Bostonians might want to vote against Kerry

by philg

Generally there is no point in voting if you live in Massachusetts.  The Democrats always win the state regardless of what happens in other parts of the U.S.  People who live in Boston might want to consider voting against John Kerry, however, due to the massive negative impact that his election to the Presidency would have on our lifestyle.  Being a peasant in the presence of royalty was never enjoyable.  Ever since September 11th, however, American royalty has been running scared from terrorists and that has made them far more difficult guests in a city.


Check out an article in today’s Boston Globe:  “Massive closing of roads set for convention week”.  Most of the useful highways and tunnels in downtown Boston will be shut down for at least 8 hours per day during the week of the Democratic National Convention (July 26-29).  The 200,000 commoners who travel on Interstate 93 every day are being encouraged to take the week off.  It is tough to calculate the economic losses but one aspect can be comprehended by looking at the $15 billion that was recently spent on roadwork in central Boston.  At 5 percent annual interest that works out to $2 million per day.  (If you decide to poke your way into work on local roads, take the weed out of your glove box because the government will have the right to stop and search any vehicle downtown at any time during the week.)  Fans of public transit should note that the North Station T stop will be closed during the convention as well.


If Kerry were to go to Washington, DC and work at his desk for 4 or 8 years that would be one thing.  But no doubt he will want to come home every couple of weekends to his fabulous mansions in downtown Boston and on Nantucket.  This will necessitate the closure of downtown Boston and Nantucket to the rest of us.  Of course the airspace for 30 nautical miles around Boston and Nantucket will also be closed, except to scheduled airlines and maybe the biggest corporate jets.  If President Kerry is running late back to Logan Airport commercial airliners will be kept waiting with the engines running for 1-2 hours (according to my airline pilot friends, this happens all the time with Bush and Cheney at airports around the U.S. but it hasn’t affected Boston much because W. very seldom comes here).


One bright spot in a post-George W future:  all of the restrictions on travel and building in Crawford, Texas are going to lighten up so we Bostonians could move down there if things get too constrained up here.

30 thoughts on “Bostonians might want to vote against Kerry”

  1. But no doubt he will want to come home every couple of weekends

    The amount of time Bush has spent at his ranch is unseemly. Should Kerry win, hopefully he’ll stay put at the White House, where the president is supposed to, you know, live.

  2. HL Mencken covered this topic:

    Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard

  3. Pretty funny stuff. Maybe we can get some slogans behind this.

    How about “Apathy in the name of Activism”

    or maybe “Think Locally act Globally”

    Yep, I suppose that the individual rights of some socially-enabled bostonian potheads and internet-enabled tecchie pilots certainly outweigh the national and global need to remove a war-mongering hand-puppet of a president from office.

    Sheesh, we only get the chance to switch out presidents every four years. I would think that you would be pleased to take a part in the process. But then, just grabbing onto the convention dollars (does that weigh against the ‘big dig’ interst in your calculations?) isn’t enough for you.

    Ahhh, I can see it now, you are trying to get MA into the same national spotlight the florida was in 2000.

    Pretty clever Phillip

  4. They say a conservative is a guy who used to be a liberal, but got mugged… what’s next Phil? Dare you criticize affirmative action? Bogus claims of global warming? The apparent contradiction between Massacusetts fully supporting the First amendment but completely ignoring the Second?

  5. I used to interview lots of people for programming jobs. Once HR inexplicably sent a guy who took seven years to get through college. I was eager to hear the guy’s story, and was surprised and disappointed to find that he was a nebbish.

    I can imagine interviewing Dubya:

    Me: “So it says here you were an alcoholic coke head into your forties. What’s the story here?”

    W: “Jesus is the higher power in my life. Also Daddy bought me a baseball team.”

    Me: “Ah. And can you explain how running oil companies into the ground qualifies you to be leader of the free world?”

    W: “I’m going to stay the course. Freedom is God’s gift.”

    Me: “Right. Have you personally accomplished anything at all during your life?”

    W: “Crawford is part of the heartland. America is a beacon of hope. Some hate us for our freedoms.”

  6. Another 4 years of W. and you can probably expect free searches of your car no matter where you drive, not to mention that Americans will be so hated around the globe the only safe place will be a cornfield in Nebraska.

  7. Better to kill a few more tens of thousands of people than cause Philip Greenspun to be inconvenienced.

  8. Ian: I’m not sure that you can blame W for any hatred of the rest of us Americans. Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, beneficiary of a Green Card by our ever-helpful Immigration officials, and nine followers from his mosque tried to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993. Ahmed Ressam and colleagues tried to blow up the Los Angeles Airport in December 1999. The USS Cole was attacked while visiting Yemen in October 2000, a month before Bush was elected (sort of). There is no evidence that Muslim terrorists during the Bush years have any additional hatred on which to draw compared to what they had during the Clinton years. They have perhaps learned from past mistakes and become more effective.

  10. Philip,
    Sure, Dubbya was not in office through the nineties when the terrorist attacks on american soil began.
    But, if we look a little deeper it may be possible to find some connections.

    Theme 1:
    Bush money is oil money.
    American oil money has kept corrupt regimes in place in the middle east since world war 2.
    These corrupt regimes have managed to point the aggression of their opressed classes towards america.
    The longer that this oppression continues, the longer the terrorist attacks on america continue.

    Theme 2:
    George HW Bush was in a critical decision making position in the Reagan whitehouse, and was even a president himself.
    Those whitehouses supported fundamentalist insurgencies against the soviet backed government in afghanistan
    A great number of fundamentalist religious fighters got their start in the afghani uprising
    George W Bush owes his own political position to his father,
    George W has reaped what his father has sown.

    Itis awful damn easy to point the blame for the current ‘state of terror’ at the Bush(s).
    Attempting to cast any guilt on Immigration officials is just weak.

  11. Is it me or Philip’s logic is becoming weaker and weaker.

    It astounds me how narrow-minded, self-centered and ridiculously myopic his arguments have become — perhaps it has always been like this and he was faking it under: “I went to MIT, teach at MIT so I am part of an elite group who knows it all” huh?

    Get off the high horse man.

    He says, “The Democrats always win the state regardless of what happens …”

    What kind of balderdash is this? You fail to understand basic math baby.

    It saddens me that people like you teach in universities.

  12. Philip, Your comments about the logistical implications of holding the Democratic National Convention in Boston are apt. It is my impression that your fair city isn’t the ideal place for holding huge events, because of limited hotel capacity, the byzantine road system, quaint local customs, etc. Many years ago, while serving my sentence of “time by the Charles”, I was involved in organizing a medium-sized technology conference. I was shocked at the difficulty of the logistics. Many conference attendees remarked about how surly the local denizens were. The whole event was a disaster.

    Fast forward to 2004. Any terrorists who try to infiltrate the Convention will get what they richly deserve. If you think the US military is nasty to the detainees in Iraq, I can assure you that such abuse falls far short of what native Bostonians can dish out to innocent visitors.

  13. Phil, you’re turning into a shrewd old Zionist. It’s obvious you generalize against arabs at this point and are willing to support whoever will slaughter them the best, regardless of the effect on our own country.

    Look into who started modern terrorism in the first place – king david hotel on wikipedia is a hint. Come on man, intelligent people are able to separate themselves from bias – are you getting old or are you just bored and trolling your own blog?

  14. Adam

    At this point, I highly doubt that aging is the issue. I have a nagging feeling that Philip has always been biased towards ethnic groups, Arabs in particular. What amazes me that he’s Jewish himself and certainly knows that Jewish folks suffered and still suffering, more than any other minorities throughout history, from racial discrimination, profiling and Aryan supremacy.

    I am a white American and these remarks make me upset much less people in minorities.

    Jon

  15. “There is no evidence that Muslim terrorists during the Bush years have any additional hatred on which to draw compared to what they had during the Clinton years.”

    What a fucked-up perspective Philip. I am glad that you didn’t go to Political Science school, it would have been total humiliation for you.

    How long have you been sleepling lately?

  18. I’m not sure how I came to be associated with W. and his invasion of Iraq. I didn’t vote for Bush. I didn’t support his even mentioning Saddam or Iraq in a speech much less turning the rebuilding of Iraq into a major national project. (Iraq is too small a country for a U.S. leader to deal with directly as an enemy.) All that I wanted to do was point out that there are 293 million of us here in the U.S. now and if people do indeed indeed hate us it doesn’t seem fair to blame W.

    Gary: I don’t think it is easy to explain as “corrupt regime supported by US generates terrorism”. Most countries around the world have governments that steal. We can probably include our own government here in the U.S. for that matter, which often passes laws that cost the average taxpayer and benefit a handful of rich people, e.g., various bailouts of Mexican debt (we paid for it but do you know anyone in your family who owns Mexican bonds?).

    I’m not sure why it has become politically incorrect, at least among commenters to this blog, to refer to “Muslim terrorists”. It seems like a useful term to distinguish our current antagonists from Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma City bomber) and similar angry white guys. Nobody has suggested that W’s foreign adventures have increased the likelihood of terrorism from any white native-born Americans, have they? So it must be increased Muslim terrorism that we fear, no? And we had plenty of that in the Clinton years too….

    Jon B: I am surprised that you believe the Massachusetts presidential election is in some doubt. Unlike Nebraska and Maine, Massachusetts is a winner-take-all state. If a candidate wins 51 percent of our popular vote we will send 100% of our electors to vote for his party in the Electoral College. W only won 33 percent of the vote here in 2000. It is hard to imagine that he will do substantially better in 2004 and therefore no individual Massachusetts citizen’s vote will count for anything (Kerry won’t benefit more by winning 79 percent of the vote here instead of 78 percent).

  19. I live in Virginia where you could argue the opposite. That’s no reason not to vote. If every person who thought that way had voted in the last election, perhaps we wouldn’t have this moron as our “president” now.

  20. Phil, I don’t think you can blame the coming disruption of Boston traffic
    on John Kerry – it’s been ordered by the Secret Service and Homeland Security.
    The Bush administration is probably happy to aggravate a strongly Democratic city, too.
    Look at Kerry’s Seattle rally today — the SS let him go ahead and hold it in the rain – – but wouldn’t let the audience bring umbrellas.

  23. Hey, it’s your turn. Dubya has been tying up Philadelphia traffic every couple of months for his fundraising activities ever since the last campaign. It’s a sad, sad day for all when the NJ Turnpike becomes the shunpike for I-95.

  24. I never knew how shallow and short sighted most Americans are until I read this piece by Mr Greenspun piece and the comments section here.

  25. I see you haven’t been updating your blog very frequently. Wise choice.

  26. The New York Times is good at pointing out the obvious, e.g., that the average blog doesn’t get read by very many people. But like most newspapers it isn’t good at helping people understand things. This blog enabled me to distribute Galapagos photos to friends and family from an Internet cafe in Puerto Ayora. This blog has enabled me on many occasions to ask questions of the readers and get practical answers that have saved many days of pain and suffering (check out the Photoshop scripting question below, for example). A blog isn’t a great way of competing with the NYT for readership but maybe the only people who think that is the point are folks who work at the NYT…

  27. Hey, Philip: Timothy McVeigh was probably trained to build leathal bombs by Al Qaeda, according to former Terrorism Czar, Richard Clarke. It’s in his book “Against All Enemies”.

  28. As far as the “reap what you sow” argument. Nobody who has been a student of history has not seen the long arc of US foreign policy as weighing in on fueling terrorism abroad. Howard Zinn has made one of the best analysis of just this phenomenon going back to the 19th century. A lot of people would like to brand critics of US foreign policy as “America Haters”, but it’s just too facile. Critique != hatred.

    One of the most interesting responses from the Islamic world immediately after the attack on the Twin Towers was from a moderate muslim cleric from Indonesia (I can’t remember his name). I think the jist of what he said was “America, some brown people attacked the very symbols of your financial and military power — and you do not understand why. This is your fundamental problem.” His point was maybe getting to the bottom of why is a higher priority than anything else, including blame and military action. Saying that Al Qaeda “hates us for our freedoms” is just completely stupid. Nobody hates freedom. Until we know why, we will not be able to solve the problem. This “follow on the facts” approach has been so absent from Dubbya’s regime, and a lack thereof has been the hallmark of this Rove Republican era.

  29. Nah, I still have to vote against Bush because once in 1986 my flight was delayed because Air Force 2 (with then VP Poppa Bush) was at the airport. It was then that my political worldview was formed and I became a Anarcho-syndicalist.

    And don’t even get me started on the years-long closing of highways in Salt Lake City before the 2002 Winter Olympics. Anyone know who I should vote against over that one?

  30. What do the New York Times and Phil’s Blog have in common ?
    (aside from they’re black and white and read all over)
    I pay this much to read them both online – $0.00

Comments are closed.