Category: Politics

Ten Reasons Not to Vote Democrat

The Dems are the left-wing party in the U. S. Almost all Dems nowadays are leftists or liberals — there is no practical difference at present.  It's not 1960 any more and you geezers out there with your sentimental attachment to the 'Democrat' label need to wise up.  So any reason to oppose liberals is a reason to oppose Dems.

1. Liberals lack common sense. As witness their lunatic stand on photo ID at polling places.  I have written several posts on this topic.  Here is one.

2. Liberals play the race card every chance they get.  Evidence here, but see also my Race and Leftism categories for plenty more.

3. Liberals are anti-liberty.  As witness Obamacare's  individual mandate, to give just one example.

4. Liberals have a casual attitude toward crime.  See Britain and the Barbarians and other posts in the Crime and Punishment Category.  Liberals are opposed to  capital punishment even though this is exactly what justice demands in certain cases.  With their unhealthy love of underdogs as underdogs, liberals will champion the scum of the earth with shoddy arguments while ignoring the concerns of decent citizens.

5. Liberals smear their opponents and then issue hypocritical calls for 'civility.'  What passes for argument among liberals is the hurling of SIXHRB epithets: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, bigoted. (acronym via Dennis Prager)  For example, if you oppose illegal immigration then you are a xenophobe; if you carefully argue against Obamacare then you a racist; if you give reasons why marriage is between a man a woman you are dismissed as a bigot.  If you oppose the slaughter of innocent human beings which is abortion you are waging war against women and interfering with their 'health' and 'reproductive rights.'   If you point out the very real threat of radical Islam, then you are dismissed as an  'Islamaphobe' with a mental illness.

6. Liberals are weak on national defense and naive about foreign policy.

7. Liberals are fiscally irresponsible.  Unlike his predecessor, Obama made no attempt to put the existing entitlements on a sound fiscal basis.  Instead, he started up a new one!

8. Liberals are anti-religion. 

9. Liberals have  no proper appreciation for the Second Amendment.

10. Liberals have no proper appreciation of the Tenth Amendment and the notion of federalism.

Addendum (6 Nov):  Tony H. writes to say that I forgot one:

11. Liberals are economic illiterates.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282190930932412.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

True.  Of course, I wasn't trying to give a complete list of reasons to oppose Obama and his gang.  There are a lot more reasons than ten.  How about this one:

12. Liberals are linguistic hijackers.  They routinely distort the English language for their ideological purposes.  This is actually worse than lying.  To lie successfully one must use language properly, in accordance with the going conventions.  Misuse of language  is a subversion of the rules of the communicative game.  There are examples in my Language Matters category.

One particularly egregious example is the use of 'voter suppression' to refer to common-sense demands for proper ID procedures at polling places.  This shows that the scumbags of the Left will do anything to win. 

For even more reasons, see the Constructive Curmudgeon who has worked himself into a fine, and justified, lather over Obama's abominations.  See here, for example.

Subsidiarity and the Left’s Assault on Civil Society

You say you're Catholic and you are going to vote for Obama? Are you stupid?  Apart from the fact that the Dems are the abortion party, the Obama administration's attack on civil society is at odds with Catholic social teaching which rests on the principle of subsidiarity.  David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of
subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more
complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler
organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more
decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited
government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for
centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the manifest drift of the Obama administration, on the one hand,  and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme, on the other.  By the way, one of the many mistakes Rick Santorum made in his campaign was to attack all government-sponsored education.  He was right to question whether the Federal government has any legitimate role to play in education, but to question the role of state and local government in education was a foolish extremism that befits a libertarian, not a conservative.

Subsidiarity also fits well with federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Obama.  'Federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Whether or not you are Catholic, if you accept the principle of subsidiarity, then you have yet another reason to oppose Obama and the Left.  The argument is this:

1. The Left encroaches upon civil society, weakening it and limiting it, and correspondingly expanding the power and the reach of the state.  (For example, the closure of Catholic Charities in Illinois because of an Obama administration adoption rule.)

2. Subsidiarity helps maintain civil society as a buffer zone and intermediate sector between the purely private (the individual and the familial) and the state.

Therefore

3. If you value the autonomy and robustness of civil society, then you ought to oppose Obama and the Left.

The truth of the second premise is self-evident.  If you wonder whether the Left does in fact encroach upon civil society, then see my post Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society.

Addendum:  This just over the transom from an old sparring partner of mine from the early days of the blogosphere, Kevin Kim:

Thank you for your recent post on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which I had never heard of despite years of dealing with Catholics.  I had a good chuckle when I read this:

"This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization."

And this from a gigantic, thoroughly hierarchized organization!

But what really burbled to the surface of my mind was the thought that, for a supposedly Catholic principle, subsidiarity sounds remarkably Protestant.  Heh.

But isn't it obvious what the Catholic response would be?  The church is in the business of mediating salvation.   What the church does cannot be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization.  Nulla salus extra ecclesiam, where the church in question is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church founded by Christ himself on St. Peter as upon a rock and presided over by the Holy Spirit.  It might also be argued that the principle of subsidiarity is a secular or temporal political principle and not one that has any bearing on soteriology.  For the same reason there is nothing Protestant about it.

What Does Abortion Have to Do with Religion?

The abortion question is almost always raised in the context of religion.  The Vice-Presidential debate provides a good recent example.  The moderator  introduced the topic with these words: “We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I  would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your  own personal views on abortion.”  Why didn't the moderator just ask the candidates to state their positions on abortion?   Why did she bring up religion?  And why the phrase "personal views"?  Are views on foreign policy and the economy also personal views?  Below the surface lies the suggestion that opposition to abortion can only rest on antecedent religious commitments of a personal nature that have no place in the public square. 

A question that never gets asked, however, is the one I raise in this post:  What does the abortion issue have to do with religion?  But I need to make the question more precise.  Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative.  The following argument contains no religious premises.

1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and  infancticide.
Therefore
3. (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument. 

And as a matter of fact there are pro-life atheists. Nat Hentoff is one. In The Infanticide Candidate for President, he takes Barack Obama to task:

But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme  Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban  Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama — in the Illinois Senate — also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.

Return to the above argument.  Suppose someone demands to know why one should accept the first premise.  Present this argument:

4. Killing innocent human beings is morally wrong.
5. Infanticide is the killing of innocent human beings.
Therefore
1. Infanticide is morally wrong.

This second argument, like the first, invokes no specifically religious premise.  Admittedly, the general prohibition of homicide – general in the sense that it admits of exceptions — comes from the Ten Commandments.  But if you take that as showing that (4) is religious, then the generally accepted views that theft and lying are morally wrong would have to be adjudged religious as well.

But I don't want to digress onto the topic of the sources of our secular moral convictions, convictions that are then codified in the positive law.  My main point is that one can oppose abortion on secular grounds. A second point is that the two arguments I gave are very powerful.  If you are not convinced by them, you need to ask yourself why.

Some will reply by saying that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body.  This is The Woman's Body Argument:

1. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.


For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

 If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (1) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (2) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction. Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (2) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (2) is acceptable, but (1) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

I wrote "perhaps (2) is acceptable" because it is arguable that (2) is not acceptable. For a woman's body is an improper part of her body; hence if a woman has a right to do anything she wishes with her body, then she has a right to kill her body by blowing it up, say. One who has good reason to reject suicide, however, has good reason to reject (2) even when 'part' is construed narrowly. And even if we substitute 'proper part' for 'part' in the original argument, it is still not the case that a woman has a right to do whatever she wishes with any proper narrow part of her body. Arguably, she has no right to cut out her own heart, since that would lead to her death.

I am making two points about the Woman's Body Argument.  The first is that  my rejection of it does not rely on any religious premises.  The second is that the argument is unsound. 

Standing on solid, secular ground one has good reason to oppose abortion as immoral in the second and third trimesters (with some exceptions, e.g., threat to the life of the mother).  Now not everything immoral should be illegal.  But in this case the objective immorality of abortion entails that it ought to be illegal for the same reason that the objective immorality of the wanton killing of innocent adults requires that it be  illegal.

Of course it follows that you should not vote for the abortion party, a.k.a. the Dems.  And if you are a Catholic who votes Democratic then you are as foolish and confused as the benighted Joe Biden.

The Losertarian Party

Politics is a practical business: it is about the gaining and maintaining of power for the purpose of implementing programs and policies that one believes to be beneficial, and for opposing those whose policies one believes to be deleterious. As the Converse Clausewitz Principle has it, it is war conducted by other means.  For this very reason, I stay clear of it except for voting and blogging: I am by inclination and aptitude a theoretician, a "spectator of all time and existence" to borrow a marvellous phrase from the  Plato's Republic. But part of the theoretician's task is to understand the political. And if I understand it, I understand that the Libertarian Party, though it might be a nice debating society, is a waste of time practically speaking. That's why I approve of and borrow Michael Medved's moniker, 'Losertarian Party.' These adolescents will never get power, so what's the point? It's a party of computer geeks, sci-fi freaks, and adolescents of all ages, the sort that never outgrow Ayn Rand.  Open borders, legal dope, ACLU-type extremism about freedom of expression.  Out of the mainstream and rightly so.

So Ron Paul made a smart move when he joined the Republicans, and his son Rand seems more conservative than libertarian. 

As I said, politics is a practical business. It's about winning, not talking. It's not about ideological
purity or having the supposedly best ideas; it's about gaining the power to implement good ideas.  The practical politician understands that quite often  Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, the best is the enemy of the good.  (Voltaire's maxim explained here.)

Addendum 11/1.  The 'open borders' idea is foolish in itself, but it is foolishness on stilts when note is taken of the plain fact that we have a welfare state here in the U.S., one whose expansion can perhaps be contained, but one which will always be with us until we collapse, most likely, under its weight.  Either a welfare state with strictly controlled borders, or open borders and no welfare state.  One or the other. 

Your First Time: Obama Ad Hits New Low

Here.  How low can the Dems go?  And you thought Clinton was a sleazeball for answering the question about his underwear and telling us about his old El Camino with the astroturf in back for, you know . . . .

Time to elect some adults.  Enough of clowns and buffoons.  (Did you see Biden in the VP debate?)  Give gravitas a chance.

Mark Steyn:

Both videos – the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext – exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state's most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer-pressure: C'mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last holdout?

If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it's very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria's supposed wedding advice to her daughter: "Lie back and think of England." Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep twice with a $16 trillion broke loser?

Ron Radosh on George McGovern

A  balanced assessment.  The piece concludes (emphases added):

Years later, I heard McGovern at the PEN International Writers Conference in New York City, where he spoke on a panel with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Bruno Kreisky, the former chancellor of Austria who was virulently anti-Israel. At that meeting, McGovern said that had he been elected president, the first thing he would have done to deal with the Middle East would have been to go to ask Kreisky for advice. Kreisky, with McGovern’s support at the panel, also called for recognition by the West of Communist East Germany, and rejected  any policy that would have sought to isolate the regime. It was clear then, listening to McGovern at that event, what a disaster he would have been for his country had he been elected.

McGovern, it is true, opposed the war in Vietnam before it was popular to do so, and showed rare political courage, taking a position he thought was right although it could not help his political career. He was a straight-shooter, honest, and principled, and one could reject his policies and still respect him as a person of honor who thought what he fought for was in the nation’s best interest. A war hero, he did not ever mention his war record to try and show that he had fought valiantly for America, even though Nixon was condemning him for weakness and for having no concern for America’s position in the world. He simply did not feel to raise his own war record was the right thing to do, especially since he had become anti-war.

His defeat revealed to most people that standing for national office on a platform of extreme leftism, if openly proclaimed, could lead only to political destruction. Future leftist candidates learned from the outcome in 1972 that a more stealth approach to a move to the left was the way to operate if one wanted to achieve, as Barack Obama put it in 2008, a “fundamental transformation” of the United States based on redistribution of wealth and attainment of a social-democratic model for a future America.

A good and decent man who advocated policies that were both dangerous and wrong, he passed away living into his 90th year. R.I.P.

A good part of Obama's deep mendacity is his use of the stealth approach.  He won't say plainly what he is really for, and he will say he is for things he isn't.  For example, did you notice that in the third debate he came out in favor of American exceptionalism?  He was lying, of course.

Liberty Forever?

Liberty stampHow many Americans care about liberty?  The depressing fact that Obama may well win the election shows that vast numbers of Americans care more about panem et circenses, bread and circuses, than about liberty.

We're running on fumes.  The stamp is border-line Orwellian.

Time was, when liberty was a state.  Now it's a stamp.

Dorothy Rabinowitz

Victor Davis Hanson

 

 

 

Obama Lied Last Night About Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Here is the video clip of Obama lying to Romney and the rest of us in their second debate.  Obama lies when he claims that on the Arizona law (S. B. 1070) law enforcement  officers can stop people whom they merely suspect of being undocumented workers. Obama has told this lie before. 

The details are in an earlier post which I now reproduce:

Debra Saunders' article begins:

President Barack Obama hailed the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision Monday that struck down most of Arizona's 2010 immigration law. In a statement released by the White House, however, the president said that he remains "concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

All eight voting members of the Supreme Court upheld this provision, which requires
that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration.

Please note the difference between what the president is quoted as saying and what Saunders correctly reports the S.B. 1070 provision as requiring.  The law requires "that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration." President Obama of course knows this.  So Obama lied in his statement when he said that "the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

Obama's egregious misrepresentation has been repeated time and again by leftists over the last two years.  See my 1 June 2010 post, The Misrepresentations of Arizona S. B. 1070 Continue.  Other
of my 1070 posts are to be found in the Arizona category.

Why are leftists so mendacious?  Because in their scheme the glorious end justifies the scurrilous means.

Don't forget to read the rest of Saunders' article.

National Public Radio and Big Bird Need Your Support!

Big bird

This is something I wrote 10 March 2011.  The points still hold and the piece is relevant because of Governor Romney's 'attack' on Big Bird in his first debate with President Obama.  Lefties have a hard time understanding why we mean-spirited conservatives would want to deny such a loveable critter Federal bird seed.  Maybe this will help.

……….

If you like NPR programming, as I like some of  it, write them a check!  Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support.  At least not now.  We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made.  If such inessentials as NPR, PBS, NEH and NEA cannot be defunded, where will the cuts be made?  Think about it.  If these small allocations cannot be zeroed out or placed on moratorium, how are we going to tackle entitlement reform?

So one good reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it.

Some think that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship.  But that is stupidity pure and simple and duly refuted here.

But even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support.  And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left.  Now that should be obvious to anyone who has been following current events, including the firing of Juan Williams, the exposure and sacking of the two Schillers, etc.  If you deny the Leftward tilt of NPR in its present incarnation, then you are delusional and not worth talking to.  So let's assume that you are sane and admit the bias.  The next question is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view that most of us in this conservative land find objectionable.  I say that it it is not morally right that you take my money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates my beliefs.

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty.  But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR. 

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons.  I am not arguing that government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad).  I leave that question open for the space of this post.  I am arguing that present facts dictate that defunding NPR is something we ought to do. 

I love Garrison Keillor and his "Prarie Home Companion" and tune in whenever I can.  "Guy Noir" is one of my favorite bits.  So I hope NPR stays on the air — on its own fiscal steam.  Hell, if they wean themselves from the  mammaries of massive Mama Obama Government I may even send them a check myself!  And the same goes for PBS. 

Obama, the Imaginary Man

Outstanding analysis by Andrew Klavan. Excerpts:

The mystery Obama—the hollow receptacle of out-sized fantasies left and right—is not a creation of his own making, political chameleon though he may well be. It emanates instead from a journalistic community that no longer in any way fulfills its designated function, that no longer even attempts the fair presentation of facts and current events aimed at helping the American electorate make up its mind according to its own lights. Rather, left-wing outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and the like have now devoted themselves to fashioning an image of the world they think their audiences ought to believe in—that they may guide us toward voting as they think we should. They have fallen prey to that ideological corruption that sees lies as a kind of virtue, as a noble deception in service to a greater good.

It is the nature of the Left to conflate the world with the world as leftists want it to be.  Whereas the conservative stands on the terra firma of antecedent reality, the leftist trades in nebulous hopes and dreams, many of them impossible.  (it comes as no surprise that the late Edward Kennedy's favorite song was "Impossible Dream.")

Theirs are largely passive lies and lies of omission. The active frauds—NBC’s dishonest editing of videos to reflect a leftist worldview, ABC’s allowing Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos to masquerade as a newsman, the Los Angeles Times’ suppressing even the transcript of the video in their possession that shows candidate Barack Obama at a meeting with a PLO-supporting sheik—these are only egregious salients of the more consistent, underlying dishonesty. The real steady-state corruption is revealed in the way Obama scandals like Fast and Furious, Benghazi-gate, and the repeated breaking of federal campaign laws have been wildly underplayed, while George W. Bush’s non-scandals, like the naming of Valerie Plame and the firings of several U.S. attorneys at the start of his second term, were blown out of all proportion.

And it is revealed in Obama’s blankness, his make-believe greatness, and the suppression, ridicule, and dismissal of any evidence that he is not the man this powerful media faction once wanted so badly for him to be. No other modern president could have associated so intimately with lowlifes like Wright and Ayers and the now-imprisoned Tony Rezko and not had those associations exposed in every detail. No other president could have made the radical remarks he’s made—about wealth redistribution, religion, and the federal government’s alleged ill-treatment of blacks—and not had them headlined all over for weeks. No other could have presided over such a crippled economy and such universal failures at war and in foreign policy and escaped almost without mainstream blame.

The Delusional Left and ‘Voter Suppression’

Here is a TNR piece that proves once again that lberals live on a different planet.  I call it the planet Unsinn and I sometimes speak of the 'planetary' difference between left and right.  The difference is between nonsense and sense.  The author asks why principled conservatives won't denounce 'voter suppression.'

'Voter suppression' is leftist code for 'photo ID.'  Here's the short answer:  we won't condemn it because common sense demands it.  Longer answer and arguments here.  It shows how far we've fallen that this needs to be argued at all.

I am of course against voter suppression while being all for 'voter suppression.'

I am also against voter fraud, unlike liberals.  They welcome it knowing that it can only redound to their benefit.  That is the plain motive behind their opposition to photo ID.  If voter fraud worked to the benefit of conservatives and libertarians, leftists would be screaming in protest.

POTUS Pounded

Romney scored big against Obama  last night in the first of their three debates, as most of the pundits, left and right, agree.  When Romney came out with the "trickle-down government" line, I gave him a big 'thumbs up' to the mild amusement of my wife who, bless her heart, insisted that we watch the debate instead of a 1965 rerun  of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  (I was tempted to blow off the debate, expecting nothing but the usual bullshit.) 

But Romney should have repeated the excellent line that sums up the whole leftist approach: we take your money which, by rights does not belong to you but to the collective, and we dribble back to you such benefits as we see fit.  (Karl Marx: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.")  Obama 2016 provides evidence that this is the ultimate Obama agenda.

Romney should have pounded away with the "trickle-down government" line.  Repetition is necessary to get through to Joe Sixpack.  Romney is still too gentlemanly.  Politics, however, is not gentlemanly debate but war by other means.  Leftists have understood this all along.  Conservatives are slowly learning.

So while POTUS was pounded, he did not receive the plenary pounding that he needs.  Work for the next two debates.  Romney needs to slug harder while maintaining  his smiling 'nice guy' demeanor.