I don't get it

People don't take their votes seriously. I got a guy, a retiree in town, who stops in and bullshits with us when his wife is sick of him hanging around the house. Now I love this guy and respect him. He's an Air Force vet, a plus right off the bat, and he's a genuinely nice guy. The problem is, I can't figure out how he can be so supportive of Bush.

The other day, he's telling me that Bush did good by enacting the No Child Left Behind legislation. Then I told him that all the funding for the fucking program fell on the states and local school districts. And it happens a lot, mostly the older guys I know, mostly WW II vets, who think that Bush is the greatest thing since sliced bread. They hear the Coward in Chief saying 'I'm assuring that no child is left behind' or some other slogan of the week, and they don't bother looking any further.

I don't know about you, but they're the ones who bitch the most when their school taxes go up. Doesn't anybody look past the rhetoric and see what these Presidential decrees actually entail? I mean, their vote could be the tipping point in an election; we saw it in Florida in 2000. It seems that all they see is this guy who likes to 'give them Arabs what they deserve', or some other shit. This guy told me this morning that the U.S. sudden turnover was proof of Bush's competence in handling the situation. I almost fell down.

I'm venting here, because I know that people who need to hear this are definitely not reading it, and I try not to talk politics with folks. Friendships are too dear to fuck up over politics. Also, the neighborhood where I work is very conservative and I don't need to be losing Harry customers. I just don't get how people who proclaim they hate and distrust politicians believe everything they are told by said politicians.

Man, we gotta get the United States working correctly again, not perpetuate this mutation that we've morphed into. Make your vote count, dig past the top layer of bullshit and find out what is really going on. Ever since Al Gore [sic] invented the Internet, it's easy.