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November 7th: To vote or sit out?
Posted by Raven on October 10th, 2006
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democratic candidates have a big edge on Republicans one month before elections to decide control of Congress, a flurry of new polls said on Monday, with ratings for President George W. Bush and Congress dropping after the Capitol Hill sex scandal.
A USA Today/Gallup poll gave Democrats a 23-point edge on Republicans in the battle for Congress, while a CNN poll gave Democrats a 21-point lead.
A ABC News/Washington Post poll found Democrats held a 54-41 percent lead in the congressional horse race among registered and likely voters, which ABC said was the biggest Democratic lead this close to election day in more than 20 years.
And a new CBS News/New York Times poll showed 79 percent of respondents thought Republican leaders were more concerned with politics than the well-being of the teenage congressional assistants who received lewd messages from former Republican Rep. Mark Foley of Florida.
So the GOP desparately needs my vote. I get that.
But it places me in a position I’m not sure is right or wrong. I want to vote on November 7th. I want to vote GOP. But they have pissed me off BIG TIME. It’s more than the DO-NOTHING Congress.
I have been thinking about sitting this election cycle out, not voting.
Some tell me this is like giving the Democrats a win. By not voting, I would handing over the election.
Others tell me we shouldn’t vote for those who have not done the job we elected them to do.
And others tell me I should vote straight GOP in spite of their miserable failures-that I should give them my vote of confidence
anyway.
I am also hearing the worst case scenerio stuff too- “If the Dems win, you’re taxes will skyrocket, we will be weaker, we will lose the War on Terror, we will cut and run….”
I am in a quagmire. I don’t know if I can live with myself if I vote GOP- because they have done nothing to represent the true values of this party. Instead, they have cowarded down to every PAC (illegal immigration is an example); they have spent my money on more damn pork than any other Congress has; they give in to pressure with national security issues. They have become SOFT and MUSHY and POLITICALLY CORRECT to an extreme I can’t condone or excuse.
IS anyone else feeling this way?
October 10th, 2006 at 11:03 am
I am, big time, raven.
The only problem is, I don’t think I can sit it out or vote anything but Republican.
My reasons?
The Democrats would turn the War on Terror into the usual lefty political circus — they care more about pleasing countries that have anything but our best interests at heart than they care about doing what is right for America. Given the fact that the global Jihad is already being won in Europe and that they are prepping the U.S. — with the help of our own media and our own government, I’d hate to see their timetable accellerated by having people like Nancy Pelosi running the “ship of state”. The Dems would almost surely have us cut and run from Iraq and it would then be “another Vietnam” — us leaving the people over there in the lurch, the bad guys taking over and murdering thousands of people who sided with the U.S. and worse, Iraq would become the home of Taliban II, which would not be good for the U.S., Israel or the west in general. It would also have the effect of turning those countries in the Arab world that have modified their behavior since our troops arrived in the region into totally ruthless Islamofascist regimes over a very short time span.
Here in the U.S., we would end up with the ACLU’s version of national security, we’d be flooded with much more unskilled immigration than the economy can handle and who knows, maybe we’d even end up with the new British policy where Law Enforcement has to consult with Muslims before conducting raids on terror cells.
Pelosi has already announced that one of her first actions after becoming boss lady will be to push to roll back the tax cuts (with a Democrat majority, she’d have no problem), which will screw the economy, plunging us back into the late 1990s/ early 2000s recession. There would be a whole hell of a lot of layoffs as companies and investors again began hanging onto their money, and the gov’t would abruptly see considerably lower tax revenues as the penalties for the successful would come nowhere near the levels collected from income tax on the rank & file citizen. So as is their way, the new Dem majority in Congress would end up raising taxes across the board to compensate, further damaging the economy as people would be spending less money — hence, less sales tax collected and more layoffs in the retail sector, leading to still less income tax collected. The Dems have absolutely no concept of economic reality.
At least if we maintain our Republican majority, we can continue fighting to fix our party while it’s still in the majority and still holding back some of the extremes of the left.
So I’m definitely going to vote, despite the bad taste it may leave in my mouth.
October 10th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
dido what seth said. I will definitely be voting Republican. They are not perfect but what do we have for the alternative. I’d be scared to know where our country would be if Pres. Bush was not it office.
October 10th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
BREAKING: NAMBLA to endorse GOP in coming mid-term elections
Sat Sep 30, 2006 at 11:09:09 AM PDT
In an unprecedented move, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) has issued a blanket endorsement this morning encouraging its membership to vote GOP in upcoming mid-term elections in the US. Speaking from an undisclosed basement location, NAMBLA spokesman Phil McCracken announced the surprise move in response to growing evidence that GOP House Leadership covered up, for over a year, the sexual predations of one of its members, Mark Foley (R-FL).
“We know how Mark Foley feels,” responded McCracken to reporters, “this is the same stigma all of our membership feel, the painful stigma of being harshly judged for using our relative power, as adults in positions of authority, to gain sexual favors from minors. And not since Cardinal Law helped cover up the actions of some of our members in the ’80’s and ’90’s have we had so powerful men as the GOP House leadership looking out for our interests. It is therefore time we return the favor and encourage our membership to vote Republican in this election cycle.”
In a scandal guaranteed to anger parents, a prominent House Republican, Mark Foley (R-FL) has resigned after the revelation that he exchanged raunchy electronic messages with a teenage boy, a former congressional page. Rep. Foley, who is single, apologized Friday for letting down his family and constituents. Once his resignation letter was read to the House late Friday afternoon, Republicans spent the night trying to explain – six weeks before congressional elections – how this could have happened on their watch.
NAMBLA, which has in the past endorsed virtually every election the Libertarian party, took the further step of offering its services to the GOP to mobilize voters, but McCracken admitted “they haven’t gotten back to us on that yet.”
Dennis Hastert’s office did not return calls in response to this story.
October 11th, 2006 at 12:20 am
Trust me…….the ONLY people who care that YOU sit out are the democraps. Its the only way they can be assured victory, and they realise this.
I say vote your candidates that meet your views and then ride them with letter writing and phone calls.
To sit out an election because of a few bad apples just proves liberals right and supersedes any rights you have for the next 4 years in being able to complain about anyone in the house or senate because YOU didnt vote.
October 11th, 2006 at 12:21 am
Steve –
Even if you were serious,
A)The page in question was too old for NAMBLA members to be interested, and
B)Perverts almost uniformly vote Democrat, as that is the party that supports, encourages and includes most perverts.
You might have noticed that the GOP got rid of Foley immediately, whereas Massachusettes’ resident Democrat boy enthusiast was heartily endorsed and reelected by Democrats.
Of course, Democrats being the hypocrites they are, I saw no mention of him in your comment.
October 11th, 2006 at 5:22 am
Raven,
Your basic problem here is that you dont want to support either party. And while the US is, in theory, not a two-party system… for all practical purposes, it is.
Do you want to support the party that shares your views officially, but seems to pay only lip-service to them and had demonstrated a lack of competance and tendency towards dishonesty? Or the party that doesn’t share your views, but is less subject to recent scandle and probably more competant at day-to-day things? Or vote for noone? Its things likt this that lower election turnout.
Your problem isn’t with the parties, its with the two-party system. You have two options, and dont like either. So, where possible, perhaps look into finding an independent or another party to support? Difficult to do at the federal level, where the number of politicians not allied to one of the camps is tiny, but there are some in state and local government.
The NAMBLA rumor appears to be a hoax. A check of both their own website and a search of recent news reveals no mention of it at all – though I see them being used a lot as a political smear, with many commenters claiming people in both parties are associated with them.
Seth: A bit of an exageration there. The dems have their problems, but so do the republicans. Their incompetance is in different areas. Im not going to counter all your claims right now (Still waiting for the morning caffine to kick in), but you seem a bit paranoid there. The country is not going to be destroyed if democrats win an election. The economy is not going to collapse. You are not going to be invaded by a billion angry muslims. The democrats wouldn’t just flee from Iraq – they would probably rush to get it stable, then get out as many troops as they could and hope for the best. But they will still try to avoid the country collapsing. They might at least do something about thinks like climate change, where the republicans are still doing the equivilent of sticking their fingers in their ears and singing ‘I cant hear you’ whenever the topic comes up. They are ahead on all enviromental issues by far, for similar reasons. Economics… I dont pretend to understand that, and I suspect your understanding is no better than mine, so really I cant judge it. But at least they have a policy, while republicans want to spend without limit in the military and just cut back domestic programs to compensate.
But, more than anything, if I could vote I would support the democrats for their honesty. I think the republicans are far too manipulative – they deliberately exagerate security problems, they ignore any facts that might cause them to change policy, they spout empty nonsense about ‘Values,’ and more specific things like ‘Protecting marriage.’ Bush did the blatent emotional blackmail of his ’snowflake’ photo-shoot, even. And twice now they have passed laws banning biotech procedures that have not been done and wont be for many years yet, in an attempt to create a moral panic. Then they give the constant appeals to religion, knowing that if they can just mention God and Christ often enough they will win the religious voters whatever their policy. No, I could just never support a party that puts so much effort into a superficial image and so little into actually making decisions properly. They turn politics into a game.
October 11th, 2006 at 5:43 am
Seth –
Your suspicions are correct. I think the “Phil McCracken” gave Steves little news flash away. Sounds like this bit was taken from the weekly world news.
October 11th, 2006 at 7:57 am
IS anyone else feeling this way?
I do!
October 11th, 2006 at 8:00 am
Ugh! I hit the submit button before I was finished.
As I was saying, I’m very dissatisfied with the Republicans, but the Dems are worse.
I never miss a chance to vote. Here in my district, George Allen is fighting to keep his seat, so he needs every vote he can get. Also, several bond issues are on the ballot, so I have to vote against those–for all the good my vote will do. The bond issues here always pass. And residents of Fairfax County wonder why their real-estate taxes are so high! We’re building new schools all over the place, to accommodate the illegal invaders’s children.
October 11th, 2006 at 9:08 am
Siricou Raven –
The world is not the same place it was re aggressive Islam that it was a year ago.
Bush’s tax cuts were the ONLY thing that got us out of the recession — I won’t argue the point with a Democrat because Dems’ version of Economics is what got us into the recession in the late 1990s — Dems’ economics are a Utopian dream.
Tomslick —
The Dems are feeling real frisky about the Foley thing, and it really makes them look pitiful when one considers that such things are an exception to the rule among GOPers, whereas it’s a Democrat norm — it wasn’t always, but since the Dems let the libs hijack their party….
October 11th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Seth
I agree, the Dems do appear to be catering to the far left and IMO, this is not helping their cause very much. The Reps do not appear to be in high regard at this time. It would be a good time for the Dems to go for the jugular, but they are not doing a very good job of stating what they stand for. It seems like the Reps neck is on the block, but the Dems can’t lift the axe.
I hear Bush is wrong, the war is wrong, Foley’s a perv, but that is not much of a platform. Exactly what would they do different? “Well, we don’t know, but Bush is an idiot”.
I am personally disgusted with both parties. The only thing both sides of aisle could agree on is crushing any third party that gains momentum. Maybe term limits would help and eliminate the legal bribery under the guise of lobbying.
As far as voting, I often feel like blowing it off because there is not much of a choice. However, acknowledging all the scarifices made in the past for me to do so, I can’t bring myself to even miss a primary. Not to mention I get to vote against Murtha in my district.
October 11th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
Thank you all for your thoughts.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
One other thing Raven…….
LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!
:D :mrgreen:
October 25th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Susan…are you aware that President Bush has two more years in office? We’re not voting for the new President here, sweetie. Get your facts straight and stop believing every Republican word you hear. They’re just trying to sway you. And as far as all this talk about Dem’s not wanting to protect America; what bullshit! Dem’s are not just pacifists who want to sit around giving every country what they want. Please read a little bit more instead of just inserting your own opinions here, people.