Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bill Arnett

posted by The Sailor @ 6:04 PM Permalink

We here at vidiotspeak are blessed again. In addition to new author oscar wilde, (sorry oscar for being so remiss in your welcome), we also have a new guest poster, Bill Arnett.

Take it away Bill:

Barack Obama for president

As I watched Barack Obama's announcement, made in Springfield, IL, that he's running for president several thoughts came to mind; most good, one, in particular, not.

First the good: The historically rich background for his speech spoke volumes to me about the man. He truly, unlike our current prez, knows history, has good instincts for using that history to advantage (Springfield is where Lincoln made his "A house divided against itself cannot stand…" speech), and his affable but very plain and direct words really galvanized the hugh crowd present.

His recitation of his "street cred" was quite impressive as he deftly laid out his background as a church organizer working in Chicago right out of college to becoming a Harvard Law School-educated attorney (he never said Harvard, just being modest, I guess) working for civil rights and to aid the least amongst us.

He hit all the right buttons for me: a plea to be the generation that actually eliminates poverty in America; universal health care for everyone by 2012, bringing the troops home from Iraq; using genuine diplomacy to help the country and the world to benefit from the exportation of American ideals, and ending the use of our military to attempt playing mediator in a civil war.

I think Obama is probably at least as good an orator as Bill Clinton, who is the best of my lifetime 'cept for JFK, and perhaps even better, but at the end he blew it as far as I am concerned.

It took less than five minutes for Chris Matthews to bring up the bogus "his middle name is Hussein" crap; very disappointing.

He spoke of strengthening our military and better preparing to fight the war on terrorism more effectively, improving the Department of Homeland Security, etc., and it broke my heart to realize that, at least insofar as the WOT, he has drank the kool-ade and bought into the premise of this phony construct of power-mad men who see terrorists lurking everywhere and use fear to consolidate power.

There is no war on terror, there cannot be by definition a war on terror, and there is no greater chance of "winning" this phony war then there is of winning the war on drugs, poverty, ______________ (fill in the blank) and therefore, although Obama proclaimed he wanted to end eternal war, these two ideas are simply incompatible and virtually mutually exclusive.

The Defense Dept. will absorb and then regurgitate 40% of our entire budget for '08, a sum exceeding three-quarters of a TRILLION dollars, more than the next 14-major nations combined. Spending that kind of money will literally prevent implementation of almost ANY of the good ideas Obama expressed and it strikes me as incongruent and mystifying that he doesn't see it.

I simply believe that any country spending that kind of money for arms instead of social programs is at its zenith and beginning the downhill slide into historical insignificance, the End of Empire, and it's incomprehensible to me how so many ostensibly intelligent people don't see that if we cut back the defense budget we could pay for every social program on the books many times over and still have immense sums of money left to create, and pay for, new programs like universal health care, college funds for everyone, better veterans care, new industries to reduce our oil dependency, new jobs and completely new industries that could be started and nurtured for infrastructure repair, massive public works programs, restoration of our manufacturing capacity, and STILL have money left over after all that.

It will be the military-industrial complex that will prove the undoing of this great nation as Eisenhower warned, yet still we allow congress to continue spending money, like a crack wh*re on vacation in Bolivia, on expensive weapons systems, many of which do not work, and many for which the technology with which to build them or make them work has yet to be developed.

Obama lost a lot of points with me over this, but then again you never hear any other politicians being honest about this issue either, so in the long run this will not be the deciding factor for my future vote.

- Bill Arnett