I Support John Edwards for President

I Support John Edwards for President

I am way past ready for a change in the way the United States conducts politics and I believe that John Edwards, as the closest to a progressive populist candidate, offers the best chance we have to make that change. While the Corporate Embedded Media is doing its dead-level best to paint Edwards as a hypocrite and decide for us who our Democratic Presidential Candidate will be, I’m remembering how the media served as a dysfunctional enabler to help elect our current president by making such reckless claims as the following endorsement by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen:

“given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.”

The media also propped up the myth of George Bush the regular guy who lives on a ranch in Texas rather than the truth of the arrogant, spoiled rich brat that he is.

It is clear that the media is trying to tell us who our next president should be but thankfully Time Magazine busted the Edwards as a hypocrite myth.

“Another challenge is that much of the attention he’s gotten recently has been the unflattering kind, stories that question his sincerity and assail his image as a fighter for the little guy by focusing on his pricey haircuts, huge house and hedge-fund job. These viral attacks, spreading from the Drudge Report and other blogs to newspapers everywhere, make a dumb argument. They assume that someone who’s wealthy can’t be a sincere advocate for poor and working people. By that logic, the healthy can’t speak on behalf of the sick, or whites on behalf of people of color…

snip

Here’s what would truly be hypocritical: if Edwards spoke out on behalf of the disadvantaged while pushing policies that benefit the rich. This he does not do. He favors boosting the capital-gains tax rate for families earning over $250,000 and closing the loophole that allows fund managers like those at Fortress Investment Group, where he earned almost $500,000 in 2006 to get taxed at just 15%. ‘He wants to take money away from the people who paid him,’ says deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince. ‘That’s not hypocrisy. That’s sincerity.'”

A few of the reasons I support Edwards.

1. Health Care: He has an honest plan to provide health care for all Americans and he has been honest enough to say that the money will come from tax hikes on the wealthy.
2. Workers: He is pro labor and that is important to me as I write this after working on Labor Day. It should be important to most of us because our wages have remained stagnant since 2000
3. Poverty: He wasn’t always wealthy. He grew up in poverty and while he did earn a fortune in his law practice he could have earned ten times more than that representing corporations against people. Instead he represented people against corporations. He is not the first wealthy person to fight for the impoverished. Were they all hypocrites? I think not.
4. His wife: I like her.
5. What he said here:
   

   [The system is] controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it’s perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed. This is the game of American politics and in this game, the interests of regular Americans don’t stand a chance.

6. And what he said here:
   

   “We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other”

7. And everything he said in the following speech (text HERE)

To see where he stands on the issues, clilck HERE

Note to Mzchief who sometimes reads this blog: You are a person whose intellect I admire so I was concerned when you said that you would never support Edwards because he said that the war on terror was only a bumper sticker. I immediately researched that statement. Here’s what he said:

Edwards called the war on terror a “bumper sticker” slogan Bush had used to justify everything from abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison to the invasion of Iraq.

“We need a post-Bush, post-9/11, post-Iraq military that is mission focused on protecting Americans from 21st century threats, not misused for discredited ideological purposes,” Edwards said in remarks prepared for delivery. “By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set—that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam.”

I completely agree with him!