Read this before you vote.
moultano
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
in Off-Topic
<div class="IPBDescription">This is the most lucid endorsement of Obama that I've read.</div><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/10/13/081013taco_talk_editors" target="_blank">http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008...co_talk_editors</a>
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.
At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.
The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.â€
The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,†with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,†governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick†willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.
Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation†that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.
On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,†but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.
In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.
By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.†Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.
On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.†Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!â€
The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me anyâ€; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.
But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.
In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.
President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victoryâ€â€”a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.
Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,†McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.†A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.
Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.
The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.
What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.†The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.
Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change†one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.
Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,†but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick†senator. But in a President they would be a menace.
By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.
Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope†(2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance†(1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.
A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father†is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.
It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.
The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere†words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere†speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.
At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.
The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.â€
The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,†with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,†governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick†willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.
Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation†that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.
On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,†but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.
In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.
By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.†Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.
On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.†Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!â€
The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me anyâ€; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.
But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.
In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.
President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victoryâ€â€”a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.
Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,†McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.†A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.
Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.
The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.
What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.†The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.
Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change†one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.
Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,†but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick†senator. But in a President they would be a menace.
By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.
Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope†(2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance†(1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.
A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father†is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.
It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.
The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere†words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere†speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Comments
Partially because he knows what he's doing and also because he appeared on the Daily Show twice so far. I know he must've at some point, but I've never seen McCain sit down with Jon Stewart.
As for me, I already voted. And I live in a blue state so my vote doesn't matter. And that's too long to read for something about politics.
edit: the URL looks like it's from The New Yorker so I went ahead and read it.
I'm sure an equally as troubling piece could be written for Obama. People have formed their opinions and people are going to vote for who they want. A long winded jab at McCain from the New Yorker (for <i>gods</i> sake) isn't going to change a thing.
I'm sure an equally as troubling piece could be written for Obama. People have formed their opinions and people are going to vote for who they want. A long winded jab at McCain from the New Yorker (for <i>gods</i> sake) isn't going to change a thing.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Unless someone is undecided.
For example, take the section on the supreme court: There are four conservative justices, the article reminds us, along with four liberal justices and a moderate swing vote. The next President is expected to have up to three appointments to make. If the President replaces a liberal vote with a conservative vote, why good heavens the course of this nation might swing towards the conservative side and the Supreme court wouldn't stop it! By contrast, if the President replaces a conservative vote with a liberal vote, why good heavens the course of the nation might swing in the OTHER direction, and the Supreme court wouldn't stop THAT either!
The only difference is which one you view as "bad". And quite frankly, if you've already decided which one is "bad", then you probably aren't an undecided voter anyway.
Regardless of the show itself, this is why I like Stewart and pretty much do research of issues he brings up for comedic sattire.
I just have repspect for Jon Stewart is all.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE</a>
I was unaware that torture was a standard conservative policy. Nice to know.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You shouldn't.
He castrates news anchors for not asking tough/true/real questions. However, he has a clearly open bias and rarely asks those 'tough' questions himself. Then, when questioned, he hides behind the fact that his show is a "comedy" show without taking any responsibility.
He's funny (I watch him and Colbert every night), and I'm sure he's a great person, but to link that video and say that's why you respect him doesn't make sense. If his beliefs were that strong he would use his interview time slots to ask the questions he feels are 'tough' and 'honest.' Just because your show is supposed to make people laugh doesn't give you the right to be blatant hypocrite. The fact that he routinely hides behind his show makes him nothing short of a coward.
<a href="http://boortz.com/nuze/undecided.html" target="_blank">http://boortz.com/nuze/undecided.html</a>
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><u><b>TO THE UNDECIDED VOTER</b></u>
By Neal Boortz
© 2008 Neal Boortz
This is long; very long. Hey, I'm a pretty entertaining writer ... so give it a go. If you're an undecided voter in this presidential election the least you owe your country is to try to base your final choice on some substantive facts. No, I don't have all the facts here ... but I have enough of them to perhaps convince you that voting one particular way on November 4th might not be the most brilliant move you've ever made.
This election is my 10th. My 10th presidential election since I became a radio talk show host. My 10th election since I began spending more time than the average American thinking about, researching, reading about and talking about the choices voters face. Look; I mean no arrogance here. It's just that the average American doesn't spend from 15 (then) to 22.5 (now) hours a week over the period of a presidential race talking about the candidates, the issues, the non-issues and the consequences of voter choice.
Never in those ten elections can I remember choices so stark and possible outcomes so perilous. For the record, over those 10 elections I voted for the Republican candidate six times and the Libertarian four. Never have I voted for a Democrat for president. I see no need to vote for a Democrat since I have no plans or desires to become a ward of the government. Somehow I don't think 2008 is going to be the first time.
I've noted that some other "pundits" out there are starting to post, in columns and in their blogs, the reasons they are going to vote the way they are going to vote. I'll make no attempt to refute their (oh-so refutable) arguments here. Instead, I'm just going to put my thoughts and reasoning in writing just to cleanse my mind. If you can make some use of them; whether it is for laughter, talking points or intellectual consideration, have at it. Me? I'm just pulling the handle.
<u><b>The Race Factor</b></u>
Are many black voters going to vote for Barack Obama primarily because of race? Of course, many will. Surveys and polling have shown that the figure may reach 20%. I think it's well more than that. Is race a sound reason to cast a vote? Probably not. Is it understandable? Absolutely. I cannot fault a black American for voting for Obama. It may turn out to be a negative vote insofar as their dreams and goals are concerned. It may not work out all that well for their children, especially if they're ambitions and talented. But I don't think many of us can absolutely say that we wouldn't be casting the same vote were we in their shoes.
If you are a white American there is no way in the world you can look at this election through the same eyes as a third or fourth generation black American citizen. Several months ago a caller to my show suggested that Barack Obama's ascendency in the presidential sweepstakes was Black America's biggest accomplishment. I disagreed. Though I can't remember the exact words, I said that, in a general sense, the shining moment for Black America may have been the show of patience and restraint shown by black men when they returned from putting their lives on the line in World War II and in Korea to a country with segregated schools, colored waiting rooms, whites only water fountains, beatings, lynchings, water hoses, police dogs and systematic discrimination pretty much every where they looked. The restraint showed by black Americans during the civil rights struggles of the 50's and 60's, though not universal, was something to behold.
Now .. try, though you won't succeed, to put yourself into the mind of a black American. How can you experience or understand the legacy of segregation, violence and second-class citizenry your ancestors went through and not take pride in a black American on the verge of winning the presidency? How many black American voters do you think are uttering to themselves: "If my grandfather had only lived to see this." It takes a great deal of maturity and a clear understanding of the possible future consequences for someone to put their racial pride aside and swim against the tide on this one. So, there will be no name-calling, at least not here, for people who cast their vote on the basis of race in this election. As I said, It's understandable.
<u><b>And Then There's the Race Card</b></u>
This really isn't really a reason to vote for or against Barack Obama, but you do need to know what the next four years are going to be like with an Obama presidency.
During the campaign there have been some rather amazing charges of racism. Let's see if we can remember a few:
* Using the word "skinny" to refer to Obama is racist.
* "Community organizer" is a racist term.
* Any reference to a connection between Obama and Franklin Raines, the former head of Fannie Mae is racist ... that would be because Raines is black.
* All references to Jeremiah Wright are racist; that being due to Wright being black.
* Referring to Obama as "eloquent" is racist because it infers that other blacks are not eloquent.
* For goodness' sake, don't say that Obama is "clean."
* This just in from The Kansas City Star: Calling Obama a "socialist" is also racist because "socialist" is just another code word for black.
And so it goes. We've also had several pundits, columnists and opinion-makers flat-out state that if you are white and you don't vote for Barack Obama it can only be because he's black. There is simply no other legitimate reason to deny this wonderful man your vote. Vote for McCain, you're a racist. Simple as that.
Now let's consider the next four years under President Obama. He is certainly going to introduce ideas and pursue policies that are pure poison to many Americans; especially achievement-oriented self-sufficient citizens. Whenever anyone dares to utter a word in opposition to any Obama position or initiative you can be sure that there is going to be someone waiting close by to start screaming "racist!" By the end of Obama's first year in the White House virtually every white American will have been called a racist for one reason or another. So, what else is new?
<u><b>The Republicans</b></u>
One thing for sure ... the Republicans deserve exactly what is happening to them in this election. It's just too bad the rest of the country has to suffer the lion's share of the punishment the Republicans so richly deserve. In 1994 the voters were fed up with Clinton and the Republicans swept to control of both houses of congress, largely on the strength of Newt's Contract with America. Do you remember some of the promises? One that sticks in my mind is their promise to dismantle the Department of Education. Republicans – in 1994 – recognized that the quality of American education had been going steadily downhill since this government behemoth was formed. Well, that was then ... this is now. The size of the Education Department, as well as the cost, has doubled. Republicans did this, not Democrats.
As a matter of fact, it's not just the Department of Education; it's our entire federal government. Spending has doubled. Size has doubled. All under the Republican watch inside the beltway. Pork barrel spending is completely out of control, and Republicans are behind the wheel. Education and pork spending aside, we have the Medicare prescription benefit, McCain-Feingold, Sarbanes-Oxley, a tepid response to Kelo vs. New London ... all elements of a well-deserved Republican drubbing. The problem here is that the cure, that being Barack Obama, might well be much worse of than the disease.
The Republicans don't deserve power in Washington just as you don't deserve a boil in the center of your forehead. There are worse things, however. Complete Democrat control or, in the case of your forehead, a nice big melanoma. Pretty much the same things, actually.
It's not that the Republicans did everything wrong. They got the tax cut thing right, and they responded correctly, for the most part, to the radical Islamic attack on our country. They just did so much wrong at the same time. They got drunk with power, and the hangover affects all of us.
<u><b>Obama's Friends</b></u>
By "Obama's Friends" we mean the likes of Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko and other assorted miscreants. I could spend a lot of time here detailing the crimes of Obama's friends --- and make no mistake, they were his friends. At this point I don't think that any votes are going to be changed one way or another by detailing the corruption of Rezko, the America-hating of Wright or the unrepentant terrorism of Ayers. Suffice it to say that Obama was close to all of these people ... and these were associations born of mutual interests and philosophies. If you think that it is fair to judge the character of a person by observing the people they surround themselves with, then the judgment of Barack Obama would be a harsh one.
Obama's varied storylines regarding his relationship with Ayers have, to say the least, been interesting. The list is incomplete, but thus far we have:
* He was just a guy who lived in my neighborhood.
* I was only eight years old when he was throwing bombs.
* I didn't know about his history when we started working together
* I thought he had been rehabilitated.
Yeah ... I guess it's OK if you form a close relationship with a bomb-throwing terrorist, as long as he threw the bombs when you were a kid. Works for me. Work for you? In a similar vein, It must be OK if your pastor rails against America, as long as you aren't in church on those particular days. Or maybe we should say as long as nobody remembers actually seeing you in church on those days.
One interesting point: If Barack Obama was applying for a security clearance as a government employee, these associations would disqualify him. We are, my friends, about to have a president who doesn't qualify for a security clearance. Pretty pathetic. If Barack Obama becomes president, he would not even qualify to be his own bodyguard.
<u><b>Obama's Tax Policies</b></u>
You may consider this to be horribly old fashioned, but I operate on the principle that governments have the power to tax so that governments can collect the money needed to pursue and pay for the legitimate functions of that government. By "legitimate functions" I'm referring to law enforcement, national defense, a system of courts to adjudicate interstate disputes, national infrastructure and the costs associated with running the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government.
Now we can get into quite an argument over what constitutes a "legitimate" function of government, but let's save it for later. Suffice it to say that Barack Obama has a much different picture of our government's taxing authority than many of us do.
Before we go on, let me remind you of a point that I first heard made by former Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne. Government has one unique power that you don't have, and neither do I. This is a power that is denied all private businesses and individuals in this country. That power .. the power unique to government .. is the power to use deadly force to accomplish its goals. If you have a business; a restaurant, for instance; you have to convince people to come to your establishment for a meal. You can advertise for customers, but they make the decision whether or not to give your restaurant a try. When the customers do come in it is up to you to deliver to them a superior product with exemplary service. This is how you get them to come back. Not through force, but through value and service.
Not so the government. You have no choice as to whether or not you are going to be a customer of government. Your patronage is compelled and your payments are extracted at the point of a gun. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall said that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." The power to tax in the wrong hands can certainly bring destruction to our economy and even to our country. I submit to you that the power to tax in the hands of Barack Obama is dangerous: Dangerous to you personally, and dangerous to the very fabric of our Republic.
Just take a look at some of the rhetoric Barack Obama uses when he talks of his plans to increase taxes on the evil, hated rich. In a television interview with (I think) Charles Gibson, Obama was asked if he understood that tax increases have often resulted in decreases in government revenue. Obama responded that he was aware of this fact. He was then asked why, then, would he be so eager to raise taxes? Obama responded that, to him, tax increases were simply a matter of "fairness." In other words, Obama didn't wish to use the police power of the state to collect taxes necessary for the legitimate functions of government; he wanted to use his taxing power to promote some vaporous "fairness" in our economy. After all, as Obama put it, the people he wants to tax have more money than they actually need and he wants to give that money to people who really do need it.
Now I ask you, does any of that sound vaguely familiar? Hmmmmm, let's see. I know I've heard something like that somewhere before. Wait! I think I have it. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Some character named Marx made slogan quite popular around 1875 in a writing called "Critique of the Gotha Program." This phrase is one of the most well-known principals of communism. You can yell, scream, spin around on your eyebrows and spit wooden nickels all you want, but what Barack Obama is pushing here, at least insofar as his tax policies are concerned, is communism. This shouldn't come as a surprise considering Obama's self-professed affinity for communist student groups and communist professors during his undergraduate years. Oh, you didn't read that? Maybe that's because you read his second book, not the first one. But what the heck. He's eloquent, isn't he? And he has a good narrative.
As I've indicated, I've been doing talk radio for 39 years now. I was on the air when we were fighting communism in Southeast Asia. I was flapping my jaws when Soviet leaders seriously entertained dreams of world communism. Throughout all of those years I was never one to scream "communism" every time someone came up with an oddball idea on governance, and I never once found a communist under my bed. But now, at least when you consider tax policy, we have a candidate for president who seems very comfortable with some basic communist principals. Too comfortable. But none of this should really bother you ... right? A little communism or socialism never really hurt anyone that you can remember. Besides, Europe is telling us that they'll like us again if we vote for Obama. That pretty much overrules everything, doesn't it?
<u><b>Does this reflect your philosophy?</b></u>
Come on! Put the celebrity worship aside for a moment. Put skin color aside. Just think about Obama and his "spread the wealth around" tax policy.
Let's talk heartbeats. Sounds weird, but I'm going somewhere here. A bit of Internet research led me to the fact that the average number of heartbeats in a life time for a human being is about one billion. To make this more understandable, the average human heart beats around 70 times a minute. In one eight-hour work day your heart beats around 33,600 times. This is your heart beating .. every beat subtracted from the one billion .. every beat a part of your life gone, never to be recovered. If you are a moderately successful human being Barack Obama is going to take about 13,000 (39%) of those heartbeats away from you every working day. Put your finger on your wrist and feel your pulse. Feel every heartbeat. Just count up to 100. How much of your life went by as you counted? You can't get those beats back. They're gone, for good. Remember, you only have a finite number of those beats of your heart left ... and Obama wants 13,000 of them every working day of your life. Those heartbeats – your life – being expended creating wealth. Your heartbeats, your wealth. Obama wants them. You don't need them. Someone else does. The police power of the state.
Taxes are a nasty little reality of life. Nobody wants anarchy. Government is a necessity. Government, though, is not supposed to create winners and losers. Government is not, as Obama intends, to be used as an instrument of plunder. Almost all Americans are perfectly willing to surrender an appropriate percentage of their earned wealth to fund the legitimate functions of government. I, for one, don't want to see my wealth confiscated because some bureaucrat has determined I don't "need" it, and then have to watch as that wealth is used to buy votes from someone who is simply too lazy to generate the income they need by themselves ... or, as Obama puts it, "spread around."
What is Obama going to do? How does he determine "need?" What data does he use to determine "fairness?" Maybe he'll set up some bureaucracy staffed with like-minded leftists who will use data collected in the last census and from those pesky American Community Surveys to establish a basic "need" level for people living in different areas. Once it is determined how much of a person's wealth they really don't "need," it will be a simple matter of confiscation and redistribution to those who do need it. After all, that would be "fair," wouldn't it? Come on, it's not exactly like you worked for that money.
Listen to the rhetoric of the left. Those who are in need are called "the less fortunate." This means that their status as needy was due to nothing but bad luck. It stands to reason, then, that those with more than they need were just lucky. The fortunate and the less fortunate. The lucky and the not so lucky. And here comes Barack Obama riding over the rainbow on his Unicorn to set everything right and make it all fair. Isn't that the world you want to live in?
There's a quote that's been floating around since I began my talk radio career. This quote is most often attributed to someone named Alexander Tyler writing in 1787 about the fall of the Athenian Republic. Others have said the guy's name was Tytler. Let's not argue spelling right now ... let's just get to the quote, because the quote goes to the heart of this presidential election:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
Think about this, my friends. Isn't this exactly what we're seeing right now? In fact, hasn't this pretty much been the theme of Democrat Party election politics for nearly as long as you can remember? Here we have Barack Obama promising that he's only going to raise taxes on the evil rich who make over $250,000 a year while 95% of Americans will get tax cuts. Think of this in terms of votes; higher taxes for 5% of the voters, lower taxes for the other 95%. It really doesn't take all that much brainpower to figure out how this is going to work at in an election does it? You take money away from the people whose votes you don't need, and give it to the people whose votes you do need. So very simple. The result is that people have, in fact, discovered that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. Who is promising those wonderful goodies? That would be Barack Obama. Just what percentage of voters out there do you think are going to vote for Obama simply because he is promising them someone else's money? My guess is that the number would be high enough to constitute the margin of victory for The Great Redistributionist.
Somehow I had this idea when I was growing up that if you wanted something bad enough, you would work hard until you got it. That was then. This is now. Now you vote for it. That's change you can believe in.
<u><b>Those Amazing Vanishing Jobs</b></u>
Barack Obama repeatedly tells the American people that he is going to cut taxes for 95% of them. Now that's a pretty nifty trick when more than 40% of Americans don't pay income taxes in the first place. Tell me please ... just how do you cut taxes for someone who doesn't pay taxes?
Here's the fancy narrative (Obama supporters just love that word) that the Obama campaign has come up with. Even if you don't pay income taxes, you still pay payroll taxes. So Obama is going to give these people who only pay Social Security and Medicare taxes an offsetting tax credit. At this point Obama's plan becomes almost impossible to explain. It's convoluted, to say the least, but that's out of necessity. When people started reminding him that about one-half of the people he's going to cut taxes for don't pay taxes he had to come up with something. The bottom line is this. Obama says that he is not going to take the cost of his tax credits from the Social Security Trust Fund. That's nice, considering the fact that this so-called Trust Fund exists only on paper anyway. But if that money isn't subtracted from the Trust Fund ... where does it come from? Obama's people explain that at first the deficit will just have to increase while these checks are written. Later they'll just go out there and get the money from those "rich people."
OK ... so there we are. It's tax the rancid rich time so that money can be transferred to the poor. But just who are these evil rich people destined to be beaten down by Obama's taxes? At first Barack Obama defined them as "people making over $250,000 a year." That definition had to change when it became known that the $250,000 a year figure was only for a married couple filing a joint tax return. In a heartbeat Obama changed his rhetoric to note that the tax increase would nail "families," not "people" earning over 250 grand. If you're single, the figure will be somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000, depending on who you're talking to. We'll try to let you know when Obama settles on a hard figure.
There's your first lie.
So, what does all of this have to do with jobs? Well the very people that Barack Obama wants to nail with these tax increases are the people who create most of the jobs in our economy; America's small business owners.
The Democrats spend no small amount of time excoriating corporations. To listen to a Democrat candidate corporations and lobbyists are the sole sources of evil in our society. Oh ... and right wing talk show hosts. Well, you can forget these evil, nasty corporations for now. Fact is 70% of all jobs in our economy come from America's small business owners. The Small Business Administration recently reported that 80% of all new jobs are being created by these small business owners. These are people who report all of their business income on their personal income tax returns. As such, they are squarely in the crosshairs for The Chosen One's tax increases.
If you are an American concerned about your job with a small business ... and if you vote for Obama ... then you very well could be cutting your own economic throat. Think about it. If the small business owner(s) who employs you has his taxes increased by Barack Obama he is going to look for a way to replace that money. So where does he go to replace his income lost to Barack's tax increases? The best way would be to cut expenses. Well guess what? You're an expense! Will it be your job that is cut to compensate for the increased taxes? Maybe you'll be lucky and just have to forego your next raise. Maybe there would just be a cut in your pay or a reduction in benefits. Cast your vote and take your chances!
In recent days the McCain campaign has finally started to warn people about the possible consequences of Obama's tax increases on America's small businesses. This has forced the Obama campaign to come up with a response. Initially Barack Obama started saying that he was going to give a break on capital gains taxes to small businesses. This worked for a while until people started figuring out that small businesses don't pay capital gains taxes. Back to the drawing board, and this time they came up with a beauty. It's a con, but it works. Barack Obama is now telling the media and anyone else who will listen that 95% of America's small businesses don't make $250,000 a year, and thus won't be affected by Obama's tax increases.
That's the second lie. A lie of omission.
Obama's statistics may be accurate .. or nearly so. But the statement leaves one very important statistic out. Initially when you hear that "95% of all small businesses" line you probably think that this 95% employ about 95% of all of the people working for small businesses. You could think that, but you would be wrong.
The trick here is that the vast majority of America's small businesses are just that ... small. I owned a title abstract business in the 80's that had one employee. My wife owned a travel agency that had two employees. Neither of these small businesses came anywhere near the $250,000 line.
When you think about it you will understand that the important statistic here is the percentage of small business employees who will be affected, not the percentage of small businesses.
The October 21st edition of The Wall Street Journal addressed this issue in an article entitled "Socking It to Small Businesses." The WSJ reports that Obama is right "that most of the 35 million small businesses in America have a net income of less than $250,000, hire only a few workers, and stay in business for less than four years." There's more to the story though: ".. the point is that it is the most successful small and medium-sized businesses that create most of the new jobs.. And they are precisely the businesses that will be slammed by Mr. Obama's tax increase." The Senate Finance Committee reports that of those who file income taxes in the highest two tax brackets; three out of four are the small business owners Obama wants to tax.
The WSJ reports that the National Federation of Independent Business says that only 10% of small businesses with one to nine employees will be hit by Obama's tax increase. However, almost 20% of the small businesses that employ from 10 to 19 people will get nailed, and 50% of small businesses with over 20 employees get punished.
Again ... it is not the percentage of businesses that will have to pay the increased taxes; it's the percentage of the total of small business employees who work for those businesses. The Obama campaign is counting on you not making that distinction; and they know the media won't make it for you; so Obama's "95% of all small businesses don't make $250,000" line will probably rule the day.
Come on folks. These are your jobs we're talking about here. It's time to take your blinders off and see through some of this Obama rhetoric. The Obama campaign has some wonderful people working for them to tell them just how to parse words to hide intent and meaning. Just because they're trying to fool you doesn't mean that you have to be so easily suckered. When Obama talks about change .. he may well mean that you are going to have to change jobs. Now that's change you can believe in, right?
<u><b>Pandering to the Unions .. at Your Expense.</b></u>
Now since we're talking about jobs here, you need to be up to speed on The Messiah's "Employee Free Choice Act." Let me step out on a limb here and say that applying the words "free choice" to Obama's plan to eliminate secret ballots in union elections is like applying the words "fun sex" to an act of rape. Freedom has nothing to do with Obama's plan, and fun has nothing to do with rape.
Going in you need to recognize that union membership has been falling for decades. You only see growth in union membership in government employee unions. This, of course, is troubling to union leaders. It is also troubling to Democrats. Unions, you see, almost exclusively support Democrat candidates, both with money and time. Big money and lots of time ... and it's all behind Obama's candidacy.
To know what Obama is up to here, you need to know how union organizing works under the current law. Union organizers circulate a petition among employees. Employees are asked to sign a card saying that they would like to be represented by a union in their workplace. If a majority of the workers sign the cards the employer has the option of immediately recognizing the union and allowing them to organize the workplace. More often the employer will call for an election – an election using secret ballots. Every employee will be given the opportunity to express their desire to join or not to join a union in secret. Their co-workers will not know how they voted. They can prance around the workplace touting their support of unionization all they want in order to impress or appease their fellow workers, especially those who are trying to organize the union, but then vote "no" on the secret ballot if that's how they truly feel.
How, you might ask, do Democrats feel about the secret ballot in union elections? For a clue let's go to a letter from 16 House Democrats dated August 29, 2001. The letter was written on the letterhead of California Congressman George Miller, a Democrat representing the 7th District of California. That letter reads:
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->[Letterhead of George Miller, Congress of the United States]
Junta Local de Conciliacion y Arbitraje del Estado de Puebla
Lic. Armando Poxqui Quintero
7 Norte Numero 1006 Altos
Colonia Centro
Puebla, Mexico C.P. 7200
Dear members of the Junta Local de Conciliacion y Arbitraje of the state of Puebla.
As members of Congress of the United States who are deeply concerned with international labor standards and the role of labor rights in international trade agreements, we are writing to encourage you to use the secret ballot in all union recognition elections.
We understand that the secret ballot is allowed for, but not required, by Mexican labor law. However, we feel that the secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise chose.
We respect Mexico as an important neighbor and trading partner, and we feel that the increased use of the secret ballow in union recognition elections will help bring real democracy to the Mexican workplace.
Signed:
George Miller
Bernard Sanders
Lane Evans
Marcy Kaptur
William J. Coyne
Bob Filner
Martin Olav Sabo
Joe Baca
Dennis J. Kucinich
Fortney Pete Stark
James P. McGovern
Barney Frank
Zoe Lofgren
Calvin M. Dooley
Barbara Lee
Lloyd Doggett<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
So there you go. These 16 Democrats are on the record as being solidly in favor of using secret ballots in union recognition elections. So far, so good ... because that, as they point out in their letter, is clearly the right stance.
That brings us to piece of legislation – a piece of Obama sponsored legislation --designated as H.R. 800, the Employee Free Choice Act. Would you care to guess just what H.R. 800 does? Well, that's simple. It will eliminate the secret ballot in union recognition elections. You got it! Obama has decided to really do something nice for the union bosses that are supporting him in this election, and he is determined to do away with secret ballots in union elections. When H.R. 800 gets passed ... and trust me, with Barack Obama in the White House, this thing will become law ... the union organizers will visit all of the workers, perhaps even visiting some of them in their homes, and "urge" them to sign the card calling for a union. I can hear it now: "Mrs. Johnson, wouldn't you and your children want your husband to be represented by our union at his job?" Now put yourself in the worker's place! Are you going to say no? This organizer is sitting in your living room looking at you and your wife and saying "You do want to be represented by our union in your workplace, don't you?" And you're going to tell him no?
Are you getting the big picture here? This is nothing less than Barack Obama and his Democrat pals legitimizing union intimidation in the workplace. If you don't see that, then there is virtually no hope for you when it comes to understanding basic politics. It's payback the unions time .. pay them back for all of that financial support and all of those volunteer hours. Besides ... the more union members there are the more union dues the union bosses have to spread to Democrats as campaign contributions.
But – we're saved, right? After all, we have those 16 Democrats who signed that letter to Mexico. What was it they said? Oh yeah: " ... we feel that the secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise chose." So these 16 Democrats will certainly put up a spirited defense of secret ballots in union organizing elections, right?
Well ... um ... maybe not. You see, four of these congressmen (Dooley, Sabo, Evans and Coyne) are no longer in the Congress. One of the signers, Bernie Sanders, is now a Senator. That leaves 11 of the 16 signees still in the house to defend the principal of the secret ballot.
I'm afraid we have a small problem though. It seems that every one of the 11 remaining signees is now a sponsor of H.R. 800. In fact, the so-called Employee Free Choice Act was actually introduced by none other than George Miller – the very California Democrat on whose letterhead that letter to Mexico was written. Bernie Sanders is a sponsor of the same legislation in the Senate along with Barack Obama. No surprise .
On the one hand we have these Democrats writing a letter extolling the virtues of a secret ballot in union organizing elections, and then they sponsor a bill eliminating those very secret ballots! And here's Barack Obama pledging to sign the bill as soon as it comes to his desk! So what changed between 2001 and 2007? What happened that made these 12 Democrats go from believing that a secret ballot in a union election was "absolutely necessary," to introducing a bill eliminating those "absolutely necessary" secret ballots? Control of congress; that's what changed. In 2001 the Republicans ran the show. In 2007 it was the Democrats ... and it was time to return some favors to union bosses. Do you know what you're seeing here? You're seeing just how much power unions have over Barack Obama and the Democrat party. It doesn't matter what kind of letter you wrote, or what stance you took in the past --- when we say "frog" you had better jump.
Let me tell you what is going to happen as soon as Barack Obama is elected. Employers are going to look at the so-called Employee Free Choice Act and they're going to be very afraid. They know what a union can do to their business and their profitability. Just look at our auto industry. So employers are going to immediately start working to minimize the damage. How do you do that? Well, automation is one way. Go ahead and buy that machinery you need to automate much of your workplace. That will allow you to get rid of these employees before they can unionize. You might also want to consider the possibility of moving some of those jobs overseas where union intimidation might not be such a negative factor in your business operations.
When Obama gets his unionization by intimidation thing in place – and he most certainly will – jobs are going to be lost and businesses will fail. This is the price Obama is willing to pay to pay back the unions who have supported him.
Just another reason to vote for The Chosen One, right?
<u><b>The Supreme Court</b></u>
This is getting to be a bit long. We're over 6,200 words here. So let's end this message to the undecided voter with a few words about the Supreme Court.
It is quite possible that Barack Obama will get to make one, maybe two Supreme Court appointments before he's through in Washington. It is also possible that he will have a filibuster-proof Senate to help him ram those choices through.
I'm a lawyer, and I've always had this strange idea that the U.S. Supreme Court should base its decisions on the supreme law of our land, our Constitution. Many people think differently these days. A recent and rather shocking survey showed that around 80% of people who support Barack Obama believe that the Supreme Court should base its decisions not on the Constitution, but on what's "fair." Egad! On the other hand, the strong majority of McCain voters believe that the Supremes should look to our Constitution as the final authority.
Let's just make this short and sweet, because I know you want to get out of here. If Barack Obama gets those two nominations, and if the Democrat Senate rubber-stamps them, then we are going to have a Supreme Court making decisions based on their liberal definition of "fairness" with some consideration to foreign court decisions tossed in. This is perhaps Obama's greatest opportunity to do permanent damage to our Republic; permanent and irreparable damage. It's one thing when Barack Obama talks about wealth seizure and redistribution in terms of "fairness." It's quite another when that talk is legitimized by a Supreme Court decision.
So, dear undecided voters ... as Og Mandino (a great American) once said: "Use wisely your power of choice." There's a lot hanging in the balance.
There. I'm done.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
i should go to bed now so I can get up and vote. OB for 08!
After five solid pages with no deviation from the pattern of "Obama supports the liberal policy, McCain supports the conservative one, and the liberal one is obviously better", I got bored and skipped to the end. My apologies for not finding the one sentence where it discusses McCain's record on torture (voting against one particular unnamed bill).
In any case, the Senate is not well-known for passing bills that do simple things like "ban torture". They are much better known for passing bills the length of small novels, which typically do at least a dozen things at once and provide any number of reasons for legislators to be either for or against them. Given McCain's record as the single most vocal opponent of torture within the Republican party, mentioning that he once voted against a bill that mentioned torture is not very convincing unless you also explain what else the bill did and what McCain's stated reason for opposition was, at a minimum.
You may also recollect that the last time the torture debate was a mainstream issue, the group in favor of having access to "enhanced interrogation" techniques was clearly rooted on the conservative side of the aisle, despite being an overall minority, so I don't even see how its surprising to you to suggest its a conservative-slanted issue.
Given that "enhanced interrogation" is not one of McCain's positions, but that its also not a surprise that the position finds more support on the right than the left, your sarcastic remark does nothing at all to dispel the suggestion that this article is preaching only to the choir. The intensely liberal mindset of the article could be acceptable only to those so far inside the Obama camp that McCain was never even a plausible alternative to them, making it quite irrelevant whether anyone reads it "before [they] vote". Exactly who did you think was going to change their minds because of this article?
In any case, the Senate is not well-known for passing bills that do simple things like "ban torture". They are much better known for passing bills the length of small novels, which typically do at least a dozen things at once and provide any number of reasons for legislators to be either for or against them. Given McCain's record as the single most vocal opponent of torture within the Republican party, mentioning that he once voted against a bill that mentioned torture is not very convincing unless you also explain what else the bill did and what McCain's stated reason for opposition was, at a minimum.
You may also recollect that the last time the torture debate was a mainstream issue, the group in favor of having access to "enhanced interrogation" techniques was clearly rooted on the conservative side of the aisle, despite being an overall minority, so I don't even see how its surprising to you to suggest its a conservative-slanted issue.
Given that "enhanced interrogation" is not one of McCain's positions, but that its also not a surprise that the position finds more support on the right than the left, your sarcastic remark does nothing at all to dispel the suggestion that this article is preaching only to the choir. The intensely liberal mindset of the article could be acceptable only to those so far inside the Obama camp that McCain was never even a plausible alternative to them, making it quite irrelevant whether anyone reads it "before [they] vote". Exactly who did you think was going to change their minds because of this article?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/us/politics/17torture.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/us/polit...amp;oref=slogin</a>
McCain's stated reason for opposition is that it would ban various euphemisms for torture.
I know plenty of people that are skittish about Obama's anti-trade rhetoric, or perhaps worried that his tax policies are more progressive than they actually are, and were on the fence until relatively recently, and this makes the case as lucidly as I've seen it put.
One reason I should add:
When the leader of a political party flagrantly and unambiguously violates the law for 8 years, we owe it to the dignity of our nation to remove that party from power, regardless of who takes it over after that. Sometimes we must cast our vote punitively, and this is one of those times.
<a href="http://boortz.com/nuze/undecided.html" target="_blank">http://boortz.com/nuze/undecided.html</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The difference between that editorial and the one I posted, is that the New Yorker doesn't try to misrepresent McCain's positions.
When the leader of a political party flagrantly and unambiguously violates the law for 8 years, we owe it to the dignity of our nation to remove that party from power, regardless of who takes it over after that. Sometimes we must cast our vote punitively, and this is one of those times.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's horrendously unfair to equate every single Republican with Bush, especially considering some of the positions he has taken that are far out of line with traditional conservative values. Bush is not all Republicans, and all Republicans are not Bush.
I totally agree for congressional and senate races. Not the presidency.
McCain's stated reason for opposition is that it would ban various euphemisms for torture.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What was that about mis-representing positions again?
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->The bill, which the Senate passed Wednesday by 51 to 45, would force the C.I.A. to abide by the rules set out in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation.
...
He [McCain] said he voted against the bill Wednesday because legislation he had helped to pass <b>already</b> prohibits the C.I.A. from “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.â€
McCain, of Arizona, said he believed it would be a mistake to limit C.I.A. interrogators to using only those techniques that were enumerated in the Field Manual, which he noted was a public document.
...
Mr. McCain said the vote was consistent, noting in a statement he submitted to the Congressional Record that when Congress voted in 2005 to apply the Army Field Manual to the entire Department of Defense, it deliberately excluded the C.I.A.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-The New Yorker+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(The New Yorker)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation†that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I suppose the New Yoker is under the impression that nothing done to McCain in Vietnam falls under the umbrella of “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment", then?
I admit that the argument is involved, but you have to remember the political circumstances of this vote. The ambiguity of the definition of torture is exactly what allowed the Bush administration to believe it was legal to use certain forms of torture. McCain voted to retain that ambiguity, which under the Bush administration's interpretation of the law meant they could do anything they wanted.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I suppose the New Yoker is under the impression that nothing done to McCain in Vietnam falls under the umbrella of “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment", then?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
wut?
Trying to impress the Obamatons with some handwaving?
More like the Ron Paulatons who run around yelling "Big Gov't bad!" "Both candidates are the same!" until someone pays attention to them or the McCainatons who will do everything they can to ignore the man McCain has become as try and discredit Obama by talking about a university professor as if he were Osama Bin Laden,[/snark]
I voted today, and I hope you all did whether you voted Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Socialist, Independent. I actually ended up voting for 3 of those 6 parties today.
I voted today, and I hope you all did whether you voted Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Socialist, Independent. I actually ended up voting for 3 of those 6 parties today.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I voted for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Someday I hope to have the opportunity to vote for a moderate libertarian. I always check out the libertarian candidates, find out that they want to dismantle most of the government, sigh and move on.
He also, in the very same article, continued to criticize the Bush administration for abuse of ambiguity, claiming that the Bush tactics fell outside of the areas allowed by the laws <i>already in place</i>.
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=moultano)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(moultano)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><!--QuoteBegin-Cxwf+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Cxwf)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I suppose the New Yoker is under the impression that nothing done to McCain in Vietnam falls under the umbrella of “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment", then?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
wut?
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Oh, you missed that particular mis-represenation? Allow me to juxtapose the relevant lines next to each other so there can be no confusion:
THE NEW YORKER: McCain ... voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation†<b>that he himself once endured in Vietnam</b>
McCAIN: Legislation he had helped to pass <b>already prohibits the C.I.A. from “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.â€</b>
So, following your assertion that the New Yorker did not mis-represent McCain, therefore the New Yorker must believe that nothing done to McCain in vietnam would count as "cruel, inhumane or degrading".
Personally I never paid much attention to McCain's war stories, so you tell me -- is that correct? Was McCain's treatment in vietnam entirely humane and non-cruel?
I think I voted for one Democrat, one Libertarian, two or three Republicans and at least two Greens. And then there were the judge elections, who are all officially "Independant", so I managed to tick off 5 different parties. today. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
I was stunned to discover that Cynthia McKinney was running for President. The only thing I remember her for was attacking a security guard at the Capital building a few years back.
For example, take the section on the supreme court: There are four conservative justices, the article reminds us, along with four liberal justices and a moderate swing vote. The next President is expected to have up to three appointments to make. If the President replaces a liberal vote with a conservative vote, why good heavens the course of this nation might swing towards the conservative side and the Supreme court wouldn't stop it! By contrast, if the President replaces a conservative vote with a liberal vote, why good heavens the course of the nation might swing in the OTHER direction, and the Supreme court wouldn't stop THAT either!
The only difference is which one you view as "bad". And quite frankly, if you've already decided which one is "bad", then you probably aren't an undecided voter anyway.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Any literature on the topic can help form an opinion. Whether or not it's pro- or anti- anything it can help sway things. That's my only point. The weirdest things can nudge people to a decision, even the most partisan of articles.