A politically offensive post

I fully expect that this will offend some of my politically active friends, but I think it's at least mildly entertaining, so I'm including it. This is my journal entry for last election day (4 Nov 2008). At the time, I was really interested in a girl named Betsy, and that's why this entry reads the way it does.

At the top of the page, I attached my "I Voted Today!" sticker, and then I wrote this:

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5:17PM

And do you know why I voted today? It certainly wasn't because I liked the candidates (tirade on that to follow shortly). It wasn't because I wanted to show good faith in The System because, frankly, The System sucks! It's broken and corrupted, and I seriously considered following Shawn and Joel in not voting to express my view that The System is down. What moved me to the polls today wasn't even my sustaining of Church officials who condone and encourage political activism (though, in retrospect, that might have been a nobler motivation than mine).

I went and cast my vote for John McCain because Betsy says she likes him.

And you wanna know another thing? I don't feel bad about that at all. I have a notion that I ought to feel like a cad, but I don't. Here's why:

Although it's a syntactic oxymoron, I consider myself a radical conservative in that I want small government: unless I am directly threatened by something that I cannot protect myself from, I want government to stay the heck out of my life. Because of this, I am rather upset with the Republican party right now: they've done a lot to grow the government and to expand the executive power in the past eight years, and I find that abominable coming from a so-called conservative group. Therefore, I wasn't too hot on voting in another GOP candidate.

Barrak Obama (Democratic candidate and media poster child) is far worse, though, because of his socialist ideals. Nevertheless, I considered voting for him for a while because most of his promises could only be fulfilled by acts of Congress, so he struck me as fairly harmless; I thought he'd be a nice figurehead to oversee the continuing downfall of this proud nation. But after a political discussion with Betsy on the phone a couple weekends ago, I realized that voting for a candidate whose politics I unilaterally disagreed with was a bad idea, even if I doubted his ability to enact any of his bad ideas--what if he did?

Then I was fairly resolved to vote for a third party candidate just because I feel like that's the really the only way to make my vote count anyway (true, chances of a third party candidate ever getting elected are infinitismal, but it was a big deal a few years back when Green Peace got enough votes to become federally recognized; I'd like to participate in something like that). But looking at the Utah ballot quickly dissuaded me: Socialist party (no good), Green Peace (blah), Ralf Nader (not my guy), Libertarian (don't like 'em), and the Constitution Party (I like the party, but their condidate's leadership credentials are limited to the fact that he's had his own Baptist churhc in Florida for the past couple decades--no political experience at all).

So John McCain it was. I don't mind him; I just hate his party. But Betsy likes him, and I look forward to honestly telling her I voted for her boy.

That's me.

11:12PM

So. Obama won.

After watching McCain give his concession speech, I called Betsy:

"Howzitgoin'?" I asked.

"I'm pretty good," she said. "But I think I'm going to hold a wake."

We left politics almost immediately and had a most delightful conversation that last nearly an hour (50 minutes and someodd seconds), which I felt very good about.

Except for that it never came up--who I voted for--I never said.

And that's that, I guess.