We have, in our storied history, elected Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives and moderates. We have fought, and will continue to fight, pitched battles about how best to govern this nation. But we have never, ever in our 232 year history, elected a President who so completely and openly opposed the idea of limited government, the absolute cornerstone of makes the United States of America unique and exceptional.
Read the whole thing. Then contact your local GOP to help stop this terrible thing.
I’m not actually sure that’s right. I imagine Roosevelt was worse.
I actually rather like Roosevelt because of his role in winning WWII, but I’m pretty sure he was even less in favor of limited government than Obama. The New Deal nearly took us over the bloody cliff.
This is a little like the liberals who say Bush is the worst president ever. He may be pretty bad, but there have been a lot of bad presidents.
Roosevelt saw many of his measures as temporary. If I recall, he also wanted to privatize social security at some point. But keep in mind, if Obama is anything close to Roosevelt, we’re utterly fucked. Roosevelt was a game changer. We still have not, and probably will never recover from some of the worst of the New Deal in terms of growth of the federal government. Not to mention Roosevelt was responsible for turning a recession into a decades long depression.
>But we have never, ever in our 232 year history, elected a President who so
>completely and openly opposed the idea of limited government
Wait, is he talking about McCain or Obama?
McCain is not a believer in “redistributive change”, nor does he favor a massive increase in the federal budget. McCain is not a game changer. He’s an evil we know, and can deal with.
McCain is not a believer in “redistributive changeâ€, nor does he favor a massive increase in the federal budget. McCain is not a game changer. He’s an evil we know, and can deal with.
Sebastian, I am in general agreement with your first point, with the caveat that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the 16th Amendment are plenty redistributive.
Okay, he’s not a Constitutional scholar or an economist of any stripe, let alone an Austrian economist. Despite his “Good government/Quote Constitution” line, I think he’s indifferent to the founding principles, not hostile to them (like the other guy). As my dad (RIP) used to say, “If you ain’t got a dog, you hunt with a cat.”
That said, I’m a little less sanguine about the second. His hero and role model as President is Teddy Roosevelt. If he decides something is a good idea, he’s going to do it, hang the cost or the Constitution.
No doubt Obama is objectively worse, at least for given values of worse. What worries me about McCain is you got clowns like Bill Bennett going around saying we owe McCain the Presidency for his service to the country, and I read someone else calling him “the rightful heir.”
McCain himself isn’t really a man on horseback, but there are enough fools out there trying to jack him up and stick a white horse under him to make me think that this is unlikely to end well no matter who wins.
If you are convinced it will end badly faster under Obama, well, that’s entirely possible.
III
>McCain is not a believer in “redistributive changeâ€, nor does he favor a
>massive increase in the federal budget. McCain is not a game changer. He’s an
>evil we know, and can deal with.
So buying out every mortgage in America doesn’t qualify as redistributive change or a massive increase in the federal budget?
There’s also a lot more to limited government than taxes. I guy who passes laws banning political speech he doesn’t like, trashes people who don’t work for the government because they’re not sufficiently selfish, and talks about citizens like they belong to the state and exist only to serve its goals is no fan of limited governmnet.
And again, until the Republicans wake up to that and stop using ‘limited government’ as nothing more than a gang sign, they deserve to lose.
not sufficiently selfless, even
I’m not going to claim that McCain is perfect, or even close to perfect. If you had told me a year ago I’d be helping the guy’s campaign, I’d tell you that you were crazy. The problem right now is, no one is going to win running on a limited government platform. Hell, there’s a good chance we’re going to elect a socialist to the White House. If the Republicans had stuck to their principles for the past eight years, it might be a different game, but McCain, generally, has been on the right side of fiscal issues.
I too detest his stance on campaign finance, and I take great pleasure in the fact that it’s hurt his campaign in this election — to a significant degree, in fact.
If someone wants to shoot you, that doesn’t mean the guy who just wants to hit your knees with a crowbar is now on the ‘right side of the bodily injury issues’
Yeah, except people’s political views are more complex in a binary metaphor. I’ll take McCain’s lifetime American Conservative Union’s rating of 83 over Barack Obama’s whopping 8 any day of the week. But to go back to the binary choice — if my choice is getting kneecapped or shot, I will take kneecapped. The binary metaphor does work for the election. Either McCain or Obama will be the next president, unless something very out of the ordinary happens.
My issue isn’t that you’ve decided to hold your nose and vote for McCain, it’s that you’re going around actively advocating how great getting kneecapped is and how being hit in this knees is the essence of conservativism.
I’ve had eight years of people trying to feed me chicken shit and tell me it’s chicken salad, and I’m fed up with it. The McCain campaign the last few weeks has done little but get me more and more pissed off with every ham handed atempt to tell me what a libertarian-minded guy McCain is.
I’m telling people to vote for him, not trying to tell people he’s the second coming. He’s a very flawed candidate in many ways. All I’m saying is you have two choices this election: McCain and Obama, and I think McCain is good enough that we can hold the line. You might have had eight years of people telling you that, but look where we were in 2000, and look where we are now. In 2000, you had a major candidate for office calling for licensing of gun owners, and registration of firearms. The other candidate was calling for renewing the assault weapons ban. People like me were saying then “Vote for Bush, we’ll do better under Bush!” And those people would have been right.
Would Gore have nominated Alito and Roberts to the Supreme Court? Would we have won Heller? Would Gore have signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act? Would Gore have acquiesced to Congress not sending him a renewed assault weapons ban? Would Gore have bad mouthed gun owners at every opportunity of tragedy like Bill Clinton did with every mass shooting? Would we have even been talking about carrying firearms in National Parks?
We made progress under Bush. It’s undeniable. And he was also a very flawed candidate.