Barak and Hillary, Ah Wah Ah Gwan?

For those of you who are Caribbean challenged, the heading simply means, what's going on. Now lets get down to it. There's a reason why a political election is called a race. Like everything else, there's the match up where the odds of one team or individual is weighed agains the opponent. Polls or odd makers decide on external circumstances, what the past history of the teams have and make their predictions. If one is to base the outcome on the polls, then the team that has been deemed the loser should just go home and give up the match, right? You know the answer, it ain't over till its over. Until the big bad team wins, they did not win. Barak Obama was given the lead by all the pollsters and it almost happened. Early results on the race began to show that but it didn't take long for Hillary to take the lead and kept it until the end. Hillary won!

What went wrong? One has to remember what Hillary's husband had said a while before, "its the economy, stupid". In the end, this is what made the difference. Of course, the misty eyes and the almost tears might have helped too. I still remember when my mother cried to me for hitting my brother. Even though it was an accident since we were rough playing and he ran into my elbow with his stomach, she still cried to me after he went down, holding his stomach from the blow to his solar plexus. I felt like the worlds biggest murderer even though we were both staring in disbelief at her. I would've given her the belt to beat the crap out of me instead of those tears. So don't count out those tears. The thing is however, its the economy too. Most of the voters when polled after were talking about being under or at the bring of financial disaster with high credit card bills and barely if at all able to pay their bills. Don't tell this to a Republican but during Bill Clinton's tenure, the country enjoyed good times and a very strong economy. It enjoyed a time when the budget was balanced and the economy was expanding. In comes George Bush and it was all over. It wasn't GB's fault regarding 9/11 even though the conspiracy theorists down the block and in the barber shops would say different. What was the problem reminds me of the girl in the beauty pageant, Miss South Carolina. She was absolutely right that people in the US can't locate the US on a map because many people in the US don't have maps. Maps are boring if you're not using it to go somewhere, right? So GB, not knowing the difference between Afganistan and Arkansas, took the US into Iraq. The Taliban were in Afghanistan allowing Osama and Al Quida to train. By the way, they're still there.

From all of this, we now have a situation where the dollar is now weak and we're going through the massive housing crisis that promises to shut the country down, according to my barber shop friends. Billions and billions of dollars we should be enjoying and which should be used to develop the country and help with some of the crises we now have are being used to blow people up and put ourselves where we can be blown up as well.

Meanwhile people are broke, either barely holding on to their jobs or are quite dissatisfied with it. There's the hysteria about illegal aliens who are hated because they're cheap and want to bring down the high prices paid to Americans for the same jobs.

This race promises to be exciting and already it is. When you see me watching it instead of sports you know that something is different to say the least. I watched as South Carolina was run over by Barak Obama but the underlying theme from the media was how much race was a factor. Indeed, many Blacks voted for Hillary but they don't make up the majority of the population. Many whites went to the polls. Maybe what this was saying was that the majority of White South Carolinans are Republican and whether Hillary won or not didn't matter to them.

So we move on. Super Tuesday, February 5, would be an interesting time. I'll go out there and cast my vote and you won't know who and don't think you do. In the long run, come November, America won't be the same. I don't care who goes in there, as long as we get out of Iraq and continue the business of living life in the pursuit of happiness. Both are as difficult as they appear simple but it has to be done.

God me love dis country! (I don't think I need an interpretation, do I?)

Iain