American Presidential Election 2008

Fred Thompson threw in the towel. Rudy Giuliani's towel is in the air and will hit the mat any moment. The viable candidates are down to four, and I haven't been allowed to vote yet.

Thanks to the McCain-Feingold Act and other congressional interferences in our election processes, we now have to choose between four pieces of fruit, and they're all rotten. I don't want to have to eat a rotten piece of fruit, even if it's less rotten than the other fruits we have to choose from. My favored candidate is out, and the citizens of Texas and most of the other states never got to vote one way or the other. The only influence most of the citizens in this country now have in the party primaries is via our donations. I sent $25 bucks to Fred. Obviously I should have maxed out and sent $5,000, because the only way he was going to get a fair chance was if all his individual contributors sent him 5 grand to spend advertising, since most of them live in states that haven't had the opportunity to vote yet. If you can't afford to contribute to your candidates campaign, you are totally at the mercy of the initial state primaries in the north and east. If your state isn't among the first, you don't get a vote and you have to settle for whoever's left in the race after the first three or four state primaries.

Is it not obvious that this is wrong? Where are the champions who preach about equality for the lower income groups? I believe that Fred Thompson was defeated in all the primaries because his campaign didn't have enough money to mount a sufficient number of quality political ads in the initial primaries. Of course, Fred made a key error in waiting so long to get in the race to start with, but the key factor was campaign financing.

Our choices of valid presidential candidates should not boil down to whoever can spend the most money. While supporters of campaign reform measures always claim they are trying to create an equal playing field, they always result in mediocre middle-ground final options. This country needs radical change at the executive level. Choosing between two centrists for the presidency will do nothing to achieve that radical change.

Donnie and Marie we popular for a while. One was a "little bit country" and the other was "a little bit rock and roll", but both were neither and the American audience eventually got sick of the lukewarm, bland entertainment they provided. Americans want either Ozzy, Hank Williams Jr, or Fifty-Cent. We're sick of Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson. The hot or cold preferences are the same in politics. Give me solid, hard core conservatism that I can be ecstatic about or give me a flaming liberal so I can finally see one way or the other if they are right.

We have the technology to give every citizen in this country a vote from the very beginning of the primaries. It should be a national election from the get-go, not a state-by-state watch-'em-fall-early contest where the north and east regions of this great land get to decide who the rest of us will have to choose from.

I'd tell you all to write me in for President just to show congress, the Democrats, and the Republicans how fed up we are, but I'm sure doing that would violate some campaign law somewhere. It certainly wouldn't be any more of a wasted vote than pulling the lever for one of the two we're going to end up with.