You know, they said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose. – Barack Obama, Iowa Jan. 3, 2008.
One question, Barack – who are ‘they?’ Sure in your next paragraph you call them ‘the cynics’ but that’s really just what ‘they’ are, not who ‘they’ are. So who are these people, you know the dastardly ones who have been holding us up from enjoying the sweet sweet sunshine and flowery goodness that we really should have been experiencing all along? Clearly a lot of stuff is their fault, I mean, dividing and disillusioning an entire country – these are obviously bad people. So who are ‘they?’
For John Edwards, ‘they’ are all the greedy corporations and the fat cat lobbyists that apparently own every senator and congressman in Washington D.C. (except for him.)
For Hillary, well she doesn’t say so but I’m pretty sure she’d tell you that ‘they’ is whomever the hell you, dear voter, want them to be as long as it gets her enough votes to beat the crap out of John and Barack come Tuesday, Feb. 5th. (Is it just me or is she the blonde Henry Kissinger?)
Well, I think I know who ‘they’ is and I think I have some bad news because ‘they’ are not OPEC. ‘They’ are not Osama Bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri (although the sooner we stake both their wretched heads on pikes at the entrance to New York harbor the better off we’ll all be).
And, sorry Mitt and Huck but ‘they’ are also definitely not a bunch of Mexican busboys working twice as hard as everyone else in this country just so that they can buy food for their kids. I am also pretty sure that they are most certainly not two people who love each other and just want to be left alone to get married.
‘They’ are us. That’s right – us. We are the ones who are gleefully celebrating our 401K s going up up up because they are fat with investments in John’s greedy corporations. These would be the same corporations that need to keep their stock price up so that we will invest in them and they won’t have to layoff their employees (you know, employees like us).
We are the ones driving the cars that sent oil to $100 a barrel yesterday. And we are the ones who let people like Dick Cheney stick around just because he’s really good at scaring the crap out of 50% of the country. Ok, he actually scares the crap out of the other 50% but for different reasons.
And while we are at it, we are also the ones who are getting fatter and older and demanding that medical science prioritize our erections and our self-inflicted diabetes over the easy cheap stuff like pre-natal care for poor women.
So John, Barack and Hillary (ok, maybe not you Hillary, you are just too far gone) why don’t you guys stop pandering to us and start telling us that the country is in a mess, it’s going to get worse and that the only way to fix it is for all of us to start making sacrifices and to stop letting our fears make our choices for us. This may not be your best strategy for winning the presidency but, if you want your campaign and your presidency to mean anything, then trying to stop the country from getting fatter, lazier and stoopider would be an amazing legacy.
John, Mitt, Mike and Rudy well, you guys need to just stop hating people because of who they sleep with or where they were born. Let’s just start there.
As the turnout numbers from Iowa showed last night, this might be the first election that the AARP, the NRA, the UAW or the Southern Baptist Convention (pick your favorite villain, odds are that you or someone you know gives them money – it’s us that we are talking about after all) can’t just go ahead and rig the election at the expense of the rest of the country. It would be a shame if who ever wins does it by dividing, demonizing and coddling a select few while the folks who weren’t on the winning side got to look forward to 4 more years of picking up the tab.
