2004 election results in!

That’s right – Traveling Soldier already has the results of the 2004 presidential election. The winner is for waging war in Iraq and refuses to “cut and run.” He helped pass the USA-PATRIOT Act, which violates the 4th amendment of the Constitution and gives the government enormous power to spy on citizens without cause. He wants to give tax breaks to big corporations and the rich. The winner’s name is either George W. Bush or John F. Kerry and the losers are all of us.

This election is a fight between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dumber and people who want to bring the troops home now can’t win with these two choices.

The problem is that when people who want to end the war and bring the troops home now get behind the “lesser evil” John Kerry – simply because his last name isn’t B-U-S-H – they end up getting the lesser AND the greater evil. The classic example is when people who were against the U.S. invading Vietnam in the 1964 election campaigned for Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson under the slogan “part of the way with LBJ.” The idea was that while Johnson wasn’t perfect, at least he wouldn’t do terrible things like put our boys in the jungles of Southeast Asia like his Republican opponent Barry Goldwater. Johnson won the election, and what did he do? He sent tens of thousands of ground troops into Vietnam, destroyed huge amounts of jungle with chemical weapons, and began a war that would cost billions, kill 58,000 Americans and 3 million people from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

The war ended when the anti-war movement realized that it could not rely on politicians from either the Democrat or Republican parties to lift a finger for them and instead relied on mass demonstrations to spread anti-war sentiment. Eventually, the very people forced to fight the Vietnam war – soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen – decided to end it themselves, both on the ground in Vietnam and on their ships and planes. With the military in revolt, Richard Nixon, a Republican who had escalated the war by invading Laos and Cambodia, was forced to bring the troops home from Vietnam in 1972.

The lesson here is that the anti-war movement can’t give up its independence and expect a bought-and-paid for politician like Kerry to help end the war, especially when Kerry says he wants to escalate the Iraq war by expanding the Army by 40,000 active-duty troops. The only way to end the war is by building a grassroots movement in every neighborhood, community, campus, workplace and barrack that isn’t willing to settle for the “lesser evil” but will take its fight to the streets.

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