[EM] Differentness or similarity of Republicans and Democrats

[Michael Ossipoff]

I was going to let this drop, but the matter is highly relevant to
voting, in Plurality or any method.

A few people have been claiming that there is significant difference
between the Democrats and the Republicans. A difference so significant
as to justify abandoning your favorite to help the Democrat beat the
Republican.

Obviously, the matter of whether or not that claim is true is very
much relevant to voting.

So, those people disagree with Gore Vidal, who said that we don't have
a 2-party system--We have 2 parties with one right wing.

Who's right?

When Jameson and someone else insisted that there is significant
difference among the Republocrats, I invited them to tell what
difference(s) they were referring to. They haven't answered :-)

So I'll just tell of a few (of very many) _similarities_ between
Democrats and Republicans.

Let me just start out by saying this: Look at the Directory of
American Political Parties. Search for that phrase on the Internet. It
will show you a perspective that our "Republocrat-Dissimilarists"
might benefit from.

Better yet, search the web for G/GPUSA platform. And GPUS platform.
Those are this country's Green parties. You'll find them so different
from the Democrat and Republican, that you'll no longer consider
Democrat and Republican to be different from eachother.

Now, for a few examples of the identicalness of Republicans and Democrats:


Example 1:

During the Contra war, of the '80s, when the Reagan administration was
funding terrorists and sending them into Nicaragua with specific
written manual-instructions to kill teachers and doctors, destroy
schools and hospitals, hurt a lot of people, and do various other
similar things, the World Court and the U.N. were ordering our
administration to cease the terrorism.

I noticed, one day, a newspaper headline saying, "Bipartisan Contra aid".

Example 2:

In 2004, my girlfriend at that time was very involved in campaigning
for Kerry, to beat Bush. Because she was my girlfriend, I helped her
with the campaign work, tabling, canvassing, helping with mailings.
And I promised her that I'd vote for Kerry, even though I have no
confidence whatsoever in the Democrats.

There was a commercial in which John Edwards said, "I know what John
Kerry is made of."  I told my girlfriend, "I know what he's made of
too, but I'm going to vote for him anyway."

She was invited by her daughter's family to go over to their house to
watch the first Kerry-Bush debate on TV.

I hadn't been there long, and so, instead of going, I stayed and
listened to the debate on the radio. I wouldn't have bothered
listening to Republocrats debating eachother, except that she was
watching it.

When Kerry and Bush weren't specifying and listing everything they
agree on, or heavily praising eachother, they were criticizing
eachother for not waging war hard enough, not sending enough soldiers
to die, not being hard enough on the countries we occupy. Not doing
enough to _win_ the wars. Kerry was trying show that, in comparison to
Kerry, Bush was a peace-sissy.

During that debate, it was clear to me that I was going to have to
break my promise to vote for Kerry, because he was just too disgusting
for me.

Also during that campaign, I called the Democrat Party headquarters,
and questioned the humane-ness and justifableness of Kerry's war
policy. The woman who answered, probably the woman who ran the place,
fully supported that policy, argued that it was justified, and angrily
hung up on me.


Example 3:

I don't know if you remember when Clinton was "working" on his medical
care reform. After allegedly considering everything, he said that
single-payer national medical insurance wasn't "viable".

Noam Chomsky responded by saying something to the effect, "No, it
isn't viable, because only the public want it."  :-)

Chomsky and others have pointed out that polls have shown that the
public strongly favor that reform.

Example 4:

In fact, Chomsky and historian Michael Parenti have pointed out that
the public, on the whole, are always much more progressive than the
Democrats or the Republicans. But they're resigned to the media's
claims that the Democrats and Republicans are "the two choices". Each
person feels isolated, feels that s/he is the only one who feels as
s/he does. Feels that the tv's portrayal of the "mainstream" is
accurate.

Example 5:

I once did a small phone poll myself, regarding the desirability of a
more progressive tax system. The people whom I randomly called, from
the phonebook, unanimously said that they would prefer higher tax on
the wealthiest individuals, with less on the rest of us.

No, not only are the Republican and Democrat the same as eachother,
but they're very different from the public, whom they claim to
represent and speak for.

We interrupt this message for a joke: What do you get when you cross
Tanya Harding, Elena Bobbit, and Hillary Clinton?

You get kneecapped and mutilated, with no medical care.


Example 6:

Did you know that Obama, a Democrat, angrily complained that Bush
wasn't sending enough soldiers to Afghanistan, in order to _win_
there, and that, upon taking office, he greatly
escalated and stepped up the loss of life there, and the gargantuan
waste of our tax money? And that he's still continuing that war?

Mike Ossipoff