Making something stupid sound even dumber.

There is an interesting article over at Pajamas Media about Bob Barr. If you are like the 299 million American who have not heard about him, read the article. Yeah, he's running for President. For the Libertarian Party.

There wasn't much about the article that was new to me, but as is my wont, I continued down and into the comments section where I read things that again, were not new to me.

The basic debate in the comments basically revolved around this idea: A vote for Barr is a vote for Obama. Now, anyone who has paid any attention to elections history will hearken back to the days 1992 when Ross Perot (that magnificent pie-chart toting bastard) is believed to have tipped the election in favor of Clinton over Bush.

Now here is the thing that annoys the crap out of me...we have become so fatalistic about our political system that we actually engage in this type of lazy thinking. It the endemic nature of our two party system that we actually believe in the concept that we only ever have an option between the lesser of two evils.

And this is why it pissed me of:

1)The guy who gets the nomination isn't the guy that the supporters of his party want. If it was, then there would be no primaries. And in primaries that run all the way to the final day, you generally have one candidate getting slightly more delegates than the other candidates. Think about that for a second. The guy (or girl...Jesus you guys are annoying in your gender equity linguistics) who is nominated only got just over half of his party's supporters. Think about that for a second. No really, stop reading this and go back and think about it.. ½ of a party's supporters were fully confident in nominee. And with the voting populace split into two parties, you do the math and it means that really, only 25% of the population has any faith in your candidate.

So we take two guys, each of them each only having 25% full support from the voting populace, and then put them out there to the world saying “This is the best we can come up with.” It's F'n crap and we should be ashamed.

2)If you look at the mechanics of the Constitution, our government can function just as well with 3 parties as it can with two. There isn't anything in there that delineates that we must have 2 Craptacular groups of people to screw our lives up. The only benefit I see in a 2 party system is that it will often keep Congress from doing anything (which is a good thing).

3)We have so little respect for the privilege of voting, that we have lost sight that it is our most powerful tool. Your vote is what makes this whole thing work. It represents what you believe. And the second you engage in the thinking that you should vote for someone you don't believe in, just to keep someone you believe in even less out of the White House, then you have sold yourself out as a person.

Vote for who you believe in. Be able to look yourself in the mirror.

A vote for Barr isn't a vote for Obama. It's a vote for Barr. And yes, it is that simple.