I don't generally write anything but I feel a good rant coming on and it's far more interesting than what I'm getting paid to work on so here it goes:
1) The Fanatics: I get it. You love your candidate. That doesn't mean that the rest of us do. Your candidate is not perfect. The odds are that your candidate is a rich white man or a protestant minister. Your candidate is not an infallible panacea for the ills of government. Your candidate is not a 'Washington Outsider' who will come in and wash away the sins of the status quo. Your candidate is not 'the common man'.
2) The Common Man: You're running for President of the richest and most powerful nation in the world for God's sake. You are not just 'one of the guys' nor should you be. I don't want you to be the guy who was my best friend in high school who wanted to name his kids after action verbs; lord only knows what he'd do with nuclear launch codes.
3) The Conspiracy Theorists: The government is not controlled by some secret shadowy organization. There really are two parties. While their values and positions may be poorly defined and often changed, they are not secretly two parts of one giant super party. By the same token, Al-Qaeda has not hand picked one of the candidates in an attempt to destroy America through free elections. They hate us; they're going to hate us whether we elect a Republican or a Democrat.
4) The Doomsday Prophets: The world is not going to end if one of the candidates gets elected. They may make lots of decisions you disagree with, but they probably aren't racist mass murdering sociopaths, those very rarely make it through the primary debates.
5) The Focus on the Family, etc.: To quote the overly cited Treaty of Tripoli (article 11) "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion". I don't care if the candidates haven't been to church in 30 years, that's their own business and completely irrelevant to their ability to lead a nation of 300,000,000 people. Morality is not your exclusive bailiwick and does not need your God to exist.
6) The Pat Robertson: You're probably thinking I covered Pat in numbers 1, 3, 4, or 5; but I decided he annoys me enough that he deserved his own spot. According to Pat if the wrong people get elected God will smite us (and he'll blame it on the gays). Of course, if the wrong people get elected and we aren't smote it's because the righteous prayed and God was merciful.
7) The Atheists: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." We have freedom of religion not freedom from religion. Stop getting your knickers in a twist every time someone mentions God. They have just as much a right to their beliefs (and to talk about them) as you have to yours.
8) The Gay Agenda: For the last time, there is no such thing as the Gay Agenda. Anyone who thinks that there is has clearly never worked with a group of gay people for any length of time. We're lucky if we can agree on a meal in less than 3 hours. The gay agenda could take centuries at this rate. We haven't even started the gay mission statement or gay vision statement yet.
9) The Gay People: For a group of people between 1% (Conservative bad science estimate) and 10% (Liberal bad science estimate) of the total population we really need to get our act together. That's between 3 and 30 million people. There are only around 20 million people over the age of 60 and they're much better organized. How long are we going to whine for equal rights while we can be out lobbied by people with Alzheimer’s? We need to get our well dressed and flannel wearing ducks in a row so at least we can pretend like we actually care enough to do something about gay rights.
10) The Electoral College: I could (and have been known to) go on for hours about the Electoral College. It has it's quirks but I actually like the system. This is more about the idiots who think they can come up with a better system off the top of their heads. No, if you change it from statewide to congressional districts it doesn't make everyone's vote worth more (first of all, they can't ALL be worth more without breaking some ceteris paribus conditions) it would just encourage more gerrymandering and ultimately the same results in smaller scales instead of statewide campaigns. No, if you make your delegates go to whoever wins the national popular vote it doesn't make things better; it just disenfranchises your entire state (unless everyone does it). No a national popular vote is not better, that would only focus all of the campaigning on population centers, they could campaign in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia and ignore the rest of the country.
This wasn't going to be a full 10 point list when I started... but it seems like a good place to stop and get back to doing what they pay me for.
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