Old WCA Rant from March 23, 2000. So, how wrong was I?

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THE ACTUAL PLATFORM

Ann Arbor: One of the marginally interesting things about the current presidential campaign is the belief that people voted for McCain or Bradley because they were mavericks or counterweights or somehow different from the two officially- sanctioned pols they were trying to defeat. (Note: in the 2000 Primary, lots of Michiganders voted for McCain to annoy the Republicans, who of course wanted them to vote for Bush. Ed) People with a particularly annoying set of blinders on are agonizing over this effect and over what they seem to believe is the "outrageous" practice of the major parties deciding ahead of time who their preferred candidates are. There are some important holes in this point of view. First of all, few people are likely to have voted for ANYONE on the grounds of what he or she believed about the candidate. The vast majority of people who voted for McCain did so because they a) hate George W. Bush, b) hate John Engler, and/or c) hate old what's-his-name, the right-wing talk radio guy. Second, no one -- as in not one single person in the United States -- believes that any of the candidates actually holds any distinguishably different set of positions. For the record, here are the actual positions of everyone running for President (with the exception of Ambassador Duke and J. Francis McLuggage, of course),

Reproductive Rights: All of the major candidates are men (In 2000, this was true. Ed.), and all of them restrict their concerns with abortion to a kind of simple- minded gratitude that their parents didn't go for it. That's it. They have no other concerns with it at all -- not even personal ones -- our most sexually irresponsible President of the last fifty years hasn't been accused of fathering any unwanted children. No, what our boys on the hustings want is just to say the right, soothing things to one or the other side of this deeply polarized issue. And they don't like polarized issues -- it makes them choose among possible voters. In reality, every last one of the bastards would be just as happy to see a constitutional amendment guaranteeing reproductive choice, as long as they could just wake up one morning and have it over with -- anything so as not to have to take a position.

Campaign Reform: I'm reminded of the strip where Dilbert suggests doing the right thing and his boss says, "Oh, right. And let's pull our neckties until it hurts." No one within a 150 mile radius of the White House wants to enact any kind of campaign funding reform. Nobody. End of story.

Taxes: Oh, please. All this issue provides is an illustration of our country's horrifyingly poor math skills. You cannot cut taxes. Can't. Won't. Will not happen. (Don't agree? Can you say, "alternative minimum tax?" Ed.) What will happen, regardless of who is elected President, is that expenses will get moved around so that both parties can CLAIM to have cut taxes for somebody, somewhere. But regardless of how it's implemented, you will pay more taxes next year than you did this year and more the year after that and so on. If your income taxes go down, your sales taxes will go up. The price you pay for a vehicle will go up. The price you pay for a gallon of gas will go up. Unless you have some ideas about perpetual motion machines, reversing entropy, or turning the US into several tens of millions of little anarcho-syndicalist communes and living on nuts and berries, you can take the above as immutable.

Foreign Policy: One hundred percent of the candidates want to impose the will of the American People on foreigners without getting American kids killed. (I was apparently really, really wrong about this one. Ed.) Talk loudly and wave a big stick from a safe distance about sums it up. The will of the American People, by the way, appears to be that foreigners are not allowed to kill each other over religious differences -- we reserve that right for ourselves -- and if they do, we get to kill them, but without running much risk while doing it. This is not as futile as it sounds, since the old military hardware industry is going great guns on developing unpersoned vehicles, brilliant bombs, and all kinds of other cool, expensive stuff to whack recalcitrant Serbs and others with at long range, thus keeping lots of executives and engineers employed. (See "Taxes.")

The Family: If there is a candidate for any office, let alone President, out there who is willing to define "family" as anything other than two heterosexual white people with a slew of kids, a yorkie, and a new Voyager, then he or she is doing a damn good job of concealing the fact.