JONTILLMAN.COM | Part of the problem since 1976

Okay, so now that the field has narrowed everywhere, I suppose I can mention what candidate I plan on supporting for President in November (assuming they get the nomination).

Starting with a complete list of candidates (Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, Gravel, Huckabee, McCain, Obama, Paul, Romney) I began to look at issue positions, and narrowing the list based on those positions.

The first off the list are Huckabee and Romney. They fail solely for supporting the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would be an egregious contravention of the principle of the separation of Church and State. Amending the Constitution to institute the moral strictures of your particular religion is anathema to American society, and therefore I didn’t even need to look at any other position these two idiots might have. So I am left with possible candidates of Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, Gravel, McCain, Obama, & Paul.

Next off the list were Giuliani and McCain, for their continued support of the war in Iraq. To continue support for a war that is based on nothing other than lies is reprehensible and no one who still believes/pretends to believe the lies should be allowed to wield any political power at all. Now I am left with possible candidates of Clinton, Edwards, Gravel, Obama, & Paul.

I could stop here and simply choose between the remaining candidates that have a chance of nomination and election (Clinton and Obama) but I think it better to continue on through the issue based approach, so moving on we find that Paul falls off the list for opposing Universal Health Care. The US is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health care, and having now lived in one that does (UK), I am completely convinced of the benefit of such a system, particularly because our total actual tax burden in the UK was with 4% of what it is in the US. The fact that we in the US spend more per capita on healthcare than any other nation and yet 47 million people — 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population — were uninsured in 2006 is a travesty. Now I am left with possible candidates of Clinton, Edwards, Gravel, & Obama.

On the issue of potentially repeating the Iraq quagmire in Iran, Clinton and Edwards both come off the list for supporting military action, Clinton in particular for voting to declare the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite part of the Iranian military, a foreign terrorist group, opening the entire country up to invasion at the President’s whim. Of course, the entirety of this issue is based on Iran’s nuclear power program (started and funded by the US) and the potential (however slight) that having nuclear power would mean that Iran would start building nuclear weapons, a silly idea even to the National Intelligence Estimate, which stated that they

judged with “high confidence” that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, with “moderate confidence” that the program remains frozen, and with “moderate-to-high confidence” that Iran is “keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.” The new estimate says that the enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons” at some future date.

So now I am left only with Gravel, & Obama as possible candidates to support.

As much as I like Mike Gravel on almost every issue, there is simply no way (mathematically) for him to now receive the nomination of his party, so I only have one choice left; either I vote Barack Obama or “none of the above”.

I’d like to say that means I’m voting for Obama, but there are a couple of problems. Obama supports the Death Penalty, the Black Gun Ban, the Patriot Act, a Border Fence, and No Child Left Behind. In an ideal world he wouldn’t. Of course, in an ideal world Mike Gravel would be viable and I wouldn’t be looking at Obama at all…

So, will I make a tactical decision, and vote for the lesser of the evils, or will I remain hardline and vote “none of the above”? I honestly haven’t decided yet, but I suppose that asof now, if I vote for anyone, it will likely be Obama.

As a footnote, I personally think the best possible election ever in the history of American politics would be Mike Gravel v. Ron Paul. Too bad neither of them know how or are willing to play the game, eh?