I am so incredibly sick of lies. I’m overwhelmed by the ego-massaging over-statements of presidential candidates. I just watched part of the Democratic Presidential Debate from New Mexico and finally it was making me so angry I had to change the channel. I was so frustrated I had to watch fluff, so I switched it to Oxygen and watched “Oprah After the Show”. I was *that* mad.

Why? That debate was so full of lies and half-truths that I just couldn’t stand it. I’ll cover the few that my pain-ridden head can actually remember right now.

Howard Dean was actually silly enough to say that the government has done “absolutely nothing to protect us from Osama Bin Laden”. Um, excuse me? Have we been attacked since September 11th, 2001? I cannot imagine how blind he must be to actually believe that, if he truly does. I’ve seen evidence of many terrorist plots that have been stopped. I’m aware of how many Al Qaeda agents have been arrested around the world, including many in this very country. And to top all of that off, I don’t even watch the news that much, and I still know it! Still he says that we have done “nothing”. That makes me so angry because it undermines so much effort by so many people. If Dean believes his own words, he needs to wake up. If he knows the truth and still says such things, then he is misleading so many people, creating so much unwarranted distrust of so many more branches of our government besides just President Bush and his administration. Yes, I know the Bush Administration is shady; yes, I know that a lot of Americans don’t trust them. But to say that nothing has been done to protect us from Osama Bin Laden, that is a completely heartless and misleading lie. He has lost all credibility in my opinion.

Carol Moseley Braun said another thing regarding Osama Bin Laden that really upset me. She actually said, “We aren’t even looking for Osama Bin Laden!” Does she really think the military and this country’s intelligence agencies are so tiny that we can only focus on one target at a time? That’s completely ignorant. Anyone with such a limited view of this country’s military prowess has no right to be the Commander in Chief of the United States of America’s military forces. I know personally that what she said is so far from the truth it’s a direct opposite. One of my friends’ own fathers is the head of anti-terrorism at an Air Force Base in this country. His sole purpose in his career is to lead just one team out of many that’s hunting down Osama Bin Laden. Another of my friends used to work at the Pentagon as part of the upper echelon of Army intelligence and strategy for anti-terrorism, again primarily focused on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. And even still, she makes such a statement as “We aren’t even looking for Osama Bin Laden.” Either she lied or she doesn’t know any better, either of which disqualify her from true candidacy; she is not prepared to be our President.

Dick Gephardt. He claims that because of him and Bill Clinton, 23 million jobs were created. He said that it was all because of some bill they tried to pass, it was all because of Bill Clinton’s economic reforms. He vowed to recreate that if he were elected President. I don’t see how he can. Why? A huge percentage of those 23 million jobs that were created were directly related to the tech boom of the 1990’s. That was a phenomenan, a fluke, the result of the technological advances that were entirely separate from any bill, any economic reform that was passed within one to two years of the boom itself. The reason we only had 3% unemployment because a whole new industry was created.


And just like any new industry, there’s an initial period of trial and error. A high percentage of companies in situations like that are bound to fail. Hence why a huge percentage of jobs were lost. And Dick Gephardt is trying to claim responsibility for this boom? How is he going to recreate it? What does he intend to do to create 23 million jobs again, now that the tech industry has plateaued? He thinks he can recreate the wheel, so to speak. Dick Gephardt is taking credit for something he had no overriding responsibility for creating. It’s just as ludicrous as when Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet. Never mind the fact that he was in diapers when the internet itself was still an infant. Never mind the fact that the foundations for the internet had been in place long before he had ever even been conceived. It’s the same case with Dick. And that’s exactly what his statement amounts to.

Back to Howard Dean. The topic was granting citizenship to illegal immigrants, primarily in regard to illegal immigrants that cross over the Mexican borders. Howard Dean chose to attack the angle of profiling, claiming that no studies have ever shown this as an effective means of interrogation. I’ve even read such studies that he says don’t exist. But that’s not what made me mad.


What he said was, “Last time I checked, none of the 19 terrorists on September 11th were Latinos.” That’s totally missing the point, using an emotional ploy to back an opinion that is baseless according to his other claims. The reason authorities are wary of illegal immigrants that cross over the Mexican border isn’t because we’re afraid they’ll jump on a plane and slam it into a building, killing thousands upon thousands of innocent people. As far as I know, it isn’t a cultural norm in Mexico to hate Americans so much that they have national holidays parading their hatred.


Instead, what’s most common across the Mexican border? Drug trafficking. Do we have substantial evidence to warrant the use of profiling to some extent? Yes. Where did I get such information? When I lived in Sierra Vista, which is only about half an hour from Nogales, Arizona, the majority of my friends were FBI agents at the local field office. The reason all of these agents were assigned to little ole’ Sierra Vista was because of all the drugs that were being passed through the desert. Sometimes they went through Nogales, sometimes they would be sent across hundreds of miles of desert by illegal immigrants who had been coerced by drug lords to take drugs across the border into Mexico. Sometimes, these people weren’t trying to immigrate at all – they’d go back and forth, taking drugs with them on repeated trips.


How extensive was this drug trafficking? I remember a time shortly before I moved when one of my best friends and one of the greatest men I have ever known had to leave his family for several weeks in a row to go on assignment to Nogales. There they found a home which was actually the front for a network of tunnels underneath the desert, underneath the US/Mexican border. Millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs had been passed through this tunnels. And what was worse, these drug traffickers had murdered dozens of Americans in the process. This poor man had to spend at least three weeks digging through bodies in the desert. Then, when he got home, he didn’t know what to tell his three daughters when they asked him what he had to do. He couldn’t tell them that he had to pull young American children out of shallow graves in the middle of nowhere.

And now Howard Dean says that we have no reason to question illegal immigrants, all because they don’t hijack planes? He’s completely missing the point. Illegal immigrants are just that, they are illegal. There are proper channels. Maybe those channels should be reformed, but that doesn’t mean we abandon them. That doesn’t mean that we accept anyone without question into this country when they don’t even bother to try to do it legally.

I think it is sad when Mexicans die in the desert just trying to make it to America to lead a better life. I’m not saying that’s right. But by accepting these people, but putting them on welfare, and giving them a life better than anything they could have expected, what are we telling everyone else back in Mexico who longs to live the American Dream? We’re sending a pretty powerful message – come to America, come illegally, ignore law, and you will get a reward. We’re encouraging it. We’re setting precedents. Reform immigration laws, publicize how to make the American Dream possible legally – don’t hand out freebies to those who try to cut corners and end up hurting themselves and others in the process.

And for heaven’s sake, ask questions, investigate. Don’t harm anyone, but don’t harm anyone else by refusing to look for warning signs. It is a fact we have to face that drugs come across the US/Mexican borders. Trying to warm up to people and play nice isn’t going to change that.

Finally, back to my old rant about Howard Dean’s stance on trying to incorporate socialized medical care into this country. I had some hope that maybe another Democrat wouldn’t support this – in my opinion – doomed idea. I don’t have that hope anymore. Except for Joe Lieberman, all of them were explicitly clear that socialized medicine was exactly what they were going for, but none of them had the guts to call it by name. As for Lieberman, he simply skirted the question asked of him by addressing only one teensy aspect of his plan, so I’m not even sure what he believes, which is just as scary to me.


But as for the rest of them, if you support socialized medicine, say it. And not only that, get past the buzzwords. Get to the bottom line. They all kept saying how it wouldn’t increase costs for the tax-payers. My bologna has a first name, and it’s D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T. Look at what’s happening in England. Every single person in that nation pays for socialized medical care, whether they use it or not. It means that tax dollars are used to cover medical expenses. Yes, everyone gets medical care in some form or another, but as I already addressed, it’s certainly not medical care up to our standards.


Furthermore, say that you want private insurance, so you can get proper American medical care that actually meets your needs and keeps you from sitting in an emergency for days on end with a serious injury. What’s going to happen? Not only are you going to pay excruciatingly high costs for private insurance, you’re still going to be paying taxes for socialized care. Those taxes will not go away. Why do you think so many Europeans have such ridiculously high taxes? It’s the exact same frustration my parents faced when they decided to home-school my brother and I – we didn’t use up any government funds whatsoever for our education, but my parents still had to shell out exorbitant amounts of their money to support a public school system that had failed them. We gave money and got no benefit. True, that was by choice, but isn’t it the same with socialized healthcare? You’re choosing not to risk your life by settling for poor medical care, so you’re going to pay the price. And that price is so much higher than any of those candidates even hinted at.

Tonight really made me sick. So sick and so upset with their lack of integrity that I promise I will not vote for any of them. I didn’t even scratch the surface of the injustices that came spewing out of their mouths. If nothing else, if they have a platform, I want them to stick to it, shout it out, and be proud of it. Dean supposedly has passion, but obviously not enough to spell everything out. Neither do the others, from what I saw tonight.

So who will I vote for? I honestly don’t know. At this point, I think I’m going to write my own name in. That will at least make me feel a little better, cause I still don’t think Donald Duck would be a very good President either.

And now, thankfully, the perkaset I just took is finally kicking in. My eyes are getting that light feeling, my joints feel funny, my stomach kind of disappeared somewhere, and my massive headache is finally going away. Thank goodness for that. I’m going to bed now. Feel free to publish your opinions in the comments section, even if they get as long-winded as my blog did tonight. I welcome opposing opinions, just so long as you back them up. I’m tired of buzzwords, so drop all of those and give me the straight facts. Thanks. Sorry if I offended anybody with this, I know I was probably a bit more ranty than necessary, but hey, I’m mad as heck and I’m not going to take it anymore! 🙂

Good night.