Neither candidate has earned my vote.

##Prologue

I hate it when people tell me that if I don’t vote for one of the candidates from the two major parties, I’m throwing my vote away. Do they value their vote so little as to give it freely to someone that clearly is not worthy of that vote only because that person is somehow more well known that others?

These people deserve the government they get. If they are not willing to change the way they decide who they are going to vote for (the *lesser of two evils* view), they will continue to get an inept government that only exists to keep itself in power.

You don’t believe me? Read on.

##George W. Bush

President Bush came into office with the promise of changing the tone in Washington. He failed miserably. The climate is far worse now than it ever was.

The main achievment of his Presidency was the handling of the aftermath of 9/11. He did a spectacular job as far as he went.

However, this does not excuse all the rest of the problems of his Presidency:

###Support of the entitlement state

The medicare bill that the President signed was the largest addition to the entitlement state since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson’s ***’Great Society’***. This is not the action of a fiscal conservative, and does nothing to address the real problems facing our seniors with respect to their soaring medical costs.

This is clearly pandering to the senior vote, and not the way to fix the problem if you are a fiscal conservative.

###Support of instutitional racism

By supporting the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the Michigan Law School’s admission policy that held that being black was more important that academic achievement, he supported the idea that policies based on racial preferences are a good thing.

Again, clearly pandering to minorities, trying to get them to see that he’s not all that bad a guy.

###Support of Illegal Immigration

He might need some votes from the hispanic community, so let’s start ***’rewarding criminal behavior’*** by giving sanctuary to those who broke our laws and came into our country without our permission.

I have no problem with ***’legal immigration’***, but those who do not respect our country’s right to enforce our borders need to be deported, not embraced.

###Poor handling of the Iraq war

My greatest fears have come to pass with this war. You can debate now whether or not it was the right thing to do to invade Iraq (I happen to believe that Iraq supported terrorism and that they hated us. Putting the two together gives me enough justification for the invasion, but I digress).

However, it is indisputable that the handling of that war has been disastrous. If we were going to go to war, we needed to do so with a total committment to see it through to the end, no matter the cost. We needed to consider this to be our chance to redefine what the middle east should be by investing there the way we did after World War II with the Marshal Plan. We completely rebuilt Europe in order to make sure we would always have allies there. This was the only approach that had a chance of working in Iraq.

By not securing the borders, and not wiping out all resistence, and not being far more aggressive in the rebuilding effort, and not committing to a multi-decade presence of that region (we still have troops in Japan and Germany), we are going to leave that region in more chaos than when we got there, and we will have more virulent enemies to deal with.

###A soaring deficit

A deficit is not necessarily a bad thing (read some of the writings of Alexander Hamilton to understand why), but creating the deficit by:

* Increasing military spending
* Increasing social spending
* Increasing government beurocracy

While at the same time
* Lowering taxes

Is just plain stupid.

##John F. Kerry

The biggest problem I have with Kerry is that he seems to just say the things that his audience wants to hear in order to get their vote.

You want health care? You got it. How about more money on education. No problem. And we’ll spend billions to clean up the environment also.

How is he going to pay for it?

With a middle class tax cut! And he’s going to roll back the tax cut that the **rich** got under bush, and use that to fund these programs… except that he’s not going to pull the troups out of IRAQ and needs money for that… or is he going to pull out of Iraq?