Barack, the Demo-Publican President, and Welcome To Him

Well, I voted Libertarian, as always. The rest of you thought you were voting for Republicans and Democrats and, turns out, you were all voting for Politicians  - or as we Libertarians say, the Politician's Party, or the Government Party.

I knew Barack would push for things like health-care 'reform,' and the irony is, the way things have been going the past two decades, if he had been a Republican he would have passed it. Now we might get lucky and have the evil thing die unborn.

But I at least hoped we'd get some good anti-Republican things from a liberal Democrats, like a reduction in our military presence overseas and our overreaching foreign policy that just has to involve itself in absolutely every single thing in every other country (when we can't do things right in our own). But no: We're still as involved as we were under the hated Republicans. So we've been getting the worst of the Democrats and the worst of the Republicans, just as we have been for years. Lots of government programs at great cost and little benefit, and lots of foreign policy at great cost and no great benefit. 

Terrific. 

Barack needs to take a leaf from Clinton's book and try to become the best Republicans president the Democratics ever had. 

Obama's Peace Prize--What Happened to Our Peace President?

Ron Paul On Obama Winning The Nobel Peace Prize

http://bit.ly/2YcuNs

Ron makes many good points about the irony that this president, who ran against the war president, is getting in deeper despite his peace prize.

(Ron suggests that it's Obama's pledge to be internationalist rather than to make peace that won him the prize.)

Makes more interesting viewing that almost any other commentary on this event that I've read so far...

Let's Have a Little Disrespect for the Office of President!

A colleague writes, speaking of John Hodgman's gentle roast of Barack Obama at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner:

"Maybe it's just me -- but this is the President of the United States. I think he deserves a lot more respect than this comedian was giving him -- and certainly the office does."

Image via Wikipedia

I disagree. The roast wasn't actually at all disrespectful, but that's not the point, my humorless friend above notwithstanding.

IMHO, the President of the United States gets far too much respect, for a democracy with no royalty and no classes. George Washington would be embarrassed.

It is the very instinct to treat our leaders as if they were royalty -- to think that because the "office" of POTUS is so (excessively) powerful in domestic and international affairs--that somehow the holder of that office personally deserves to be treated with -- not just respect, but deference -- exactly this misguided instinct that risks turning a nice, grounded guy like Barack Obama into another George Bush II.

This country really needs a guy to walk beside the President and mutters in his ear while others sing hosannas, "Remember, Caesar, thou art human!"

The President should be addressed as Mr Obama in regular speech among his colleagues, not as Mr President; so likewise Senators, who get swelled heads from being called Mr or Madam Senator. G. Washington hated being addressed as Mr President, but settled on it rather than having to hear "Your Excellency." His distaste for titles -- and for the instinct to genuflect before power -- was well founded; too bad it has long been lost.

When a comedian can't make a disrespectful joke about those in power, power has gone too far.

[By the way, John Hodgman's Roast is hilarious, gently humorous, and reveals Hodgman, the "I am a PC" actor in the TV commercial, as a real wit. Worth viewing. Hodgson is a humor writer with a great bio on Wikipedia.]

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• John Hodgman Roasts President Barack Obama at the 2009 Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner (laughingsquid.com)

"A Conservative for Obama" editorial: Don't hate tax cuts, hate spending increases!

Someone sent me a copy of an essay published in September in the Dallas city magazine, Big D, in which the former publisher of the conservative National Review says he's going to vote for Obama because he's less likely to get us into a war than McCain, and Obama also shows glimmers of useful pragmatism.

Good essay. He's right about the Republicans not being conservatives in any helpful sense any more - or for a long time. I am not confident that the Democrats are a whit better, but still... He's not promoting the Demos, he's promoting Obama, and he makes a good case.

However, I hate the misreading of the value and meaning of tax cuts -- first, we are not in debt because of the tax cuts -- the improvement in the economy since then generated more money for the government than projections had it earning before the cuts. Second, we are in debt because we are spending even more, if that is possible, than ever before - much, much more. Much of that on the war, but equally profligate in every other area Washington touches. There is simply no amount of tax money that will pay the bill when the politicians hold the credit cards. Just try asking a politician or a tax-eating special interest how much is enough? You'll never get a useful answer--because enough is all of it. There will never be enough money to satisfy them. Every increase in revenues is overmastered by a bigger increase in spending - whether in war or peace, in crisis or in flush times.

Third, if the economy is indeed staggering at this time, the worst thing on earth is to increase taxes -- not even on those awful, awful people, the "rich." JFK made this exact same argument while President, and then signed the largest tax cut since WWII - which was followed by the boom that helped define the economics of the 60s. The right thing to do, in reality, would be to cut marginal tax rates, especially where they will boost the economy most -- on the rich, on investment, on capital gains, on corporations. Yeah, I know -- all the devils of the modern world, what could I be thinking?

And then, of course, to cut government spending, which we should be doing even if revenues are up and even if we increase taxes. But we will never, in our lifetimes, have a budget of any level of government that goes down from one year to the next. Or even stays even. The most we can hope for is that a planned 20% increase will be held to, say a 12% increase -- whereupon we'll have to endure complaints that spending has been "slashed" 8% and how we are suffering!

Marlarky, baloney, bullshit. I weary of it.

But as he says, Obama is marginally less likely to invade someone, and might actually be a Kennedy type of character who would hesitate to kick the economy in the nuts, if he's really as "pragmatic" as this guy is hoping. We can all only hope.

McCain would be better, even with his lust for invasion, if only he were a real Republican conservative, who would cut taxes, reduce government impositions, reduce spending *somewhere, anywhere*, regulate less impulsively, and argue against government intervention in every aspect of human endeavor. But of course he's not a conservative in any of these areas, he's only, like all of his kind, a lifetime member of the Republican faction of the Politicians' Party.

So is Obama, though for a shorter lifetime, and so less embedded. A tiny flicker of nonpolitician hesitation would be a welcome relief at this point. Not to mention any little hope, however faint, that we won't try to play policeman or Superman to anyone outside our borders for the next four years.

But me, I'm voting Libertarian across the board. The heck with it. Maybe we'll get lucky and Obama will get the nod instead of McCain. But either way, I'm not voting for the Politician's Party this year either. Marginal variations in levels of oppression are welcome, but not worth my vote.

mac

Election 2008: Experience versus Judgment?

The Independent Institute in Oakland, CA, has an original and interesting view of this debate!

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Both Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have been criticized for their "inexperience." In his latest op-ed, Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ivan Eland argues that experience should not be a determining factor in the selection of national political leaders. Richard Nixon and James Buchanan, for example, had lots of experience before becoming president, yet neither was a good president, according to Eland. In contrast, Chester Arthur was a good president despite having previously held only two mid-level jobs in New York and being vice president for a mere six months when the assassination of James Garfield thrust him into the Oval Office.

John McCain, although a more experienced candidate than Obama, has shown poor judgment on several matters of foreign policy, according to Eland, including calling for greater U.S. involvement in Iraq and advocating Georgia's entry into NATO--a move that could draw the United States into a military confrontation with Russia.

On the other hand, Obama, writes Eland, "was against invading Iraq from the start, has astutely championed withdrawing U.S. combat forces during what is likely to be a temporary lull in violence, and was much more measured about the conflict in Georgia, which threatened no vital U.S. strategic interests." McCain, Eland concludes, has too much experience in getting co-opted into making bad judgments from serving too long in Washington's military-industrial-congressional complex.

"A President Needs Good Judgment Rather than Experience," by Ivan Eland (9/8/08) Spanish Translation

The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed (Updated Edition), by Ivan Eland

Center on Peace & Liberty (Ivan Eland, Director)

The Three Ways to Pick a Candidate

There are three basic issues you can use to help you choose  a leader:  

1. Their ideology: What their philosophy of government is, what they  think the government's proper role is, and where they draw the line.  There can be a very significant difference here, but it's hard stuff.  Also, the two main parties in the US (and mostly elsewhere) are  primarily the Politicians' Parties whose ideology is limited mainly to  getting elected and reelected.

So if you're stuck with politicians, you can try:

2. Their character: If you can't get the other guy on their vision of  government, maybe you can get them on personality? Whether they are  stiff (Nixon) or at ease (Obama), whether they fool around, whether they are corrupt, -- and  best of all -- whether they are hypocrites, the number-one favorite of  all political campaigns and of the press: Palin doesn't believe in sex  education in school and look - her kid gets pregnant, which shows she  can't control her kids (who can?) and that her ideas don't work in the  real world. That's why the Demos are jumping on this -- not because  they would do any better, or because they really think sex education and condoms in  schools would make a terrific dent in the teen pregnancy rate (studies are mixed), but because it makes Palin look  foolish. Zing!  

3. Their competence: Would they once in office be able to actually run  things and get people to do what they want? This is a combination of basic competence (ability to get things done at all), plus their influence over the political process in Washington. For an example of the latter, Obama amuses us with promises to "go over the  budget line by line" and eliminate waste and unworkable programs; in reality, as being  a Senator he knows full well, he'd  run into the Congressional buzzsaw protecting special interests. (Unless of course the entire  Congress is Democratic, and then you can eliminate "waste" easiliy since that, as all know, is championed  only by Republicans!). 

Hillary ran into this early with  questions by ultraconservatives about whether, as a woman mind you,  she'd be competent to run the government and put her finger on the big  red button. Well, they don't wonder about that any more, but instead are  scared of her. (Belatedly, after she lost the nomination, there were  articles about how poorly she ran her campaign compared to Obama, whose  campaign machine ran like -- well, like a machine. I found that a far more interesting comparison.)  

The variant on this is the Experience quibble, which gets very muddy  indeed. Obama doesn't have much "experience" and neither does Palin --  presumably, the only person with experience for this job is a past  President, wouldn't you think? 

Then you get into the question of *what  kind* of experience -- legislative, or executive? Is a Senator or a  Governor better suited, experience-wise? Of course, when neither has been  in higher office more than 4 years, nobody can claim they have  experience enough with a straight face -- can they?  So as a campaign, you zig and zag among these three methods of deciding  on a candidate, pickiug your strength and their weakness, and forgiving  your guy/gal for their weakness but being very unforgiving of the other  gal/guy's weakness.  Which wouldn't be so bad if the voters, who know better, used any kind  of sophistication in making their decisions.  

The great thing about being a Libertarian is that the second and third  issues don't mean bupkus to us. We're voting for our candidate's  ideology -- his vision of how the country *ought* to be run. We don't  care if he's *actually* competent to be President -- he never will be!  He hasn't got a prayer, so who cares? What an enormous relief!

Nor do we care about his morals or  hypocrisy or character -- like I say, he's never going to win an  election, so we vote for him strictly as a powerful symbol of our  ideological beliefs about right government. It's quite relaxing not to  have to worry about any of this, or pay much attention to the noise at  the major-party level.  

And it's quite depressing to know full well that no matter which pair of  major-party candidates gets elected, we're just as screwed -- the  details may vary slightly, but the trendlines are just bad, bad, bad, because their ideologies mean they will choose bad options, push for solutions that don't solve anythng, and never, never learn from their mistakes.

But then, we voters don't either, so why should they?

 mac 

Obama's pick of Biden as VP... Tough tradeoffs for Obama!

On this stuff--the controversy over whether Barack Obama should have picked an old politico like Joe Biden as his VP partner--I am lucky I can watch from the
sidelines since I vote Libertarian, which saves me a lot of grief,
especially of the "least bad choice" variety (or as one wit put it, "the
evil of two lessers").

But from the sidelines, Obama had a balancing act here: Another Change
person like himself would be young and not fully tainted and thus
vulnerable to McCain attacks on lack fo experience that have proven (to
my actual surprise) effective recently. Biden takes that club away from
McCain. McCain can call Obama a hypocrite for choosing an old warhorse
(like McCain) but the foreign-affairs club and the inexperience club are
both out of reach now.

Since Biden is practically McCain's twin on everythign that McCain has
been pushing, he does a good job of neutralizing McCain's most powerful
messages. Biden's wild-card big mouth will be a ticking bomb for months,
but on the other hand his wit and tendency to say naughty things might
give him something of a 'by' among voters who hate politicians and
politics. It will annoy those who wanted a clean break from politics as
usual (boy, will it!) but the Obama supporters can always argue that
Biden is a savvy political-campaign chess move that puts the "old-boy
network" guy in the secondary, VP position, whereas on the Republican
side the Old Boy guy is the top dog. If you want any hope of change,
there is only one choice.

Other than becoming discouraged and staying home, of course. Which is
always the ongoing danger when your campaign relies heavily on arousing
the youth vote or the disaffected vote--they become discouraged easily
and give up. Obama's gift of oratory will have to do a lot of heavy
lifting for the next couple of months....

Hillary's Handlers Make a Good Case for Her Continued Fight--Believe It Or Not!

I heard one of Hillary's spin docs on a political show yesterday explaining why Hillary thinks she should keep running and deserves to have the superdelegates throw the nomination to her despite Obama's growing strength.

At first it was just ridiculous listening to him talking about changing the rules on Michigan (yes?) and Florida, and even talking about Puerto Rico's vote (they can't vote for president but can vote for the nominees, oddly enough). And he repeatedly ducked explaining Hillary's racist-sounding "candidate of the working white man" quote that is the current controversy. But as he talked, he started sounding entirely reasonable after all:

• The total popular vote so far is 16.5 million for Hillary and 16.7 million for Obama. In an election he would win; but this is a nomination, not an election, and in some sense this is not far from a tie.

• The job of the superdelegates isn't just to echo the popular vote. If it were, there'd be no point in having superdelegates (except as flattery, which it also is). The superdels, like all delegates if the convention were for example to be unable to come to a decision in the first vote, have as their first obligation to decide who the best candidate is for the Democratic Party--'best' in this case meaning only, and entirely, "the one most likely to get elected." In this near-tie vote situation leading up to the convention, there is nothing wrong with or even strange in suggesting they vote for Hillary if they decided she would be more likely to win the election. It wouldn't be a betrayal of party principle, or the voters; it would be what it is: Politics.

• And, finally, another commentator said Hillary is Hanging On mostly because, though she seems like a long shot now in mid-May 2008, "anything can happen," including a major screwup by Obama, a remark or act or bit of past history of Barack's that can be *twisted* into seeming like a major screwup, some world event that changes perceptions of the candidates (e.g. her stupid and scary Bomb Iran remark last month would make her sound Presidential if, say, Iran threw a nuclear missile at Isreal before the convention), or, also God forbid, some fatal or crippling accident to one of the candidates. All these are unlikely, but the one certainty about electoral politics is that nothing is certain. And, in light of the above, what happens doesn't even have to actually cripple Barack in the election--it just has to convince a few superdelegates that Obama has been seriously compromised, and -- Bam! -- the nomination goes to Clinton.

Personally, I am not thrilled at the idea of having Hillary as president; her lack of respect for liberty and the citizenry, and her arrogance in the use of power, are things to dread. Of course, Obama is no libertarian; he's as much a leftist Democrat as she is, he just doesn't have much baggage yet. And McCain, of course, has zero interest in the liberties of the people -- or in the Constitution, as he has proven repeatedly.

It will be a weird few months. I have to say, it is at times like this that I am glad I am a libertarian, and all this hubbub in both mainstream parties is just so much political eye candy for me - it's like watching a football game in which I have no team playing.

I just thank goodness there *is* a Libertarian Party on which I can waste my vote. It beats having to choose between (to exaggerate enormously) Stalin and Mao....