Voting

One of the most core foundations of democracy is the right to vote. I love our country. I love our system, for the most part, and I hope it survives for a thousand more years.

But I am not going to vote next week, and here is why.

I always used to feel that when you voted you had to choose between the lesser of 2 evils. I have never in my life felt like I had found a politician who I could look up to and who could relate to me and my life. Probably the closest I ever got was with Jesse Ventura and in some very small ways Ross Perot. These two men were guys that I felt understood what it was like to be a working American. They knew what it was like to wonder about the little things, like how you were going to pay the mortgage next month. Well Ross turned out to be a flake and Jesse has disappeared from the public eye, stating over and over again that he has no desire to run for national level public office, a feeling I can understand.

But now who do we have? A bunch of career politicians who know nothing but politics. They know nothing except how to cast themselves in the best possible light at the expense of their opponent. They have no real stands of their own. They stand for what they feel the majority want, which makes them totally wishy-washy and gives them no integrity of their own. All I see on TV is one guy in a suit attacking another guy in a suit, trying to tell me how bad the other guy is and how much he is going to ruin my life if I vote for him. Once in a while they will put on something totally stupid looking to try to look like a common man, complete with their forced smile and fake handshakes. The reason I likes Jesse and Ross, and the reason I also admire Michael Savage, is because of their unwavering stance on what they believe in. Whether you like them or not, agree with them or not, they are not going to try to hide what they truly stand for in order to garner votes. When they talk they are going to tell it like it is. A vote for a man like Jesse is a vote for a man with integrity. Whether you agree with him or not, you can count on him not changing his mind or flaking on his promises when the pressure is on.

Whenever I hear the news lately it is never about where people stand. For example, I heard a news story the other day talking solely about how much money the Republicans were spending on ads in key states. It was in the millions. Then the Democrats had to respond and tell us about how they spent even more than the Republicans. There was no mention of what one side or the other was going to do if elected. It was simply “I can spend more money than you.”

I can think of so many things that that money would have been better spent on than attack commercials. Especially when most normal, common people like me just get irritated by those types of commercials (At least that is what I hear from everyone I know).

So what am I supposed to do? Now I feel that I am no longer choosing between the lesser of two evils so much as I am trying to guess who is going to take longer to destroy our country. I suppose I could vote for a Libertarian or some other third-party person, but they have no chance in hell of winning since they don’t have the money to be considered worthy to take place in debates and other public forums. Remember, you have to be rich and have high connections to have the right to debate the two suits. So why should I vote for someone who has no chance?

I love our system, but it is so broken that it no longer functions as it should. There is no fairness in it, and it will be won by the guy with the most money and connections anyways, so I think I am just going to stay home.

And hope that I still have a home by the time these politicians have their way.

Iraqi Irony and the Solution

The Irony of Iraq

So I am driving home from work yesterday listening to the radio. I usually alternate between the Savage Nation and the NPR news, depending on my mood and what Michael Savage is talking about. But there was a story from Iraq that caught my ear and I can’t help but laugh about it.

Apparently our fearless leader, Dubya, has been telling the Iraqi PM that we were going to set some benchmarks and goals for them to meet as part of the eventual goal of bringing our people home. You know, the kinds of things that seem reasonable enough to me like “show us some tangible proof that you are taking over your own security by the end of the year” sort of thing. Make them do something. Well the PM did not like this and he got up in front of his television people and made American foreign policy for us. He told them that it is unacceptable for us to set timetables or deadlines for him to meet and that it would not help the situation on the ground for us to expect them to do that.

What??

We gave him his country. We paid for his freedom with the blood of our children and he has the gall to get up there and tell us that it is unacceptable for us to think that we are going to be able to leave anytime soon?? I say the hell with that. Tell him he has until the spring, maybe April or May, and if he is not making significant progress in controlling his own country than we are out of there. No excuses. Make them work for their country. For the past 3 years they have done nothing to secure themselves. Why should they? They have us there to take care of it for them. They have no real incentive to take care of themselves as long as we are in the middle of this open-ended quagmire. Now I have many thoughts about the situation over there, and most of them are not very popular. I listen to Michael Savage almost every day and while I don’t necessarily agree with all of his views on things I still greatly admire him. He is one of the very few people in this country that has his beliefs and convictions and will stand up for them no matter what. He is not a yes man and he does not sway his opinions or ideals based on what the popular trend of the day is. He stands up for what he believes and I respect that.

My thought is that we need to get the hell out of there. It is not a winnable war in my opinion because we don’t even know who we are fighting. Is that guy across the street trying to go about his business and go to work or is he a suicide bomber? It is impossible to win a war when the enemy looks just like the innocents without wholesale slaughter, which is not something that we will ever even consider. So here is my plan.

1. Pull our people out right now. Have most of them home in time for Christmas. Leave it up to the Iraqis to figure out how they are going to run their country. These people have been killing each other for hundreds of years. I say let them fight it out.

2. While they are all busy annihilating themselves we immediately set about securing our own country. Deploy our troops to secure our borders, ports, and airports. Nobody gets in without being screened. This would also give them time to repair and upgrade our military apparatus.

3. Wait for the dust to settle in the Middle East and see who is in power when it is over. We open our borders to legal, legitimate refugees and immigrants who have to come through very intense screenings and background checks. If whatever new government that forms there is friendly towards us than we have a new ally. If they are not, we bomb the whole country back into the Stone Age. Night time sorties without any notice and without remorse.

We are the US f’n A. This would not be submitting to defeat in any way. This would be pulling out of a mess, regrouping, and letting them kill each other while we watch and worry about ourselves. Give them a chance to fix the problem themselves for a few years. If they prove incapable then we just kill ‘em all.

Simple.

Pornography: The Misunderstood Pleasure

Everywhere you turn these days it seems that people are bashing on pornography. Just the other night I was watching the Glen Beck show on CNN, and he was doing a special on this supposed “epidemic” and was following along the same lines as the rest of the self-righteous people in this land who want something they can blame for all the problems we are facing.

Porn is not the problem.

The majority of the cases you read or hear about where someone did something evil or vile, i.e. rape, murder, child molestation, whatever one of the first things that the investigation seems to look for is whether or not the criminal looked at porn. That is always blamed as the reason for their behavior. I am not here to say that is does not have an effect on people. If you are already a messed up individual, grew up in a sexually repressed home where any mention of anything sexual was totally taboo, than yes, porn may have a negative effect of you. But if you understand what it is you are looking at and watching and the taboo can be removed then it can be an excellent source of pleasure. The news never tells this side though. They won’t tell you about how the murderer grew up in a home where he was neglected, beaten up, and not shown any love at all. They will just tell you about all the evil porn found on his computer.

What about all the failed marriages? Often times couples site porn addiction as the main cause of a failed marriage. How many times have we seen this scenario? One of the partners (usually the man) is caught looking at porn behind his wife’s back. He begins to uncover fantasies never before even considered and over time becomes a much more sexual person. He begins to want to explore new ideas and new frontiers in sex and this freaks her out. Maybe she comes from that oh-so-common American background that “porn is the root of all evil” and all that. So he is becoming enlightened and she can’t handle that. She begins to look at him as disgusting and deviant. This causes resentment from him towards her and furthers his secret surfing of porn. He is trapped in a web where he can not get enough. His secret sexual appetite is growing as his open sexual relationship with his spouse is shrinking. Eventually he gets desperate enough that he goes out and fulfills his needs someplace else, has an affair, and the end result 9 times out of 10 is a divorce and a destroyed family.

Now I realize that this is a pretty general story and that there often times is much more going on that what we know. Maybe there were other problems. Maybe he couldn’t handle the new appetites he was developing and they consumed him. There are many different things that could contribute to the failure of the marriage. But the blame almost always goes to the porn, and the man is almost always portrayed as a freak sicko. This is what I am trying to prevent, and I look at this scenario in a whole different way.

What if the stigma was taken out of porn? What if there were adult movie theaters in every town that were just as common as the regular movies? Of course there would still be age restrictions and such, but the point is what if pornography was taken out of the shadows and back alleys of American and accepted as a part of the human experience? Mankind is, after all, a sexual creature and we have been for as long as we have existed. So why should we try to suppress this natural urge and deny our natural selves?

It is my suggestion that, generally speaking, if we were to do this and take away the taboo and mystique of porn then a lot of the stigma attached to it would go away. If you tell your child that he is not to open that box but then walk away, leaving it within his reach, what do you think he is going to do? But if you told him what was in the box and took away the mystery, he wouldn’t be near as interested in it. Porn would be the same way. If the mystery and secret of it were to be removed than a lot of the problems associated with it would also go away. I am not naïve enough to think that all problems would go away, but let’s go back to my original example and look at it from a different perspective.

Suppose the man had actually been looking at porn since he was a teenager but nobody knew. He knew, deep down inside, that he would be laughed at, scorned and ridiculed for this exploration of his sexuality because porn was evil. He had been trained his whole life to believe that this was so. He had been trained to try to suppress his carnal self and control his sexual appetites. This made his dirty little secret that much dirtier in the back of his mind, and as a result nobody knew. His single biggest fear was someone finding out.

So growing up her followed along the path laid out before him by his parents and society. Eventually he married a beautiful woman and they began a life together. For the first little while he was still able to hide his true side from his wife but eventually she began to notice little things. You see, his little secret was so “evil” that he could not even be open with his wife about it. She began to notice things though, and eventually she found out. This leads them down the path we talked about earlier.

But if he could have just been honest with her up front about it, if that stigma of evil and bad was not there and had not prevented him from having to hide his true self, she most likely would not have even married him. After all, would they still even be compatible? He would have found someone more like himself, someone who better understood him and his craving and desires, and they would have been much better off. You see, it wasn’t the porn that destroyed his marriage, it was the secret. It was society’s perception of how evil and vile it was that caused him to keep it a secret and that lead to his failed marriage.

The secret, not the porn, is what destroys marriages.

And I know that the majority of people out there my question if there are even any women out there who would be compatible with a guy like this, and I am here to tell you that there are. They are just living in secret, hiding their true selves for the same reasons that the man does. You can’t recognize them from the outside. They don’t wear signs that say “I am a sexual, porn-watching freak” but they are there. If the stigma was taken away and people were able to come out and be themselves it would surprise society just how many of them are out there. I know. I have met many of them.

How do I know this? Because I have been looking at porn for as long as I can remember. I remember sneaking peeks at my uncles playboys when I was as young as 8. And, like the gentleman in my story, I hid my secret fantasies from the world for many, many years. I lived my life in constant fear of being found out, of being ridiculed and being condemned for something that was as natural and normal to me as eating and sleeping. It is an integral part of who I am. My wife knows this. She didn’t when we first got married and it led to some very rough times between us, but we have come through it and are doing great. She even enjoys it with me from time to time now, and we have opened new sexual horizons together that 10 years ago we would never have been able to discuss.

Like anything else, though, porn can be addictive and it can lead to deviant behavior. I compare it to alcoholism. I enjoy a drink every now and again. When I go to parties I may even get drunk. But I know my limits and I know when to stop. I control the alcohol, it doesn’t control me. Porn needs to be the same way. Use it, enjoy it, but don’t overdue it. Self mastery is important in every aspect of life, and it is only through this that we can enjoy the pleasures of this life and embrace our true human selves.

Mormonism and Me

I have a confession to make; I am a recovering Mormon. I am attempting to recover from the brainwashing that was instituted on me from the time I could crawl, and sometimes it still rears its ugly head up and kind of freaks me out. I have been clean from it for almost 3 years now, but I am afraid there will always be a part of me, deep down inside, that will scream to me that I am going to go to hell.

I figure that if I am going to go to hell, at least it will be without guilt or remorse.

I have done a great many things in my life that would be deeply frowned upon by the Mormon Church. In fact, even if I were to try to go back at this point I would just be ridiculed, quilted, and kicked back out. So what is the point? If they are right, and when I die I am taken before some grand judgment bar and judged by some higher power, at least I will be able to hold my head high and say “this is me, take me as I am or don’t take me at all.” So many other people I know live total shams of lives, constantly enduring brow-beatings and humiliation in an effort to “cleanse” themselves of their carnal natures. I say hogwash to that. I am a carnal creature. I crave things that go against everything the church teaches and Christianity in general teaches but are as natural to me as eating and sleeping. I am not going to live my life in misery based upon some words in a book that tell me I am supposed to live that way. If god is so great and omnipotent and powerful and all that then why don’t he come tell me that? If he/she came to me and told me that I would live that way tomorrow. But I have never seen anything to make me believe that he/she exists in the form that the majority of people believe, so I walked away from all that years ago.

I have to say I like the way Jesse Ventura said it, years ago in a Playboy interview; “God is a crutch for weak-minded people.”

If there is some sort of higher power than I need to see it. Seeing is believing. Until I see something substantial to convince me otherwise I am just going to live my life trying to be a good person and doing good for others, but at the same time I am not going to deny my true nature. It is not worth the headache.

Going to Hell in a Hand Basket

Let me start off here by warning you all; I watched the news last night and I listened to my favorite radio host Michael Savage on the drive home from work, so I am a little depressed about our world today.

Is it just me or does it seems like our world is totally going to shit? I am terribly worried for our future and the world we are leaving to my little grandson at home. Just watching the news yesterday revealed the state of our world. Below is a sampling.

Remember that congressman who was sending inappropriate emails to teenage boys? Well his whole defense a month ago was that he was gay, alcoholic and had been molested as a boy by a clergyman. That is a terrible sad story but that does not by any stretch of the imagination justify his advances on this boy. Well the priest came out yesterday and said he did nothing wrong. Sure, they went to private nude saunas together and spent nights in hotel rooms together naked and fondling each other, but it’s not like they had sex or anything. He said, and I quote, “It’s not like there was ever any penetration or anything” and he finished by saying he didn’t think there was anything wrong with the behavior at the time…

In a continuation of that story, the house ethics committee is investigating how long ago the republican leadership may have known about this guy. Yesterday the house clerk remarked during testimony that this behavior between congressmen and pages was commonplace and there were several others who do the same thing…

Two teenage boys in Florida got into a fight at the bus stop yesterday that ended with one of them pulling out a knife and stabbing the other boy multiple times in the stomach and once in the back of the head. Witnesses say they were fighting over a 15 year old girl…

Our president is calling in all of his top advisors to discuss the strategy in Baghdad and why it is failing. At first I thought maybe, just maybe, our president was finally beginning to accept that there is nothing we are going to be able to do over there to keep those people from killing each other. They have been killing each other for a thousand years and the only time they stopped was when someone more ruthless than them stepped in and quelled the violence for a couple of decades. We took him out and now they have nothing better to do than to revive their killing of each other. The fact that we are there is not helping anything. But alas, I was watching the news today at lunch and the press secretary denied everything and said this was just another routine update for the president on things over there...

And the worst one of all I saved for last. I was so upset by this that I was sick to my stomach last night. CNN somehow got a reporter in with the Iraqi insurgents and he filmed with a team of snipers as they stalked and killed a US service member who was just out on patrol. He commentated the whole damn thing like it was some kind of great thing that these guys were killing our kids. I think he should be arrested and charged with assisting murder. He is not a combatant. He is a civilian. And the gall of CNN running this video just made me sick to my stomach. I wonder if he would have provided the same gleeful commentary if it had been his son or daughter that was casually shot by these vicious assholes...

I am flying my flag at half mast for the sorry state of our country. We have no leaders who are worth a damn and I don’t even want to bother voting anymore because there is nobody out there that is any better. It is almost like instead of voting for the lesser of 2 evils I am now expected to vote for whoever is going to take longer to destroy our nation with their own greed and selfishness.

I am struggling to grasp where we, as a nation, will be in even 5 years, much less in 50.

Who am I?

First off, I am a proud American. I fly my flag 24/7 and I very strongly support our troops and our democracy. But I do not always support our government and I am not afraid to say it how I feel it. So before you read on try to have an open mind about the point I am trying to make, and feel free to comment. I enjoy stimulating conversation and love to hear opposing viewpoints to my own. But remember, any personal attacks towards me or my family will just be deleted. Save those childish games for places like MySpace, where the children go to play. Other than that I will respond to any comments regarding my thoughts on these matters.


Let’s play a little guessing game and we can see how much you hate me by the end of it. Try to guess who I am talking about on the world stage.

I am practically worshiped by those who believe in me and hatefully despised by those who do not.

I am the supreme leader of my country/organization and pretty much do as I please without fear of what others may think or retribution.

I strongly feel that only my way is the right way, and will jam it down the throats of anyone who may feel otherwise.

I am not afraid to use inhumane force and sacrifice the lives of those who believe in me to push what I believe to be true.

I am a master manipulator, twisting the truth to suit my own means and to justify my actions, no matter how wrong they may be.

I will never, ever accept defeat or admit I was wrong, even when those closest to me try to convince me of it.

My desire for power is insatiable, and most people do not realize it.

I justify my actions as my moral responsibility, and feel it is my mission to cleanse the world of the bad guys.

I surround myself with only the most loyal of supporters, and destroy any who oppose me.


Any guesses yet? I actually thought of 2 different people when I was contemplating this in the shower this morning; George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden.

Think about it.

The term “Suspect”

I was perusing blogs on here the other day and I came across one of the many posts regarding the so-called torture bill that was just signed into law by our dear president recently. It was echoing the same sentiments that are being thrown back and forth by everyone else in the world it seems. On the one side you have the pro-torture folks who feel that the Geneva conventions is out dated and that torture is what is needed in order to get terrorist suspects to talk. On the other side you have the anti-torture folks who feel that if we open that door then we are not any better than the terrorists we are trying to defeat. It is the same rhetoric, back and forth, all around the world.

I admit I don’t know what the answer is. I can see both sides of the argument and I am scared for our future. I suppose I would have to say, if I have to choose a side, that I am against torture in any form. But my reasons are rather different from most of those that I read out there.

First off, I have noticed a stark shortage of the term “suspect” in the vast majority of writings I have read. My biggest fear is that we are simply creating more terrorists with it. Here is a scenario that better illustrates my point.

You are an Arab. You have worked hard your whole life to support your family and live a decent quiet life. You have never been one to do anything to rock the boat, and simply want to live your life in peace.

Then one night your door gets kicked in by the Americans. You are beaten, arrested and taken away to an undisclosed location. Your family is not told anything. You are not told anything. You simply disappear.

For the next year you are kept locked up. You have nightly unannounced visits from your captors where you are tortured, beaten, and asked questions about things which you know nothing. You are never told why you are being held. You are never told whether or not you will ever be released. All you have is the beatings and the questions.

Finally, after several months of this, you are released. You are driven back to your neighborhood and thrown from the car onto the street. Your family has long since left because they figured you for dead. Your home has been taken because you were unable to pay for it or take care of it. You have nothing but the nightmares and the pain. Not so much as an apology comes from your captors and you never did figure out what you were taken for.

How would you feel about Americans?

Now I am not suggesting sympathy for terrorists. I am very pro-torture on people that we have proven are terrorists or know are affiliated with terrorists. But if we don’t know for a fact of their affiliation, which is what a fair trial is for, then what good are we accomplishing from torture?

I have no idea how many people there may be out there who are a direct result of this type of thing, but I can’t help but think there are a lot. All we are going to accomplish by making torture legal is to make more enemies.