We Are the Champignons!

This is the last entry before Tuesday's election. I don't have much to add to what is the torrent of information, disinformation, misinformation, and simply irrelevant nonsense already out there.

I would urge my readers to vote, but one isn't a citizen and the other, I think, isn't old enough.

I was wondering if someone stopped me and asked me why I was voting the way I am (pretty much a straight Democratic ticket), what my answer would be?

I guess it would be because they aren't Republicans. I think that's a good enough reason.

The Republicans, or at least those who appear to be in power and driving policy, seem to stand for some positions I find worrisome (for some, I just offer shorthand):

• We are in a war on terror. Which may last forever
• Checks and balances are a luxury--in a war on terror
• Torture, or an indistinguishable subsitute, is permissible--during such a war the President can identify enemy combatants (alien or citizen) and deny them access to legal representation without any appeal outside of his own branch of government
  
• Global warming is sufficiently confusing that we shouldn't worry about it
• Katrina victims in New Orleans are a bunch of whiners and often colored
  
• Evolution is sufficiently confusing that we should also teach untestable, unfalsfiable claims that provide virtually nothing in the way of a research program as comparably scientific
• Christians have access to truth that others fail to
• Israel must be defended at all costs and at all times, except the End Times, when Israeli Jews must either convert to Christianity (suitably interpreted) or die
• Iraq
• Iran
• North Korea
• Pakistan
• Sudan
• Burma/Myanmar
• Afghanistan
• Chechnya
  
• Homosexuals don't deserve equal rights
• A President who lies about a consensual sexual relationship in a deposition for a case that is thrown out deserves to be impeached and removed from office
• A President who authorizes torture, violates international law, and eliminates habeas corpus for those he identifies as appropriate, should be immune from investigation, censure, or any other penalities
• Health care
• No Child Left Behind
• Conservative principles that include ignoring deficit spending, embrace Military Keynesianism, and send mixed and confused signals about immigration
• If something is "good for business" (appropriately interpreted), it is unimportant that it conflicts with one's principles, or damages more people than it benefits
• The environment

In short, a vote for Republicans in this election seems to say this (unless, perhaps, one is either a single issue voter and can identify a single issue worthy of voting them back in, or one who, in some sense, benefits from the points above):

please keep treating me as if I'm stupid, cannot possibly understand complexity, and will vote for you because you have made me afraid.

There's a country song where the complaint is registered that one's object of affection treats the narrator as a mushroom: "You keep me in the dark, and feed me ______________" [scatological reference deleted].

I don't like being treated that way, and even if I weren't a Yellow Dog Democrat (for the most part), I would vote against the Republicans for having done so.

That's a good enough reason, this time around.