I have a great family. Like all families, you care about all of your siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, parents, grandparents, and kids. Like all families, there are some you would like even if you weren’t related to them – and some that you wouldn’t. What’s good about family members you really like is that you can disagree with them, but still love them and care about them – agree to disagree, if you will. What’s bad is that sometimes they do something you vehemently disagree with, but you love them, so you don’t do what you would normally do with a perfect stranger – use your powers of persuasion, logic, reason, and oratory to reduce their position to dust, leaving them a quivering mass of protoplasm.
I have such a family member. My registered Republican brother-in-law, we’ll call him “Joe the Contractor” for anonymity sake, is proudly sporting a “Texans for Obama” bumper sticker.
Oh, the shame!
Joe the Contractor is a great guy. Churchgoer. Entrepreneur. Successful businessman. And yet, he’s been drinking the “Change” Kool-Aid, and plans to vote for The Chosen One on Tuesday.
I take no small amount of solace in the fact that, since we both live in Texas, there’s almost no chance that his vote for Obama will make the least bit of difference in how the election turns out. Texas is a red state, and his vote won’t change that.
What intrigued me is how a guy who counts himself as a conservative could even think about voting for Obama. Here’s some of his arguments, closed captioned for the thinking impaired:
McCain will keep us in Iraq for another 100 years. [No. He won’t. His remarks were taken waaaaaay out of context. McCain stated that we would likely have some kind of presence in Iraq – maintaining a U.S. military base there, just as we do in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, for the foreseeable future. That is VASTLY different from waging a war there.]
Give the new guy a chance…young and fresh beats old and tired. [Um…sure, maybe if we’re not in polycrisis mode. But when we’re dealing with a global war on terror, economic meltdown, and a total breakdown of border security, I want someone with lots of experience – not somebody who’s going to give us “Cuban Missile Crisis II, the Sequel” in his first six months in office.
We’ve got to start acknowledging that the ‘have nots’ have rights, too. [I mentioned that no country on the face of the Earth (including all the rich Arab countries combined) have done as much for Palestinians as the USA has. The fact that these guys are angry and want what we have is no reason nor justification to capitulate. I’m sorry there are places where abject poverty exists. Deal with it. We give a huge portion of our GDP towards charity for other nations. When is enough, enough?
Who benefits from the war? We need to stop policies that benefit a chosen few. [AH. The Haliburton gambit. Look – in any situation, some people/groups will benefit (financially or otherwise) and others won’t. Frankly, it doesn’t matter one bit if certain contractors benefit. That’s a smokescreen the left uses to try and deny the value of taking the fight to our enemies. What makes more sense – waiting for another attack, or going some place to fight that draws those maggots like houseflies to a No Pest Strip?
Obama’s slick and glib – McCain is not. [Well you got me there, but I don’t see that having a slick salesman in office is a good thing for the country.]
Now for a few of my arguments – and his retorts:
Obama exhibits a pattern of associating with bad guys. Live with the lame and you limp. [Um…that’s all old news. That doesn’t matter. All those guys are gone now from his inner circle. Besides…how do you know McCain doesn’t have associates that are crooks or people that hate America?] Okay, how do you know that all the bad actors in Obama’s camp have been both discovered and booted?
If we withdraw from Iraq on a timetable as you suggest, the terrorists will simply wait us out. We need to finish the job before we leave. [A job never starts until you set a completion date.] Maybe in your line of work. War is a different thing altogether.
We can’t afford someone who’s determined to raise taxes to redistribute the wealth. [Hey – we’re all only a month or so away from living on the street if we don’t get paychecks. Obama will help. McCain won’t.] If by “helping” you mean “raise taxes to the point where the economy spirals from a recession into a deep and prolonged depression, well, then I guess you have a point.
You see, when you get someone that falls under the spell of The One, there is no reasoning with them. They will take any fact or piece of evidence you present, and discount it, twist it, or see black as white, day as night. So we’ve agreed to disagree. I hope and pray that the undecideds that have awakened to smell the coffee and choose McCain outnumber the ones who are drinking their morning Kool-Aid for Obama. And so it goes…
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