The Imminent Danger of the Shrub
			By Ben King
	Opinion
	"Shrub," that's what we call good ol' Dubya back home.  And this paper is in defense of all of those Texans who didn't vote for George Bush Jr.  Let's be honest, anyone who has seen a Jeff Foxworthy special thinks that they know what Texas is like, but it's a big place.  Most of us talk funny, most of us own guns, most of us are illiterate, and most of us don't bathe except Sundays before church, but what does that have to do with anything?  That doesn't mean you can pigeon-hole the entire population of the largest state in the country (let's be honest, you don't think Alaska counts, either).
	Let's start from the beginning: the Bush family may say they're from Texas, but they spend an awful lot of time in some place called "Kenny-bunk-port" in a state that I was pretty sure contained nothing but lobsters.  Hell, that's even where he managed to pick up his DUI.  Then he got Karen Hughes to lie about it.  Interesting story about her husband: he got the Christian Coalition to buy him a seat on the Eanes School Board in Austin.
	The man that ran against G.W. in the gubernatorial election (I am perhaps one of five or six people from my state that can spell gubernatorial) was Gary Mauro, the commissioner at the General Land Office.
	Maybe not every state has a GLO, but ours does because it has a lot of land to deal with, and aside from the personal ties I have to this man, I also respect him for his sincere politics.  He had no big business support for his campaign because his job at the GLO was directed towards slowing the environmental disasters business has caused in my state.  As a result, his campaign didn't amount to a hill of beans against the industrial-strength behemoth of old and new money that swept Bush into our governor's mansion while Gary was still walking door-to-door (literally) for support.
	My favorite part of all of this, and something I never fail to mention to those who ask, is the irony of the Shrub having to live in Austin now, the one city in the whole state that didn't vote for him.  There are picketers outside his house at least once a week complaining of every injustice he has or hasn't committed, except for the death row scandals.  To be fair, though, nobody in Texas realizes that the record-breaking capital punishment streak is to be considered unjust.
	If Texans knew what was good for them they would do one thing: vote Libertarian.  The Libertarian Party is what the Republican Party is supposed to be.  Somewhere along the way the mighty elephants lost their pride, their dignity, their ideologies, and their testicles (even the women: we've all seen Kay Bailey Hutchison, *shudder*).
	In closing, I would like to offer a notion to the platform of political reform that my friend and I hammered out.  With all of the dissatisfaction with the two-party candidates of late, and the hesitation people feel towards voting for a third party, I think this is rather appropriate.  What if, instead of voting for one candidate, you could vote against another one instead?  The only issue here would be calculating negative percentages, as the majority of people would vote against one of the major candidates, hopefully putting our independent and tertiary candidates in the running.  My final suggestion, as Election Day draws frightfully near:
	Unvote Bush/Cheney!
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