Rooting for Barack Obama
November 4, 2008 – 11:33 pm by JohnAll of my friends and colleagues, being scientific researchers who are funded by the State (National Institutes of Health, mainly), want Obama to win so badly they can taste it. They preach about doing your civic duty of voting every chance they get, and they talk and email about how this election is the Most Important Election Ever. When they urge people to vote, implicit in their message is to vote for Obama and every other Democrat on the ballot. It is not well-hidden, though they mention no one by name during their preaching.
One reason my scientist colleagues want Obama to win is because he has promised to double the NIH’s budget. (Well, whose budget has he not promised to double?) This is exactly the kind of divisive, embittering effect of mob-rule that I rail against. “If you want to increase your slice of the pie and keep that tax money from going to someone else or, heaven forbid, not being taken from people at all, vote Democrat! The Savior of America has promised to take more money from people who earned it and give it to us, so it’s in our best interest to have an Obama presidency.”
They also will, of course, vote Yes on the human embryonic stem cell research proposal because they want stem cell research to be expanded and better-funded, and if some ignorant Catholics and other fundamentalists don’t want it, we need to out-vote them to do what’s best for everyone! They don’t examine the only important aspect of the legislation, which is that it will result in the forcible extraction of money from people to pay for things the people specifically oppose. I certainly don’t expect many people I know to examine the even more important aspect of this whole mess, which is that TAXATION IS THEFT! IT IS WRONG ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE, FOR WHATEVER NOBLE OR BENEFICENT PURPOSE!
The fact that this embryonic stem cell ballot proposal wouldn’t necessarily increase taxes is not relevant. The language of the proposal only specified that human ESC research would simply be added to the list of government-funded activities that can be conducted in Michigan. (I wouldn’t be surprised if privately funded human ESC research is currently banned in Michigan. Everything is banned, or taxed and regulated to the effect of being banned, in Michigan.)
It is not clear why, if those people want human ESC research so badly, they don’t donate their own goddamned money for it.
When I was at the middle school where I wrote in “NOBODY” and voted on ballot proposals, 90+ percent of the people there were voting for Obama. I could tell because I was standing in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Something that really, literally depressed me and made me feel dark and dirty was that I was kind of rooting for Obama to win. Obviously it’s because I really want the neocons to lose, but obviously their losing implies the Democrats’ winning. See what this disgusting game of politics does to people? When I was watching the Stewart/Colbert election-night special, and they were reporting on the voting results from various states, I actually found myself disappointed when McCain won one and a little happy when they announced a state had gone to Obama. What the hell is wrong with me? I’ve written more about what a manipulative, calculating, megalomaniacal charlatan, economic ignoramus, and war criminal Obama is than I have about McCain, and I am surrounded by Obama worshipers every day so I go on silent tirades in my mind all the time about what a despicable piece of shit he is…but this fucking election has got my gut telling me that I actually want him to win. (By the way, I was shocked—SHOCKED, I tell you—to find that the vast majority of the Stewart/Colbert crowd was pro-Obama!)
My Obama-cheering gut caused this verse of Don Henley’s song “You Don’t Know Me At All” to cycle through my mind most of the day, including right now:
I feel dirty
all the way down
I feel dirty, baby
like this dirty town
I think an Obama presidency would be better for me and a lot of other blaggers and columnists, because we would get to expose lies, hypocrisy, economic ignorance, and all kinds of other faults of the Democrats for at least four years. We have pretty much run out of new things to say about the neocons.
