To hell with them both!

After all the reading, listening to the politicians, and blogging, it will soon be time to make my preferences known on the ballot, which will soon arrive home, thanks to the voting-by-mail here in Oregon.

This will be yet another election where my vote will not be for either of the two major party candidates.  Not for tweedledum, and not for tweedledee either.

A review of my blog posts and tweets will easily reveal that I have been an equal opportunity critic.  I realize that there never will be a perfect candidate, and that all governments lie.  Even within this imperfection that is the reality, I find way too many negatives for me vote for either of them.

It does not mean that I won't vote; I will.  But, this time too, it will be a protest vote at the top of the ticket, across the presidential candidates.  Though, sometimes I am so tempted to make real P.J. O'Rourke's tongue-in-cheek advice: "don't vote: it just encourages the bastards"

I will leave it up to Conor Friedersdorf to sum my feelings too:

To hell with them both.

Sometimes a policy is so reckless or immoral that supporting its backer as "the lesser of two evils" is unacceptable. If enough people start refusing to support any candidate who needlessly terrorizes innocents, perpetrates radical assaults on civil liberties, goes to war without Congress, or persecutes whistleblowers, among other misdeeds, post-9/11 excesses will be reined in.

If not?

So long as voters let the bipartisan consensus on these questions stand, we keep going farther down this road, America having been successfully provoked by Osama bin Laden into abandoning our values.

We tortured.

We started spying without warrants on our own citizens.

We detain indefinitely without trial or public presentation of evidence.

We continue drone strikes knowing they'll kill innocents, and without knowing that they'll make us safer.

Is anyone looking beyond 2012?

The future I hope for, where these actions are deal-breakers in at least one party (I don't care which), requires some beginning, some small number of voters to say, "These things I cannot support." 

Are these issues important enough to justify a stand like that?

I think so.

 Or, as this piece in Slate puts it:

One sees the benefits of being a Democrat given to expand upon the wartime practices of your Republican predecessor. In a race against another Republican, the only critique of your foreign policy will be that you haven’t been belligerent enough.

 Yep, to hell with them both :(