What reasons could any sane person have for voting for George Bush?

He's a Fiscal Conservative
Bush amazes me (or I should say the American public amazes me) because of his ability to sell himself as the direct opposite of the man he really is. How could a fiscal conservative be responsible for the greatest budget deficit in the history of our nation, a deficit conservatively forecasted to continue for at least the next decade, adding trillions of dollars to a national debt that already totals more than $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. He's a believer in small government? In the past four years Bush has expanded the federal government more than any other contemporary President of any party (he makes Clinton look like an absolute miser!). Believe this: you can blame the economy and the 9-11 attacks, but Bush is personally responsible for at least half of the $500 billion deficit we'll see this year based only on his ill-fated war in Iraq and the tax cuts he enacted.
Bush is only fiscally conservative when it comes to protecting the poor, the environment, the military he likes to claim he supports. When it comes to using the powers of the government to enrich his wealthy friends in the oil industry, Halliburton, and the like, Bush is one of the all-time biggest pork-barrel politicians of all time.

Support the Troops!
Questioning our president at a time like this is unpatriotic and encouraging our enemies to continue their attacks against us! Right? I love the way the people who spout this hard-line are the same ones who shouted so loudly that Clinton was unfit to lead. That said, I think everyone feels sympathy for the families of the soldiers who have died and those having to serve long tours away from their family in dangerous places. So how in God's name can any of those families support the very man who put them into that line of fire? He's only the man who has consistently taken away veterans benefits, refused to provide body armor for soldiers, and incidentally used his family connections to avoid service in Vietnam (that's nothing new for the privileged of both parties, but Bush is unusual in that he apparently didn't even fulfill the minimal commitments he had to make).
Here's a question: why is it that when a gunner makes an honest mistake and kills innocent soldiers on the ground (this happens fairly often but I'm thinking of the aircraft that fired on Canadians in Afghanistan) gets a court martial or even prison time, but when his commanders make a mistake and kill, say, nine innocent children by ordering cluster bombs into the wrong field, nobody ever has to face the music? What about a commander in chief who kills tens of thousands of innocent people because he said there were weapons of mass destruction that never actually existed? His reward, apparently, is re-election.
Soldiers aren't allowed to question their commanders. Patriotic Americans not only have the right, but the absolute duty to do so. Otherwise, why bother with the damn election at all?

It's Great to Have a Christian in the White House!
Bush is a poor excuse for a Christian, and I submit that many of those who will vote for him are just as bad. Can you see Jesus striding through our churches, throwing people out as he did the moneylenders in the temple? How many of us truly follow good Christian ideals in our own lives? Just how many hungry people did you stop to help today? The so-called Religious Right have no Christian compassion for anyone except themselves. They believe they are wealthy and successful because they are efficient and work hard and God is on their side and all those people starving to death elsewhere in the world are just too lazy to make anything of themselves.
Bush, according to legend, literally goes around saying things like, "Fuck em! Fuck 'em all!" and he's talking about Americans when he says that--those that don't support him, anyway, just a few hundred million of us. Bush is not a nice man, much less a Christian, and from the very beginning he has surrounded himself with men like Karl Rove known for dirty tricks, lies, and distortions. That's quite a group of disciples. I just read a story last night of how Bush denied the last chance for a condemned woman's life when he was governor of Texas--by mocking and making fun of her! You can see the true Bush in that famous smirk, and he's not the kind of man you would want for a neighbor, much less a president.

Bush is Making America Safer
If giving millions of people reasons to hate America is making us safer, if pulling out of the home of the Taliban to invade a country with no known ties to terrorists is helpful, and if you believe that killing someone's family members leads to peace, then maybe you're right. You're also nuts. This "war on terrorism" can't be won. Need an example? Exactly how free from terrorism is the State of Israel? Terrorism exists exactly because angry people know that they can't defeat a sophisticated military. And that military can no more defeat them in Israel, Iraq, or Afghanistan than it could in Vietnam. To stop terrorism, you have to have the good will of the common people, but our policies tend to achieve the opposite results.
Some like to argue that the militants hate us already so we have nothing to lose. In reality, there is no bottom to the pit of hate, and there were billions of people out there waiting for a reason to hate us. Bush has given them just about every reason you can think of (let's see, invade a holy country for trumped-up reasons that are proven false, round up thousands of mostly innocent people, hold them in prisons for months or years without charging them with anything, then take pictures to show everyone of them being tortured and abused).
People talk about how well Bush handled 9-11, as if he deserves credit his wisdom in not nuking a country the next day. On that horrible day, everyone was looking for a leader and sure enough, Bush was it. But when you look at what actually happend, any President would have talked tough that day, said the very same words. And most of them would have stopped reading stories to school children when told that a second plane had crashed into the trade center.
They say that everything changed on 9-11. But the world was the same one as ever, filled with the very same threats. The only difference was that a president who had made terrorism a low priority, throwing out the advice and plans already developed so he could start over and come up with the same ideas all too late, suddenly saw his chance to make his mark on the world.
Why did Al Queda fly those plans into the World Trade Center? Sure, it brought some pain and suffering inside our insulated world, and that cheered the hearts of those who thought we deserved that kind of punishment. But you don't plan and train for years just for revenge. The true goal was simply to provide a violent response that would, if we were stupid enough to be so easily manipulated, get America to go to war with the Islamic world. And so, like blind fools, we did exactly what they hoped we would do.

Anything Else? Anything at All?
I understand why the very wealthy support George Bush. He makes them more wealthy. Why would anyone else support Bush? You'd have to crazy, stupid, or just willfully ignorant. If Bush walked into your house tonight and raped your wife, hauled your children off to prison, robbed you of all your money, and dumped toxic waste on your front lawn, then told you with great sincerity that he was a compassionate Christian peace-loving enviornmentalist, would you believe him? Am I missing something here?
In Geoge Orwell's 1984 the protagonist is imprisoned and tortured for weeks until he is not just willing to say that his captor is holding up four fingers when he can clearly see five, but actually believes that there are five fingers there. Until this year, I didn't realize that was actually possible.

Copyright © 2002 by Rodger Ling.
All rights reserved. Comments: rling@stationr.org.