No Country for Old Men (Or Old Ideas)

The Republican convention has just wrapped up. John McCain delivered his speech pretty well and the conservative party have had their say.


While there are many, many issues that could be debated about what has been said by the GOP this week (many instances of utter and shameless hypocrisy come to mind), the thing that the convention and especially John McCain's speech drove home to me quite clearly is...


The last thing our country needs right now in a leader is a rich old man espousing old, disproven ideas that have directly led the huge problems our nation now faces.


Whether it's the economy, the Iraq war, relations with China and Russia, healthcare, jobs, energy policy, environmental policy...all of these things are spectacularly worse than they were eight years ago specifically because of the leadership, action (or inaction in many cases) and the so called "judgement" of Bush, the Republicans and definitely John McCain.


All I could think about each time that McCain made a point in his speech about what he was going to do to solve our problems was that he is the head of the party that created these very ills and he was offering nothing new - same old Republican punch lines. And lets face it, the Republicans have really been running things for much longer than the last eight years. They controlled Congress from 1995-2006 and the Presidency for 20 of the last 28 years.

We need new ideas, new people and change. Twenty six year DC insider John McCain literally goes around the country promising more of the same.


I can't vote for that and won't.

Further, because the Republicans have so totally failed with their policies I genuinely think those deciding to vote for McCain are in fact putting some very narrow interest - anti-abortion, lower corporate taxes, oil interests, some vaugue notion of family values - ahead of the overall good of the nation. The opposite of the "Country First" mantra of the Republicans. How else can you explain signing up for the exact some thing that got us into this mess. Or, McCain voters are making their judgements on some very, very subjective criteria like...he was a POW or he seems like a nice guy. Using that type of criteria got us George W. Bush.


Lets not repeat that again.