Why I'm Voting for Obama

by Dave Lindorff It was an easy decision. I live in Pennsylvania, which is now, according to all the polls, reliably in the Obama column, with the Democratic candidate holding an insurmountable lead in the polls of 14 percent over Republican John McCain--enough to overcome even the most devious Republican vote suppression techniques and voting machine chicanery. I was going to vote for Nader because I find Obama to be a seriously flawed candidate. He ran early on an anti-Iraq War platform, saying not that invading Iraq was wrong legally and morally, but that it was "the wrong war." Since then, he has backed away even from saying he wanted the war ended, opting for a 16-month withdrawal timetable that would have the killing and dying in that sad land going on longer than most wars this nation has fought. He has also called for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, despite clear evidence that more troops just will make the situation there worse, and has called for an expansion of the US military budget, to increase the size of the Army and Marines, which will only encourage more warmongering, more killing and more waste of precious resources. Obama also sold us all out by going along with a bill sought by President Bush granting immunity to telecom companies that aided and abetted the illegal and unconstitutional spying on Americans by the National Security Agency--spying that we now know is massive almost beyond our imagination, even including the monitoring of private family conversations of American service personnel in Iraq, of journalists, and almost certainly of Bush administration political "enemies." By backing that obscene bill, Obama has made it almost impossible for victims of this police-state surveillance campaign to sue and find out what the Bush/Cheney administration has been up to all these years. In so many ways, Obama has tacked to the middle or even the right, while spouting soaring but empty rhetoric about "change." Meanwhile, everything Ralph Nader says makes perfect sense. He has consistently called the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the crimes that they are. He has consistently called for a nationalized health care system, which every other modern nation has long since proven to be a more cost-effective and health-effective way to run a medical system than the failed free-market approach advocated by Obama and the rest of the Establishment political system. He has correctly denounced the economic bailout as welfare for the rich and for the corporate criminals who have been sucking the life out of the US economy for years. And yet, I think I have to vote of Obama this year.

 

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