Give me a break, Worldy. What kind of career would your ideal veep be? Considering that most congresspeople are lawyers(something on the order of 60-75%), and well, only a few different types of lawyers including corporate and “ambulance chaser” lawyers would really have the money to run for congress or the presidency, you’re pretty much screwed. They’d also be likely to be white and male.
I worry less about his career as a plaintiffs’ lawyer than I worry about myriad other things. Being a plaintiffs lawyer certainly doesn’t make him inherently an “ambulance chaser”, but old prejudices and preconceived notions die hard I guess.
If you allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good you are effectively surrendering the future of your nation to people who have no such scruples. There was a thread around here withing the last few weeks that left the distinct impression that there were very few people who were ever given the chance to vote for a presidential candidate that they throughly approved of. This is politics, not theology. You choices, for better of or worse, are Bush and Kerry. Everything indicates that the electorate is pretty much evenly divided between the two (why that is so is beyond my understanding). Especially in the so called battleground states voting for a long shot third party candidate or to withhold your vote entirely is the same as voting for the least attractive candidate and amounts to poking yourself in the eye in hopes of improving your vision.
It is a simple question. Do you want the policies of the present administration changed or don’t you? If you withhold your vote or vote for a third party candidate (none of whom are viable candidates in the sense that they don’t have the chance of a fiddle’s bitch of getting elected) then you are only increasing the chances that the present administration and their policies will be around for another four years.
Get over your self and try voting for your country’s future.
I’d recommend reading all of the posts in the thread, in a chronological order. Luckily, this version of vBulletin adds a post number to each post, to aid in following along.
Seriously - the conversation has shifted. Please keep up.
All other things being equal, I have no strong desire to see John Kerry in the White House. Here’s yet another man who will do his level best to ignore me for the next four years, do any number of things I think are shitty and very few I genuinely appreciate (if I end up hearing about them at all).
All other things are unequal, though. Bush seems to have the blueprint for Things That Piss Me Off, and by gum he’s going through that list with the ferocity and determination of Robert S. McNamara dumping napalm on the Mekong Delta.
My feeling is this: I’m voting for the person, out of two, least likely to fuck with America more. We have met the lesser of two evils, and he sure as hell is not GWB.
After the election, I’m going to see what folks I can find in the Senate and House who are more desirable than W and Kerry put together. I am hoping this will not be difficult, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend another four years sitting around bitching about WHOEVER and waiting for someone who has no vested interest in me giving me the name of one of two people who have a legitimate shot at a job that affects all of us, USers or otherwise, in ways we see now if for some bizarre reason we didn’t four years ago.
My excuse for four years ago? Well, for one I didn’t think anyone could be THIS bad, and for another I didn’t have a hell of a lot of access to things I take for granted now (hello, intarweb), and for a third I get what I deserve if I don’t do my little part to educate myself on more than just the particular talking head of whichever party. I was also 15 when Clinton was elected to his second term, and if you’d bet me the house that Bush would run, let alone win, first I’d have had to figure out why the hell George Herbert Walker Bush wanted to come back for more after a four-year hiatus.
Then fucking read the rest of that poster’s comments. If you’re dissatisfied with my follow-up, then feel free to call me on it. Until then, let me commend you on your typing ability when your head’s so fucking far up your ass.
You didn’t indicate to me by your post that you were open to persuasion. My stock answer to “I’m not voting” is “you’re an asshole.” If now you’re saying “convince me to vote for Kerry-Edwards” then provisionally I retract my “asshole” comment.
I haven’t reviewed the entire thread yet but with it being up to page 2 I assume there have been reasons offered on both sides. I’ll ask the question that got Ronald Reagan elected. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
You tell me. I don’t plan on voting for a VP - I intend to vote for a president. You sound like you’ve decided at the last moment to not buy a car you’ve previously decided on, because you don’t like the spare tire.
Since the Ralph Nader vote-pissing issue has been raised again, allow me to direct anyone interested in the topic to a good GD thread on the subject: Nader Voters, still seen no difference?
On the specific point of under what circumstances a vote is “wasted,” the answer depends on how you conceptualize the value of a vote. If a vote is only valuable if it determines the election, then every vote but one is wholly worthless (i.e., all votes cast for the loser(s), and every vote except one for the winner). If you conceive of it as some sort of civic duty, then no vote is ever wasted.
I think the best way to conceive of it–and I’m paraphrasing this from an article on voting I read in Discover a few years ago–is that a vote’s value depends on its marginal chance of deciding the election. That means that you’re not wasting much of anything by voting for Nader in Massachusetts, but you are wasting something rather more valuable by voting for Nader in a state where the race is close, such as in Florida 2000.
Talk about your non sequiturs! What does ambulance chasing have to do with Edwards? Be specific, please–which of his cases do you think deserve this insulting appellation, and why?
Everything I’ve heard about his law cases points to their being legitimate cases on behalf of people who suffered grievous injury due to the very real negligence of other people or companies. Nothing I’ve heard about his cases makes me think that he’s out to turn
Bad luck into
Someone’s fault, and thus
Profit.
I dunno, Olentzero: what IS Kerry going to do if NATO refuses? Obviously someone with no negotiating power with NATO right now can’t do anything more than outline what steps he plans to take (i.e., he plans to ask NATO to step in). If we’re going to speculate, surely we should assume he’ll try to do similar things–i.e., he’ll try his damnedest to internationalize the military presence in Iraq, thereby deemphasizing US military presence there.
But that’s just speculation: all we have to go on is what he himself said he’d try to do, which is incidentally the exact opposite of what you said he’d promised to do.
For what? He’s been very public about his cases, having even written about 4 specific ones in a book called, ironically, Four Trials. What is there to investigate? If they investigated Bush/Cheney about their income and how their investments, business partners, and positions within companies affected their judgement on contracts and such, they never did shit about it, so what would be the point? In fact, it’s almost as if they funnelled the work and contracts to those investments and companies on purpose.
I didn’t mean to imply that you meant to imply that all trial/plaintiffs attorneys are ambulance chasers either, but the mere fact that you refer to Mr. Edwards as an Ambulance CHaser shows that you have a pretty extreme bias against him for that fact. Whether or not, by extension, that means you think all lawyers in that chosen field are that way is not why I pointed that out at all. I wanted you to see how broad a brush you painted Mr. Edwards with.
So far I always voted, but it’s not making much of a difference. Even if the party I vote for would win or be in the winning coalition, there’s still going to be enough bs coming from the government to tick me off. Voting once every 4 years is not going to represent my interests well in between voting sessions.
Hence, I cannot blame people who just give up on the whole farce we call voting and stay home. In my book not voting doesn’t make someone an asshole - if all the options are crap, then obviously the best choice is to not choose crap.
