I hear the word "change" being thrown around so much, repeated over and over by candidates, but nothing too specific about what exactly they will change. Ending the occupation in Iraq is a good change, but cutting funding for the Dept. of Education (whose teachers are severely underpaid and not given resources for better education as it is) because its BIG government isn't a good change. Neither is repealing Roe Vs. Wade, and taking a woman's right to a terminate pregnancy when she is the victim of rape or incest because of some theological doctrine that people who run as the Christian candidates like to use selectively. While I am not personally in favor of abortion that is my personal choice (that I will speak of on a later day) that I cannot apply to others. I think there is something to be said about the legality of life in the womb. But I sometimes wonder though how these individuals who have run on these strict pro-life tickets like Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, Fred Thompson and Dick Cheney would've reacted if their wife or daughter was raped and she became pregnant, or if she was knocked up by some "swarthy non-English speaking sweaty illegal alien." Someone that makes everything in their home including their dinner but they resent having to treat at the same hospitals or teach at the same schools.

My experience has taught me that people's self-righteous, sanctimonious nature is usually only applicable in a vacuum, because in real life you have to bleed for it. So it's easy for some people to think like this. It's also easy for them to chant "stay the course", most of them never picked up a rifle or stayed on extended tours in 120 degree weather while their families suffered back in the states, otherwise they might understand what it feels like to want to come home. It's easy to think that "surge is working" until you realize that your tax dollars you don't want going to "big government" are in Iraq buying off street gangs, Extremist Militia's, with monthly stipends to decrease violence against US troops. Then again this war being conceived and then run by people who dipped out when it was their chance to serve still amazes me.

Next thing you know they'll be putting Arabian Horse racers in charge of FEMA and hooking their girlfriends up with high paying jobs at the World Bank.

Wrong forum to post in?

I believe you are sitting on the right horse. . .but backwards in the saddle.

"Change" rhetoric has only to do with giving people what they want to hear and nothing to do with the speaker's concrete plans. US citizens are looking down the wrong end a loaded barrel of war, terrorism, debt, and receding privacy (to name a few irritants) while they work more long hours in the headlong race to Third World Status.

They may be forgiven for desiring “change” (even if it's dangerously ill-defined). They would be wise to look deeper.

We have been here before and suffered the consequences of a mis-begotten desire for change. The Jimmy Carter reaction to the exhausting Nixon era experience comes to mind.

The cynical view suggests that such rhetoric is naught but a variation on the commercial advertising model, goes “Tell 'em what they want to hear and sell 'em poison.”.

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“In government, the way you know your friends is they’ll stab you in the front.”
- National Public Radio, Unattributed