values will forget about their core values when they go into the voting booth and vote Republican. This of course means that they are not actually people who have moral values they are just like the Republican leadership. They are just pretending that they believe in biblical moral values. Is it okay for their leaders to lie, cheat steal and lust after teenagers? What they will be telling the country by voting Republican is that their moral values are not based on biblical principles. If you look at the way the country has been run you already know that morality and integrity are not the real principles of President Bush and the Republicans. Getting into power and keeping that power are the only principles that these so called conservative Republicans have based their governance upon. Do the Democrats have any claim to moral leadership or integrity? Who is the current leader of the Democrats? If you have been watching the news it would seem that former President Clinton is leading a global initiative to fight poverty and AIDS. So conservatives and people of faith who is doing more to promote world peace and Christian values? How do true people of faith express their moral values in this election? Should they stay home and allow the chips to fall where they may?

Should they smite the incumbent Republicans down and vote Democrat?

All the while as I am writing this I can hear the television news in the background. More Americans have been killed this month. Hundreds of Iraqi civilians also continue to be killed. Insurgents are continuing to wreak havoc on the nation of Iraq. In short the war in Iraq remains an unqualified disaster. Militias are operating all over the country and killing people. Should the voters hold the Bush administration and the congress accountable for the completely incompetent management of this war? Get ready to see plenty of Republican political adds which are designed to scare you about the terrorist threat. Do you think that by invading Iraq and putting our troops in harms way has some how made our country here safer? Instead of making us safer we have simply wasted four hundred billion dollars and thousands of lives for nothing. We have done little or nothing to secure our borders, ports, or infrastructure.

So this is my view of just a few of the election issues. If the electorate chooses the status quo then they will get what they deserve. If you do not vote or you are going to vote for your incumbent representative then you deserve the continued sorry state of affairs that you will be getting. Whatever you do get out and vote America.