A lot safer to be undecided

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
A lot safer to be undecided				November 8, 2008

I really have little interest in discussing the election, except to say that I’m very upset with whoever stole my Obama sign.

I suppose I should be thankful that they didn’t steal my McCain sign, my Wittman sign, my Day sign or my Warner sign. I didn’t put up a Gilmore sign, since, if he won, they’d probably be drilling for oil in my backyard. “Drill here. Drill now.” Well, no thank you. I just had my septic tank pumped, and it would be just my luck to have the oil dowser locate light crude under that and send $180 down the drain.

Nor did I put up a sign for the Libertarian, though I came close to voting for him. You have to admire a candidate whose platform involves doing away with the office for which he’s running. If you kill off the tax code, Social Security, Medicare and all the other social programs Congress oversees, what’s left to do? Add to that the idea of privatizing public lands and the Chesapeake Bay, and you might as well pack it in and look for another line of work.

Actually, privatizing the Chesapeake Bay is not such a bad idea. Given their exquisite success in cleaning up the mess left by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, Exxon Mobil would be the perfect candidate for taking over the Chesapeake Bay and running that through their water washer. Then they could drill there instead of here in my backyard.

I have to agree with my colleague Susan Gaston that this election has been extremely discomfiting when it comes to personal relationships. Friends and family, to say nothing of perfect strangers, have gotten into political fisticuffs the likes of which we haven’t seen since Thomas Jefferson, the last Democrat to win the White House, ran.

The solution for that is to tell everyone you’re undecided. Never mind that people who’ve been listening to these candidates bloviate and debate for the last millennium and are still undecided should check for rusty nuts and bolts in their cranial cavities. The fact is that declaring yourself undecided and putting up signs for all the candidates keeps you out of a helluva lot of trouble.

“What do you think of Sarah Palin?” “I don’t know yet. I’m still undecided.” “Whom did you vote for?” “Nobody. I’m still undecided.” Then, if they try to persuade you to vote for X or Y, you simply thank them for their input and tell them that you will consider their opinions when and if you ever decide. “But right now, I’m still undecided.” Works every time.

Much of the information we undecideds get comes from venom-laden letters to the editor. These are written by people who feel they have to relieve their intellectual intestines of all sorts of political canards derived from campaign talking points.

The letters that especially fascinated me were the ones claiming that a vote for Barack Obama would send us directly down to the fiery hell of socialism, if not communism.

I hate to be the one to inform these folks that we cooked ourselves into that stew a long time ago. What do they think lies behind Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the progressive income tax? If the last hasn’t been redistributing the wealth for years, I don’t know what has. Add to that the recent Republican-led bail-out of the banking biggies and defaulting mortgage holders, and we might as well be living in Sweden.

I’ll believe these people yammering about socialism when I see them returning their Social Security checks and opting out of Medicare for cheaper private insurance. Or refusing their mortgage bail-out checks. Or opting out of their federal income tax exemptions.

Flip the coin and you find letters about John McCain voting with President Bush 90% of the time. Again, I hate to be the bearer of nasty news, but the majority of Democrats have been blithely voting with Bush 90% of the time since the day they sanctioned the war in Iraq and all the subsequent budgetary back-ups and privacy-invading surveillance packages that our so-called war on terrorism entails.

These are the same people who told us that if we installed a majority of Democrats in Congress we’d be zipping out of Iraq two years ago Tuesday. Last time I looked, we and our monthly billions of dollars were still lounging around in Baghdad.

As for the election on Tuesday, I’m still undecided. I figure I’ll wait for a year or two to see how Obama does before I decide if I should have voted for him.

Right now I’m looking forward to 2012. I wonder if Sarah and Hillary have their signs ready yet.