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Reasons to not like W Bill Quick puts up 11 excellent reasons for limited-government types to be pissed off at the current administration. I found little to quibble with.
Generally, I have found George W. Bush to be good, very good, on foreign affairs, and mediocre to bad on domestic issues.
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I agree. The problem is, the Democrats are every bit as bad on most domestic issues that a libertarian would care about (there are cases where one or the other has the right idea but they cancel each other out) and have gone over Niagara Falls without a barrel on foreign policy.
They are Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, but at least Dum knows how to shoot whereas Dee is a total effing moron.
Apart from hiss major mistake (tax cuts = less government revenue, which is WRONG: tax cuts = greater government revenue), I don’t disagree with too many of Bill’s points.
Unfortunately, I just can’t get behind the idea of supporting the Libertarian Party. Present company excepted, the LP has almost as high a Whackjob Percentage as the current crop of Democrats.
I agree, though: I foresee political oblivion for the Democrats, followed by a split within the Republicans (and about damn time too).
Mark me down for the more conservative piece.
I made a comment on the Quick post so I won’t duplicate that here.
Anyone who expects a 3rd party movement to be more than a short term distraction at this time—see Perot’s Reform Party, or the Greens’ fling with Ralph Ego—is engaging in wishful thinking, to say the least.
The Dems aren’t going anywhere, are not going to collapse or disappear or whatever. Political trends wax and wane in the US. What does not seem to ever wane is the relentless push for the government at every level to do more and more about every conceivable problem that activists and the media can turn into the crisis du jour.
The liberal element wants more economic controls and programs. The conservative element wants more social controls, and has no problem with programs that reward its major constituencies.
Neither group has any compunction about buying voter blocks by spending money. Neither group has any intention of standing up to major influence blocks who are demanding more money, such as AARP, the education lobby, the farm lobby, etc.
The Libertarian Party has gone out of its way to make itself utterly irrelevant, with a bizarre platform, and a succession of stiffs as nominees. These guys are so disfunctional they have succeeded in destroying the credibility of libertarian ideas for the foreseeable future.
My personal opinion is that it would be easier and more doable to drive the radical left out of the Democratic party and over to the Greens than to rein in the spend and intrude proclivities of the Republicans while they are in such a position of power.
As an improper libertarian, I’m happy to say I don’t have a dog in any of these realignment fights. I vote for candidates regardless of party, depending on the person, or if I want to make a protest vote. I doubt I will be pledging allegiance to any new group based on Quick’s astonishment in finding out that GWB is a politician.
40% growth in federal government size, nationalizing a large chunk of the medical industry, paranoid regulation through Sarbanes Oxley increasing the cost of business with no benefits, the list goes on an on. This is arguably the most socialist President since FDR.
His foreign policy is largely Trotskyite in its aspects of permanent warfare (read revolution) and the extension of American democratic socialism to a global plane: which explains why Hitchens likes him, I guess.
Generally, I have found George W. Bush to be good, very good, on foreign affairs, and mediocre to bad on domestic issues. It is kind of ironic, remembering how many expected the opposite when he first ran in 2000.
I think George W. Bush is bad on both domestic and foreign policy. In domestic policy he has increased unemployment ruined the value of the dollar, and built up so much goverment debt that they’ll be paying for it for decades, and he was a president who was initially elected on a platform that included reducing debt. The trade balance has also gone from bad to worse surging to a $665 billion deficit this year.
On foreign policy he made a huge mistake with the Iraq war, it’s cost over 500 billion so far, has managed to vastly increase terrorism in the area and killed over 100,000 people according to the Lancet. It had nothing to do with the war on terrorism. It severely damaged counter-WMD efforts since it had no WMDs. It has actually managed to make conditions worse in Iraq for the average man in the street than it ever was under Saddam which is just amazing. In the war on Terrorism he still hasn’t managed to get bin Laden and that guy who ran the Taliban. In the counter-WMD efforts Bush has watched North Korea go nuclear and has invaded a country which didn’t have any.
Agreed della. Best recruitment sergeant Al Qaida ever had.
“In the counter-WMD efforts Bush has watched North Korea go nuclear and has invaded a country which didn’t have any.”
Della, according to Jack Wheeler, a great military expert, Hussein’s WMD are stocked in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, via Syria. WMDs were trucked there during the U.N. discussions before the operation Iraqi Freedom:
“The reason Saddam’s WMD were never found is that Mugniyeh made a deal with Saddam to spirit them out of Iraq before the US invasion, truck them across the border into Syria, then into Hezbollah’s Bekaa Valley stronghold. It is the King of Terror who has Saddam Hussein’s missing weapons of mass destruction.”
[“THE UNKNOWN KING OF TERROR and the Coming Lebanon Civil War“, by Jack Wheeler]
Mugniyeh is the leader of Hizballah (“The party of Allah”), one of the most powerful islamist groups, engineered and funded by the Irani mullahs, and possibly more powerful than the thug Assad of Syria, the occupier of the semi-Western country named Lebanon. Lebanon was a mainly Christian country about 40 years ago. Now, due to breed rates and to war, Chrisitans are in minority, and Muslims the majority. A must watch is this interview to the Lebanese woman Brigitte Gabriel (Windows Media Player format),
Other well informed guys I know said me more than once that some of the WMDs are in Europe, ready to use by the Islamist sleeping cells in Europe.
Additionally, Iran already has the atomic bomb (possibly purchased in Pakistan, North Korea or some ex-Soviet republic).
Besides WMDs’ nuances, we are at war, and we must defend ourselves from the islamic invasion. Period.
Joel,
P A N I C ! ! ! !
Seriously, do you think I was born yesterday? These imaginary WMDs have been doing a magical mystery tour of the Middle East and are imagined to be in whetever part that seems to be politically expedient at the time. Although I wouldn’t completely rule out some sort of terrorist act using chemical or biological weapons at some point in the future I’m absolutely certain it won’t be with Saddams magical mystery weapons.
Wot Joe Català said.
In any event, the WMD were a side issue to keep Kofi, assorted despots, human rights abusers, kleptomaniacs and Chirac & Cie happy. We didn’t go to war over WMD.
Oh wow, you mean a guy who’s a Trot abroad isn’t going to be Hayek at home? You guys are goddam geniuses, I tell ya.
– Josh
I’m with Adarak: W is a leftie. There are three reasons that lefties don’t recognise him as one of their own:
(1) his party, (2) his failure to use leftie symbols and vocabulary, (3) his use of Christian symbols and vocabulary.
Bush’s support of legalizing illegals is merely a pragmatic recognition that they aren’t going anywhere (what would be the cost of physically rounding up and deporting them?). Better to recognize that they are here, producing, and are likely to stay. Might as well toss them into the payroll tax machine than have them in an unaccountable black market. In fact it is about the only saving grace for the US that we still attract (and can absorb) large influxes of immigrants to line up the next layer of the ponzi scheme. A luxury not recognized for Europe and their unfunded governmental social-welfare programs.
The notion that a State has a care as to who produces, legals or illegals is unnecessary protectionism. The only interest that State apparently has is extracting a portion of the person’s labor, it doesn’t matter to them who it is. Basically the State exists to protect life and property from direct attack, not to presume to say who can contract their labor and where. Again ‘legal’ to the government means a tax paying statistic.
Told ya. And within 5 years it’s going to become manifestly clear to the most casual of indifferent observers, just how badly the half-wits have mucked things up in the Middle East. Absolutely we have to fight the Islamists, whom I place even lower on the scale than Christians. But we’re going to end up scooting out of Iraq with our tails between our legs, and trying to pretend otherwise.
Perhaps we can take comfort in the hope that by then, baseball players may have foresworn the use of steroids.
Robert Novak, Beltway insider and a rare Republican political commentator, here confirms his September prediction that Bush will cut and run from Iraq over the next year:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20050328.shtml
A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 70% of Americans thought the Iraq war was not worth its cost in lives and money. That must include a plurality of GOP supporters. Faced with the choice between higher taxes and a noble international Crusade to export Truth, Justice and the American Way by force of arms, grassroots Republicans are likely to conclude that it just ain’t worth it.
This poll came AFTER more than a month of media spin exalting the success of the Iraqi elections, and in a land where the government forbids coverage of soldiers’ coffins returning amd flies the thousands of wounded in under cover of darkness. We seem already to have reached that Walter Cronkite moment in the Vietnam War, when Middle America finally decided with regret that it was not do-able.
If Novak’s right, the rest of Bush’s term will be an uphill struggle to recover prestige by reforming Social Security (already in deep do-do in Congress), mending Medicare (aagh!) and making No Child Left Behind deliver, before the inevitable lame duck phase when GOP-ites start ignoring the prez and angling to be his successor’s pals. Not an appetising prospect for a naturally lazy and uninspiring incumbent. The chance of a financial cataclysm overwhelming the dollar cannot be ruled out either, like Nixon’s bad moment when he had to impose forex controls. Is this the next step in America’s lurch into “right-wing” statism?
If only GWB had listened to Daddy and gone after al-Qaeda, instead of letting the PNAC-ers distract him. If only he’d kissed off his cheap-labour employer backers and done something about illegal immigration, instead of nodding it through. If only he’d stuck to his campaign promise about running a more multilateralist foreign policy *after* 9/11, when most of the civilised world was shocked and ready to co-operate with the USA in a genuine anti-terrorist dragnet.
If only George had been a bigger man. And if only the liberventionists had remembered that you need damn big boots to dance with the warfare/welfare devil.
Della,
I am sorry if am too direct, but this is the Internet: you are in a state of denial, group think, and/or moral blindness.
The central issue are not WMDs, but the thugs and terrorists that want them in the first place. Their worldview is rooted in Islam (Muslim countries) and have the direct or indirect support of the leftist dystopia (European Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, …)
No, who is struggling for the demise of America and the West is not precisely W.
Iraq was about WMDs (amongst other things). It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they turned up. However, even *IF* Saddam destroyed his WMDs prior to the invasion, no one will convince me that he wouldn’t start up his WMD programme again at some later date if he hadn’t been toppled. He’s done this in the past with his nuclear programme. The ex-Iraqi president was a proven recidivist when it came to manufacturing WMD. Good riddance to him, and a good thing too.
Jose,
I think it is you that is suffering from the group think and moral blindness. You believe this wild story about WMD doing a tour of the middle east just because your group said so, you have no independent evidence. You would probably think it perfectly moral to bomb the hell out of the Bekaa valley because belief about WMDs there, when they wern’t found you probably wouldn’t even bother to say mea culpa, you would just move on to bombing the next lot.
Goerge Bush has indicated he wants to create a new generation of nuclear weapons, he has pulled out of the ABM treaty, he also changed the doctrine of use of nuclear weapons from being purely defensive to being one where offensive first use is allowed, his military is also agitating for the militarisation of space. The US also has the largest bio warfare program in the world, he has also invaded several countries and proposes to invade more. One or two of these things wouldn’t be too bad but put it all together and it doesn’t look good.
Della,
Perhaps are you comparing the elected president of the most libertarian constitution in the world with any barbarian, unelected dictator? Bravo, that’s very leftist from you. You would prefer living in Cuba or North Korea thn in America, isn’t it?
Are you saying that America has not the right of self-defense, and that it should disarm? To know better, recall the history of the pacifist Tibetans, my friend.
No thinking human can buy that crap you wrote.
Della,
About Hussein’s WMD, from the “newspaper of record“:
Dr. Araji said that if the equipment had left the country, its most likely destination was a neighboring state. David Albright, an authority on nuclear weaponry who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, said that Syria and Iran were the countries most likely to be in the market for the kind of equipment that Mr. Hussein purchased, at great cost, when he was secretly trying to build a nuclear weapon in the 1980’s.
The terms “equipment” and, obviously, “nuclear weaponry” should be clarifying enough.