Memo to the Sheep

I read an article where a particular person, who, by the way, was not, to the best of my knowledge, a candidate, endorsed someone who is running for office. This is not in and of itself unusual. We constantly see ex-candidates endorse their preferred remaining candidate. Organizations are constantly endorsing one candidate or another...including the "neutral" press, but certainly not limited to them.

Now, I have searched my memory banks and come up empty on the last time I voted for or against someone because they were endorsed by someone else. I am afraid I am not lame-brained enough to do that.

Seriously, are there enough voters out there who are intellectually lazy enough to vote for candidate A because organization C told them it was a good idea? Frankly, I don't want people like that determining the course of this nation. If widened voter rolls are a sign of progress and that progress results in lemming voters, lets regress a little bit.

Does anyone really think Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, the Teamsters Union, the ACLU, the NFA, or the Organized Farmers of County Cork really have enough of their specific good in mind to determine how they will vote?

Every special interest group...and those named above, with the possible exception of the fictitious group named, is a special interest group or representative of, has its own agenda. They research the key issues to them and make their recommendations...err, endorse the candidate who will give them their wish on that issue, regardless of what they will do overall.

This narrow-minded thinking is regressive and destructive.

And if we, as voters, can not take the time to investigate the issues that affect us and determine who best measures up to us across the board we will continue to get wave after wave of horrific candidates such as the current Presidential candidate field.

I don't care how many people endorse any given one of them, I am not casting my vote for anyone who A) supports murder in the name of "women's rights", B) is going to pursue destructive taxation policies or C) claims to hold a belief they will not support.

I have my own agenda when I enter the voting booth. Part of that agenda is selecting a candidate who I believe is going to represent my beliefs. Secondarily is going to be the person who is going to represent my monetary philosophy, but if there is a candidate who I believe has good morals and bad fiscal policy, I may or may not vote for him...but if he has bad moral policies and sound fiscal strategies, he will never get my vote.

But I will not give in to the "lesser of two evils" strategy. That has been tried and found wanting as we have had a succession of pedestrian at best (Bush Sr.) and horrific at worst (Clinton, Bush Jr.) since the very effective Reagan. But look behind him at what the "lesser of 2 evils" brought us: incompetent (Carter), deceitful and destructive (Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy)...

It is time for people to stop throwing away their votes on bad candidates and start voting for men and women of good moral character who have done the research to combine those with sound fiscal strategies. Surely such people exist.

But as long as these endorsements are worth points in the polls, my faith in the intellect of the American voter will remain in the toilet. And that assessment is endorsed by the Voting Plumbers Union, so you know it is a good one.