In what appears to be a first for me, there are actual 2008 candidates that I felt would I would vote for. Kucinich, mostly, as he kept coming up in quizzes I’d take online where you state your position on issues and then it shows you which candidate best matches. Ron Paul was always hovering around up there near the top as well, along with Gravel. The more I read about Ron Paul though, the more I started to lean towards him, mainly *because* he’s a republican. He has a much better chance of getting the conservative vote than someone like Kucinich does. Really in an ideal world I would have loved to see Ron Paul get the republican bid, and Kucinich the Democratic. Those debates would have been wonderful to watch as two guys who respected each other, who both wanted the same result, but just had different ideas about doing it, could get into a serious, rational, logical debate with one another. And whoever came out as President, I would have been happy with.

So it came out as a very very pleasant surprise to learn that Ron Paul has actually been commenting on the idea that Kucinich, instead of being an opponent, could actually be a running mate for 2008 as vice president. Talk about a fucking grand slam, home run team. Ron Paul has the balls to do what Kucinich doesn’t, while at the same time Kucinich would be a good balance for some of Ron Paul’s more radical ideas. And combined they would be perfectly positioned to work WITH congress instead of against it. But most importantly, they both want to end the occupation of iraq, they want to bring our soldiers home and they want to reel in this crazy borrow-and-spend republican administration. And finally provide a cohesive team that could unite this country, instead of divide it down party lines. Someone mentioned the following as a comment to all of this:

I’d vote for RP if I had to… I don’t think the job in Iraq is done, I wish a leader would’ve let the boys do their job without the PC bullshit.. Should’ve been done years and years ago. An immediate pullout isn’t the answer.

The only militaristic action of “letting the boys do their job” would be to just kill everyone in the country. PC Bullshit getting in the way? Exactly what part about “600,000 dead iraqis” is politically correct to you? Because as long as there is one shia, one sunni, and one kurd, they’re gonna be fighting each other.

Winning this war with guns and missiles was never going to work. It never worked from the start, its not working now, and it will continue not to work in the future. No amount of patriotic chest thumping and magnetic ribbons on SUV’s is going to change that.

In the mean time, american soldiers are dying for a needless cause; terrorism is skyrocketing directly because of our presence; and its throwing this country into crippling debt.

We can spend 500 billion to train iraqis how to kill each other but we can’t spend 5 billion to give our own american children health insurance?

America has lost its way, lost its soul, and lost its conscience. We’ve lost the support and admiration of the world, replaced now by vitriolic hate and smug condemnation. The US Dollar is plummeting, our borders are being overrun, our government has been bought and paid for by multi national corporations. Our health care is in shambles, our disaster recovery capability is a joke, and the economy is limping along like a wounded animal, just waiting for a death blow from some unexpected event to send us spiraling down into a recession.

It’s time to step up, admit we made a huge, huge mistake with letting Bush run the country, and elect someone who can actually unite this country instead of divide it. Forget terrorists with box cutters, the biggest threat to our national security is ourselves. If we don’t stand together and turn this sinking ship around, The United States of America will fall in our lifetimes. Something has to be done now, something that isn’t just “more of the same”. Because that is what precisely is killing us, day by day, soldier by soldier, billion dollar check by billion dollar check.

Ron Paul 2008. With Kucinich on the side as the perfect running mate.