On Health coverage: Who is offering CHOICE, and who is offering a MANDATE (order, command, enforced compliance)?
During the campaign: Who has told you to FEAR the other candidate, and who has left this tactic out of their campaign? Who has (by an overwhelming majority of press analyses) misrepresented the other candidates' history, position and statements, and who has kept it straight? Who has hidden or mischaracterized their OWN record? Who most often speaks of what THEY (control, "taker") will do for you or to you, and who most often speaks of what WE and YOU will, can, or might do? Which candidate offers to construct a health-care plan in full public view, on C-Span? Which candidate, when tasked with addressing healthcare, did so in secret, and simultaneously accumulated files on those with opposing views, with the aim of being able to destroy them in the media in order to blunt their opposition? Which candidate is funded by YOU, and which candidate is funded by power groups and vested interests? Which candidate is pushing OPEN government?
There is a difference between achieving socially responsible ends by relying on the WILLINGNESS and the DESIRE of the electorate, and trying to achieve them by enforcing COMPLIANCE by the electorate.
It is popular nowadays to equate social programs with authoritarian socialist or even communistic methods of denying productive citizens the fruits of their labor in order to divert these resources to the shiftless, the feckless and the lazy. If you say "universal" medicine, the right will cry, "SOCIALIZED" medicine! If you speak for a progressive tax, whereby those with an obscene surplus are asked to kick in on behalf of the disadvantaged, the right will cry, "SOCIALISM! THEFT! STEALING THE FRUITS OF OUR LABORS!"
But here is the bottom line. Government in this country is about perfecting a citizen's RIGHT to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It's not about perfecting your "RIGHT" to take unfair advantage of your fellow man. It insists on value for value, trust, honesty and fairness in commerce, an equal opportunity to succeed, and where, through no fault of it own, a citizen has fallen and cannot get up, it reaches down and lifts him. The "takers" who own big industry, the banks, the drug companies, the insurance companies, the merchants who cheat both their workforce and their customers in order to maximize profits, the deceivers who monopolize control of needed resources and then charge a hapless populace for a share of God's bounty, are lieing to us. They lie all day, every day, to us, to our lawmakers, to their families and to themselves. They pretend that if they were not able to squeeze every drop of profit, fair or unfair, out of every transaction, that they would have to shutter their doors, leaving us in a dark and arid commercial wasteland with the winds of poverty and want cutting through our inadequate garments, and no means to earn our daily crust of bread. They create the false dichotomy of obscene profits or no profits at all. They fatten on our inability to challenge their control of the marketplace. They spread alarm about the calamity which would ensue if they were brought into line with a progressive system of checks and balances.
So - If one believes in commerce and profit as God, in falling upon the "wicked" so as to purify the morals of our society, in greasing the slopes down which workers slide into poverty and powering the vacuum machinery which sucks the money from our pockets and deposits it in those of the rich and powerful, then vote McCain. There will be financial growth. It will benefit only the wealthy, but it will be growth. There will be jobs. They won't pay a living wage, but they will be jobs. There will be war. There will be "free trade" which enriches commercial giants in foreign lands who employ slave labor. There will be a "morally upright" supreme court which will impose its ideas of morals upon us, deny the different equal treatment under the law, and restrict our liberties in favor of government consolidation of both legal and moral authority.
Or, if one wants strong hands on the reins of power and a four- or eight-year battle of inches across an ever-widening partisan divide, one side trying to ram "social justice" down the throat of the other, and billions wasted in lobbying efforts on both sides of the war, vote Hillary. She will take command. She will "fight for us," whether we want her to or not. She will "make our lives better" according to her personal standards. She will work and scheme the system and seek to gain the upper hand over the evil Republicans and, if she succeeds, will leave a trail of bile, resentment and hatred in her wake that would make Gettysburg look like Disneyland.
Or, if you want to see what your government is doing, have a voice in it, be consulted on the critical issues of the day, recapture some of the ground which social justice has lost to carnivorous capitalism - BECAUSE someone in Washington finally convinced the Captains of Industry that it was IN THEIR OWN INTEREST to have a happy, well-cared-for workforce, access to healthcare, a warm hearth and safe, effective schools, then vote for Obama. It's up to you.
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