The crash and political realities

The past few weeks have been consumed with life events. A friend and co-worker was involved in a head-on collision with a man who was fleeing police after a traffic violation. She was working, returning from a facility we had the previous day discussed switching with one I was to visit that same day. I had decided to let things remain in situ.

Our friend was severely injured, in ICU for 5 days and is now in a rehabilitation center where she will learn to live independently while her shattered legs heal. While her doctors say she will be able to return to her love of horses, riding and teaching others, especially children, to ride and love them too, I cannot imagine such injuries will not leave her without permanent physical and emotional scars,

The passenger in the offending driver’s car was killed in the accident; the driver was injured (and temporarily housed on the same hospital wing as our friend) and while there is no doubt as to his fault, the local media chose to focus on the deceased’s family complaints of law enforcement being to blame for the accident, their reasoning, there should have been no pursuit.

There was no mention of our friend’s injuries, no reference to her decades of work with children and therapeutic rider training. No acknowledgement of her selfless efforts to organize multiple yearly group outings for her co-workers and families to “help them see there’s life outside work.”

Ellie will be OK, it will be a long, difficult journey, but she will be OK.

In the process of the past few weeks I come to know her son, John, who has come from his New York City home to oversee her care. What a great guy and loving, caring son. Ellie, ya done good!

On the political front, I’ve been loathe to write much, while the Dems duke it out for the nomination, McCain marches on, the Republican rules of engagement preventing a reoccurrence of the Democrat brawl.

The “winner take all” rules of the Republican primaries make for a quick leap to the front for a candidate who can consistently squeak out state by state wins, that growing tally in electoral votes can mask a much closer popular vote and disparity among Republican voters.

The apparent desire to keep that disparity masked is held up by the lack of available information on popular vote tallies. A search of an hour and 30 minutes yielded no information on the Republican side.

RealClearPolitics.com does a great job of polling the polls and even has a matrix of the Democrat popular vote totals, but a click on the link where the Republican popular vote totals should be yields only delegate counts and polling results.

I suspect that were the popular vote results available they would reveal that among Republican voters, the split between McCain supporters and the other candidates supporters would be much wider than the current delegate count would indicate.

I’m not a huge McCain fan; he’s too much politician, too willing to negotiate, too willing to make deals with the “devil” to lay a strong claim to conservatism. Make no doubt, I’m a conservative first, the Republican Party just lies closer to my philosophies than the Dems.

Still, I cannot, like Ann Coulter, say I’ll vote for Hillary before McCain. If he’s the nominee, and it looks like he will be, I’ll have no choice but to hold my nose and pull the lever. Unlike Dr. Dobson who said he’ll not vote for the first time in his life, I think not voting is a vote for the Democrat nominee, I just can't do that.