a.k.a. Motormouth's Manifesto
Have y'all received the forwarded email called “Letter from a 'Nobody'”? It's a folksy tome from Joe Porter of Champaign, Illinois, who says that every Obama voter he's talked to says they're voting for “Change”, and yet can't concretely pinpoint what specific changes they're voting for.
Mr. Porter, allow me to elucidate…
*I* want a president who will 1) get us out of Iraq, a war we were tricked into entering by our president's lies and obfuscations, 2) give more tax breaks to the little guys and a few fewer to those who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and have multiple homes, 3) promote affordable, high-quality health care, especially for children, 4) keep student loans secure, and 5) not start a war in Iran. From everything I've read, that's Obama.
I want a president who doesn't have a penchant for flying off the handle in anger. From everything I've read, that's Obama.
I want a president who will open up the thinking on our country's energy policies. Heating oil's going to cost my household six grand this winter — it's doubled each year. My family lives on the top floor of a windowy house in western Massachusetts, keeps the thermostat to 68 degrees, and can't pay to upgrade the heating system because, duh, we rent the place. Anyway, from everything I've read? Obama.
I want a president who supports the teaching of and advocacy for real-life, true-science sex education in schools, which of course would include but not entirely consist of “Abstinence!”; someone who keeps abortion as safe and legal as possible, if for no other reason than I'm not a medical doctor with a capital M.D and I also don't want to see 16-year-old girls going to prison for murder. From everything I've read, that's Obama.
And don't even get me STARTED on Palin's qualifications when stacked against Biden's.
And no, I'm a hippie-dippy dirtbag Teamster pagan liberal Masshole. I'm a Christian. Shit, I'm a Republican! Have been since age 18. But. I'm also a nursing mother who lives in a rented house, no stock market portfolio, no retirement account; who works three jobs, has two kids under the age of three, and a full-time-student husband who also works three jobs.
Frankly, we're drowning. We need a frickin' lifeboat. John McCain? He might as well be a big metal crate filled with anvils.
The people who represent the bulk of the future of this country need Barack Obama.
If you guffaw at that, especially if you're older than 65 or maybe the teensiest bit of a racist, please, go up about seven or eight paragraphs and read it again.
Nobody's saying McCain wasn't heroic, or doesn't have a sterling military record. But that was forty years ago and before I was born.
And how can he endorse waterboarding after being tortured for five years? I mean, this one time, half my life ago, I got raped. Eighteen years later, I'm not pro-rape.
(You know what waterboarding is, right? It's where they strap you to a plank and cover your face with a heavy dark non-wicking material and then dump gallons of water on that material so the material gets suctioned to your mouth and nostrils and you can't breathe.)
It's about time we had a president who has grown up under the specter of poverty, who knows what it's like to live in a family that waits eagerly by the mailbox for a paycheck that'll just go out to bills in the next day's mail. For that, and for everything you just read, please: Vote Obama.