Term Limits - Voters Guide
Term Limits is a Bad Idea
Term limits is and always has been a bad idea. The reason it's a bad
idea is because it limits the choices of people the public has to vote
for. If you have a really good public servant and you want to keep him,
you can't. You have to get rid of the good candidate and replace him
with someone who's inexperienced. By having term limits, we are
eliminating the people who have wisdom and experience from political
life. Like any job, it takes years to be good at what you do. About the
time our elected officials have become good public servants, we're
required to throw them out.
And what is the advantage of that? Well, for the lazy stupid voters it
creates change for people who don't care enough to find out what the
issues are or have the self control to not vote for the incumbent. Term
limit laws are an acknowledgement by the voters that they are too dumb
to make an informed decision at the ballot box.
It doesn't matter how much money someone spends, when you go into vote,
there's no one holding a gun to your head making you vote for the guy
who spent the most money or who is already in office. Believe it or not,
you have free will. You can vote these people out. If you think the
incumbent has an unfair advantage, you're right. That's why we need to
reform the system an prohibit politicians from taking certain kinds of
bribes (campaign contributions, we know what they really are). But if
Americans are too damn lazy to figure out who to vote for they deserve
the politicians who get elected.
A Brain Dead Voter's Guide to Term Limits
We don't have to pass term limits to have term limits. We can have term
limits this year. All you have to do is vote the incumbent out. Since
this seems so hard to do, I'm providing a voters guide for those who
believe in term limits to put your beliefs in effect right now. You
don't have to wait for Congress to get around to it because you can take
matters into your own hands and throw the bums out! Here's how:
- Never vote for anyone who's been in office more than 12 years. If
your Senator is running for a third term or your Congressman is running
for a 7th term, vote for the other candidate. Don't bother to even look
at the issues because if term limits were in effect, you wouldn't be
able to vote for the incumbent anyway so you might as well get used to
it now. Just close your eyes and vote for the other guy.
- If you don't know how many terms you congressman or senator has been
in office, no problem. Vote against the incumbent anyhow. When in doubt,
vote him out! This way you don't have to go to the trouble to know how
long the incumbent has been in office.
- Don't know who the incumbent is? No problem. When you go to vote,
the best way to guess who the incumbent is is to look for the name your
most familiar with. Your incumbent has been in the news so you probably
heard his name more that the challenger. You generally want to vote for
the person who you are least familiar with. So if you see a name you
don't recognize, that's who you vote for.
One problem with this method is that a very rich challenger might have
bought more name recognition than the incumbent. For example, in 1992
most voters who support term limits would have thought billionaire Ross
Perot was the incumbent and that Bush was a small shrub. Sometimes you
might want to think back and vote against the one you've known the
longest.
- Another way to decide is to ask a friend who thinks like you and
vote the same way he does. If you don't have friends that think like you
then ask someone who doesn't think like you and vote for the opposite
person.
- Even though things are changing, the incumbent is more often listed
first on the ballot. So, if you just don't know who the incumbent is,
never vote for the one who's first on the ballot. Always vote the bottom
of the list.
- Never vote for they guy who's running TV ads saying he supports term
limits. That's the incumbent!
- People tend to vote for candidate with short easy names and against
candidates with complicated foreign sounding names. So you should vote
for the guy with the long name because he's more likely to not be the
incumbent. Tall people are more often elected, so vote for the short
guy.
- If there are issues on the ballot that you aren't familiar with,
play it safe and vote NO. If the government wants it, you don't. And you
don't have to waste you valuable time understanding what the issues are.
You have better things to do than to worry about politics!
- On tax issues for which you get to vote, if they want to raise your
taxes, vote NO. There are no worthy causes. However, if the candidate is
saying he's going to lower your taxes, never vote for him because he's
lying. But if he isn't talking about taxes, don't vote for him either
because he's going to raise your taxes, and he's probably the incumbent.
- Always vote for third party candidates like the Libertarians,
Green Party or the Reform Party because they never get elected and
therefore they are never the incumbent. It also gives you a chance to
"make a statement" and to have the satisfaction of knowing that you've
scared them into thinking that your party is a serious threat to the two
party system.
- You could flip a coin. That will give you a 50% chance of voting
against the incumbent.
- If you really want to make a statement, don't vote! That's what
"they" want you to do because it legitimizes their corrupt political
system. By not participating you're telling them that they're all
corrupt and that there's nothing you can do about it except that you're
not going to "play their game". You can then put a bumper sticker on
your car that says, "Don't blame me! I didn't vote!"
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