Please Vote Republican

If you wept at Ken Lay’s funeral, please vote Republican.

If you still believe “Mission Accomplished" three and a half years later, please vote Republican.

If every time you pull up to the pump you wonder “can’t we give away a few billion more of my tax dollars in subsidies to the oil companies” and “how can I help the oil industry increase its record profits” and “those oil execs need a pay raise” and “shouldn’t George and Dick receive more credit for helping those energy companies out,” please vote Republican.

If you think Valerie Plame deserved to have been ‘outed’ because her husband Joe Wilson spoke out about the manipulation and fabrication of intelligence that lead us into the Iraq war, please vote Republican.

If you look forward to sharing a cell with Republicans Jack Abramhoff, Illinois ex-Governor Ryan, ex-Congressman Duke Cunningham, Jeff Skilling and his Enron buddies, the guys behind the jamming of the Democratic “Get Out The Vote” phone lines in New Hampshire, Thomas Ney, and many, many more, please vote Republican.

If you hate big government so much that you think that incompetence at the highest levels is the solution, please vote Republican.

If you think the numerous groups in the scientific community who have complained for years that the Bush White House has suppressed scientific findings and replaced them with their partisan political agendas are just crybabies or sore losers, please vote Republican.

If you consider ex-Republican House Whip Tom, “The Hammer” Delay to be a ‘friend’ of yours, please vote Republican.

If you define “Compassionate Conservatism” as giving the wealthiest 1% of the population even more tax cuts and look forward to the day when you or your children can pay for that loss in federal revenues through higher taxes or increased deficits, please vote Republican.

If you insist on ignoring the warnings of scientists at the
Jet Propulsion Lab at California Institute of Techology,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
US Army Cold Region Research and Engineering Laboratory,
The Scripps Institute of Oceanography,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
American Association for the Advancement of Science,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
and virtually every other leading climatological science group, organization or institute
that human produced greenhouse gases are affecting our climate adversely and we don’t have much time to change the ways in which we produce and use energy —and you would rather be lulled into buying another SUV by the science “skeptics” on the payrolls of the big oil companies, please vote Republican.

If you forgot, or were never told, that the highest ranking British intelligence official, after talking with US administration officials before the war, reported back to his Prime Minister that the US was twisting the intelligence and facts to fit the Bush policy of invading Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you think our founding fathers would be proud of a political party that has admittedly dispatched operatives from WDC to uncover any and all information about Democratic opponents, spin it into “dirt,” and spend 90% of its advertising budget on negative ads, all because it is afraid to run on the issues, its record, and the President’s performance, please vote Republican.

If you love a President whose motto is “support our troops” but who didn’t provide them with sufficient body armor or protection for their vehicles from IEDs and who still won’t cough up the $17,000,000,000 the Army says it needs to repair all the equipment that has suffered the ravages of the sands of Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you don’t remember the time eight years ago when we had such swelling federal budget surpluses that we were pulling out our hair trying to figure out what to do when we paid off the federal debt, and you are glad--with our $300,000,000,000 annual deficits--that we won’t have those sore scalp problems any longer, please vote Republican.

If you believe a war with Iran will be more successful than our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, please vote Republican.

If you think that turning over the safety net of Social Security that has been well managed for seventy years to a bunch of high-paid, smooth-talking Wall Street financers will make your retirement more secure, please vote Republican.

If you want the increase in hurricanes, floods, droughts, diseases, species extinctions, and human wars over scarce resources that global climate change will bring, please vote Republican.

If you look forward to going quail hunting with Vice President Cheney, please vote Republican.

If you consider whistleblowers who stand up against this administration’s incompetence, cronyism, disregard for science, international law and our own Constitution to be mere nuisances who need to be smeared or fired to discourage others from following in their footsteps, please vote Republican.

If you favor Nixonian “dirty tricks” like jamming the Democrat’s ‘Get Out the Vote’ telephones in New Hampshire on election day and your only regret is that you can’t give Get Out of Jail Free cards to those who went to prison for doing this, please vote Republican.

If you condone the torture and other inhumane interrogation of prisoners in Iraq, well over 90% of which were neither terrorists nor criminals, and believe this helps us win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Muslim world, gains us stature around the globe, conforms with the Geneva Conventions, and will not set a precedent for similar treatment of our servicemen and women when they are captured, please vote Republican.

If you think we are ‘winning’ the war in Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you think it’s fair that someone earning the federal minimum wage would have to work for about 20,000 years to earn what Exxon’s CEO was given as a golden parachute, please vote Republican.

If you can make sense of your Medicare Drug Benefits package, please vote Republican.

If you think that ‘Brownie’ and FEMA did a ‘heck of a job’ in responding to Hurricane Katrina, please vote Republican.

If you contributed to the Scooter Libby Defense Fund, please vote Republican.

If you love your children but still think we should be spending over $200,000,000 a day on the war in Iraq, while not providing the promised federal funding for the No Child Left Behind Act, please vote Republican.

If you believe capturing Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’ is no longer important, so it's fine to disband the working group charged with that task, please vote Republican.

If you think Presidential ‘signing statements’ should replace the Constitutional power the President has to veto legislation, please vote Republican.

If you’d be glad that your wife, son, husband, daughter or other relative was called back for a third, forth or fifth tour of duty in Iraq, please vote Republican.

If you believe that President served every month of his six years of Air National Guard duty according to the terms he signed upon entering the military, please vote Republican.

If you don’t care that the White House Council on Environmental Quality overruled the EPA and declared the air at Ground Zero ‘safe’ after 9/11, condemning thousands of the heroic first responders and clean up crew members to respiratory problems and lives of medical hell, please vote Republican.

If you agree with the threat Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made while planning for the Iraq war that the next high ranking military officer who suggests that we need to have a plan for stabilizing a post-war Iraq would be fired, please vote Republican.

If you favored the US withdrawal from the International Court of Criminal Justice, please vote Republican.

If you just love throwing away your hard earned tax dollars on those no bid military contracts being given to Halliburton and the other corporate cronies of the Bush Administration, please vote Republican.

If you supported the administration’s adamant stance against forming a 9/11 Commission and then when forced by public opinion to create such a commission, fought the commission’s attempts to get information from the administration every step of the way, please vote Republican.

If you think it’s fair that the incomes of the very, very rich should increase dramatically while those of middle class America stagnate, please vote Republican.

If you want the war in Iraq to continue on endlessly, please vote Republican.

If you realize that the touch-screen electronic voting machine you use on election day
1) hasn’t been regulated even to the extent slot machines in Las Vegas are,
2) has software that can easily be hacked to “flip” votes,
3) probably has no reliable paper trail to assure you that the machine correctly recorded your vote,
4) is owned and operated by a company owned and operated by Republicans,
well, then you’re free to vote any way you damn well please, because it won’t make a difference anyway.

ACE for the institute