Bart wrote:

What I am really surprised about is how many pussy pilots there are out there.
I mean if there's 300,000 ish AOPA members out there, then that's an important
block of votes. That's got to be one of the biggest PAC's next to AARP.
My reasoning about why our community is so tolerant of this flagrant abuse
is that we are all so used to being afraid of the FAA and what they may do
to our our pilots licenses, that we've forgotten what it REALLY means to
be a citizen of the United States.

I guess if we want to have our society digress to some lame hybrid of
a communist monarchy then we can all just do what we're doing now; nothing.

I for one am ****ed, and I don't really care who knows.

Bart,

I think the root of the problem (as far as pilots go) is this:

Taken as a whole, I think it's fair to say that the pilot demographic probably
tends to be politically pretty conservative. We tend to be mostly white, male,
upper income, with a median age 40- or 50-something. Lots of ex-military and
law-enforcement veterans. Plenty of gun owners. Rugged individualists.

Generally speaking, this is a solidly Republican demographic. I would venture to
guess that pilots probably voted overwhelmingly for this president in 2000, and
the idea of voting for another political party is anathema to most.

Yet now it seems that all of aviation, and general aviation especially, is under
attack and more restricted and more threatened than it has ever been. The
administration has given us TFRs, ADIZs, and other restrictions with no end in
sight, plus an apparent unwillingness to even respond to basic questions about
when these restrictions might ever be lifted. And an unprecedented, very clear
push to privatize ATC services.

The dilemma, of course, is that the president who is presiding over this sorry
state of affairs is a Republican.

I guess the question comes down to this: at what point do pilots say enough is
enough, even if they supported this president last time around, that they cannot
in good conscience vote again for this president, given his record on aviation
issues?

Most of the pilots I know bitch about the administration's policies and agree
that they are doing serious damage to aviation, but just can't bring themselves
to consider voting for somebody else next time around. When I remind them that
the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting a different result, they just give me a dirty look. Most of these guys
could never vote against Bush, no matter what his administration does.

I will be watching AOPA carefully when they do their candidate endorsement for
the next presidential election. Given his record, I cannot imagine them
endorsing Bush again, but I bet they would take an incredible amount of heat from
the membership if they don't.

David H
Boeing Field (BFI), Seattle, WA