Two sides of the same coin

Back in one of my previous posts, I noted that the two major party candidates didn’t really offer any diversity.  They were pretty much the same in their views.  In talking with people in the offline world about this posting, I heard a lot of disagreement about this view.  I think, then, that given this confusion, there is some need to elaborate on what “different” really means.  Before I begin, however, I want to point out that many of these ideas are not strictly my own.  Frankly, I’m not that bright.  I’ve done a lot of reading lately focusing on the opposition that people have to these candidates and some of these views come from that reading.  I think that one of the best ways that we can decide whether to vote for someone is to ask everyone that won’t vote for them the reason why.  If this reason is not really valid, then I can brush it aside. If it is, then I have one more tool to make a valid decision.

If you look at the policy positions of the two candidates, I’m sure that you can find some things that appear different.  For example, you might cite for me a difference in tax policy.  McCain wants to lower corporate taxes to open up the economy to corporations.  Barack Obama wants to lower your taxes and raise the corporate tax to make up the difference.  Barack Obama wants to divert our military resources to Afghanistan while McCain wants to finish the job in Iraq.  McCain wants private health insurance savings accounts while Obama wants socialized medicine (*shudder*).  I could go on and on about these things that, I’ll agree, appear to be a difference in policy.  In fact, they look like polar opposites.  Let me show you that they’re really not.

Take, for example, the whole war situation.  There’s no difference between the two candidates because they both support continuing large scale fighting.  Their only bickering about where it should be.  That’s not a difference.  They both support a large military and the nation building that we’ve been trying to achieve for decades.  They’ve both refused to take the first strike initiative of the Bush administration off the table (specifically in regard to Iran).  They both advocate keeping US troops stationed in 130 countries around the world (that’s not a typo).

In regard to the tax policy, they’re both looking to take your money to support a way over sized federal government.  McCain simply wants to keep your taxes where they are and take the money from you.  Obama wants to tax corporations, who will raise prices to compensate for the taxes, which means that you will eventually pay for that tax increase anyway.  Both candidates support the big government with all the unnecessary and wasteful spending.  Neither has talked about how to trim the budget to reduce the deficit.  In fact, both have introduced plans that will further increase the deficit.  Again, there’s no real difference to speak of here.

I could go on through every issue.  Many of the issues could easily be boiled down to the following statement:  Neither candidate has the authority to control your life in this way.  Both candidates wish to do so. Neither honors the Constitution with his policies and in the end, we’ll be left with the exact same thing as the last 8 years.

Both candidates have used the phrase “If you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.”  That statement could not be more true.