August 12, 2012, Howell Scrooge '12
Here's the thing: Barack Obama may be my classmate, and nominally the candidate of the party in which I'm (nominally) registered, but I don't see how any self-respecting progressive (or for that matter, human being) can support a President-- ANY President-- who holds meetings every Tuesday to decide which human beings the United States government should murder. Sorry.
So... imagine my disappointment when the possibility of voting for the (not so paradoxically) more liberal Mitt Romney evaporated in a heartbeat today, as old Thurston Howell III Romney (Willard to his friends) picked Paul Ryan for his running mate, not a boring old White guy like Rob Portman or Tim Pawlenty, or a not-at-all-boring fat White guy like Chris Christie or Latino guy like Marco Rubio, or perhaps a woman (Condi? Nikki? Gov. Susana Martinez?)... but instead Willard went for the current darling-of-conservatives-precisely-because-he-is-willing-to-put-their- policies-of-sadistic- economic- cruelty- and- austerity- up- front- and- center, Paul Ebenezer Scrooge Ryan... who is popular among the hard-ass right-wing set because he is up front about wanting to terminate old people old people (he's a "serious intellectual" and "policy wonk", you know), all in the name of the super-rich paying even less in taxes in a country that is already lowest in taxes among major industrial countries (and third lowest overall in the OECD, with only the paradisical nations of Mexico and Chile taxing their citizens at a lower overall rate than we do.)
I'm still of the view that perhaps something more troubling than just his boring-ness got in the way of a Rob Portman selection... or, perhaps, its simpler than that, and as with 2008, the financial elite Republican Establishment decided it wanted Barack Obama to win because he could and would advance its interests better than any Republican it wanted to shore up the conservative base with a candidate guaranteed to polarize all but die-hard right-wingers a tea-party darling.
Don't know. Don't care. Won't vote for either [financial sector owned and operated] "major party," quite possibly ever again.
[Slight update: WaPo's Matt Miller has more on "the talented Mr. Ryan." After a day's thought, I acknowledge that maybe a shake-up is less crazy than I thought... Romney had been losing on making this an "election about Obama"... so instead, he's going to make it an election about Scrooge McDuck and Mr. Burns... let's see how that works out... this being America, i.e., land of the free lunch and home of the knave dumbass, it might just work out pretty well...]