TWISTED LOGIC

Ok, I just saw an ad on NESN during the Sox game and I just have to write something.  It might get me in trouble but I don't care. 

It was a McCain-Palin ad that said that "Obama and his liberal allies" would raise your taxes and are against offshore drilling.  It continued by saying that this is not change, but rather more of the same.  

Now, I am no expert, but haven't we been cutting taxes over the last eight years, to the point where we are running a ten trillion dollar deficit?  And aren't gas prices high because we have been relying solely on oil and nothing else for so long?  

Soooooo, I might be wrong here, but wouldn't that mean that more of the same, then, would be continuing to lower taxes and drill for oil as we have these last eight years?  And that, as a result, what the ad proposes Obama would do, which is raise taxes and not drill offshore, would therefore be d-i-f-f-e-r-e-n-t from what we have been doing over the last eight years?  I mean, the logic here is so unrelated to any semblance of rational thought that it is somewhat insulting.    

And, the truth is, and this is even more insulting, that we could really use the millions of dollars that are being spent to run this nonsense over and over again. 

Although I said below recently that issues and campaigns are important, which they are, I just can't understand how anyone anywhere, Democrat or Republican, could spend millions of dollars on an ad like this.  

Do you know how many programs that help insulate children in urban areas from drugs, guns, gangs and violence could be funded for a whole year with that kind of money?  Or how many emerging programs designed to reach the 1% of "proven-risk" teenagers that research shows are responsible for 50% of crime citywide in Boston?

I just read an article in the Boston Globe yesterday about an amazing program that succeeded in employing members of a gang for eight weeks.  This summer, a program called Villages Without Walls reached a population that an unprecedented number of programs in Boston have been unable to reach. Everyday for nearly two months, young men that rarely show up for anything showed up and planned ways to solve problems in their neighborhood.  And yet despite this incredible success, the program stopped because it ran out of funding, leaving the men with nowhere to go and nothing to do.  A mere $200,000 could have easily kept this program running year-round and quite possibly turned some of the young men onto a better life.  

Instead, they no longer have a program to attend every day and I get to watch ads telling me explicitly that something exactly the same is different and implicitly that I am an idiot.