Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [1]
Barack Obama is a great man who’s accomplished a remarkable thing, but he doesn’t have a magic wand. Our country lives a bit under this dream-like belief, and people need to understand that you don’t just come in and right all the wrongs. The federal government is a huge piece of machinery that’s always moving, and you just jump on. Your job is to attempt to guide and inch the machinery along, a little bit to this direction and a little bit to that. But it’s very difficult because of the bureaucracy and the enormousness of it. So the American people need to give Obama a chance, first of all—at least a year before they start passing judgment on him.
Now, I didn’t vote for him. I met Ralph Nader during the course of the election and thought he was kind of a cool guy. And I voted for Ralph. I call my vote a protest vote—none-of-the-above—because I do not vote for Democrats or Republicans. I believe the two-party system is corrupt, for reasons you’ll understand in reading this book, and I will always cast a protest vote until I see a quality in our elections with more choices than two.
Having said that, I’ll never forget my feelings on Election Day, when it became clear that Obama had won. I looked at my wife and it felt good. I mean, really good. I’d never believed in my lifetime that I would see a black man elected president. I felt very happy that I was alive to see this happen. Now maybe next it will be a woman. This makes sense when you look at it chronologically, because let’s not forget that in this country, blacks could vote before women could! After all these years of white males, hopefully a woman president will happen in my lifetime, too. (But not Sarah Palin. I think we need someone who knows that Africa is a continent and not a country).
I think Obama’s message was phenomenal. He ran a remarkable campaign and raised an unimaginable amount of money. However, I’m also extremely disappointed with who he’s chosen for his cabinet. He ran on a message of change, and yet the only person missing from the old Democratic guard is Robert Byrd! I mean, from Tom Daschle right on down the line to Hillary Clinton and the rest, it’s pretty much nothing but all the old Democrats from the ’90s. How is that change? To me it’s a step backward. I may be proven wrong, and I hope I am. I hope these people can be advocates for change, but they’re sure going to have to change their spots to do that.
So that part disappoints me. But I think Obama is being very smart, in that he appears to be governing from the center. You don’t graduate from Harvard Law School without being smart, and I think it’s about time we got somebody smart in there! George W. Bush is the worst president of my almost sixty years on this planet. He allowed the largest attack in the history of our country to occur on American soil but—he still has not caught Bin Laden, the supposed perpetrator. We haven’t even charged the guy! Bush has taken us into two wars and now Afghanistan is getting worse, so apparently we’re going to shift our troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to finish the job.
He leaves our economy in total shambles. I mean, he makes Richard Nixon look like the greatest of presidents. At least Nixon accomplished a few things. I cannot think of one thing that this guy has accomplished. Spending money contrary to all conservative beliefs . . . what has he done in eight years? I blame this country for electing him twice—if they truly did. And if they didn’t, then we’ve got a lot more problems than we thought we had.
I will state flat-out that George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and other people from that administration should be charged with crimes. Vince Bugliosi, great prosecutor and lawyer that he is (remember, he got Charley Manson convicted), lays