We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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With Democratic control of the Senate confirmed, one wonders what the next two years will bring on the domestic scene.
Its easy to say what will not happen: There will not be any form of tax relief or reform, or reform of entitlement programs. And no, I do not see expansion of such programs as reform. In short, it is hard to imagine anything happening that will advance the cause of limited government.
On the tax front, the only question will be whether the President will have the stones to veto a tax increase bill. Certainly the Senate, and in all probability the House, will be more than willing to send him one. Given this President’s indifference to the virtues of small government and his status as a lame duck with no re-election chances to blow, I think the odds are that he will sign it.
On spending, expect more of the same. The Dems’ main complaints about Republican spending have been that (a) it has not been enough (b) it has not been directed to Dem constituents and (c) it has not been accompanied by tax increases (this is what passes for fiscal responsibility in Washington these days). Will ‘compassionate conservative’ Bush veto spending bills because they redirect money to Dem causes rather than Repub? I can not imagine why.
Oh, expect knock-down drag-out fights over court nominations, especially if another Supreme goes down. In fact, I would expect any nominee to fail, unless they are a squishy statist who is willing to yammer on about how the Constitution is a living document.
Expect investigations out the wazoo, which should paralyze the executive branch (not that that would take much) and the intelligence community (hmm, bug or feature?) and produce lots of political theater, but in the end it will all signify nothing. These investigations are actually Pelosi’s best opportunity to divert and satisfy her nutty lefties (if she cares to do so). The alternative is to let them actually try to make policy (shudder).
A couple of issues to keep an eye on. The Dems have gone dark on the issue of gun control, but there is no reason to believe they do not still want it. One sign of their (over?)confidence in their position will be if they feel bold enough to come back out of the closet on this issue.
For a very early indicator of whether the Dems are serious about governance, keep an eye on who gets the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. The presumptive chair, Alcee Hastings, belongs to a very exclusive club – federal judges who were impeached and removed from office for corruption. If Pelosi gives him the job, then look for a wild ride for two years, because the inmates will truly be running the asylum.
After an election in which “although many individual races were close the cumulative effect was a thumping” I watched President Bush give a brief statement and then spend the best part of a hour answering questions from a room full of journalists many of whom are his sworn enemies.
Political leaders in Britain do not react to election defeats that way – the give a statement and perhaps answer a question or two (normally not) and then run away.
I may disagree with a lot of things about what President Bush has done (for example I think that he has made the entitlement program burden, about which he rightly warned today, even worse than it was before he came into office), but he is clearly a man of great courage.
I could not have done what I watched him do today.
With the election in the bag and the Democrats measuring the drapes in the House and likely the Senate, probably the most important question, which means of course the question that no one in the mainstream is thinking about, is how these election results will be perceived in the war zone.
The enemies of the West have been counting on ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ to deliver the United States to defeat. I cannot help but think that this election will give them great comfort and lead them to believe that Vietnam Syndrome has indeed taken hold. While I believe that there is less support amongst the populace for rapid ‘redeployment’ (this year’s code word for retreat) from Iraq than many believe, in the ‘perception is reality’ hall of mirrors that is domestic and international politics, the relentless pounding of this meme by the new Democratic leadership and their allies in the press will likely make it self-fulfilling.
If Bush gives the new Democratic leadership their way, then I think that the jihadis will be proven right, and they will ultimately succeed in outlasting the United States in Iraq. If they get their way, the US will withdraw under fire, the nascent Iraqi state will collapse into civil war, and we will see the spectre of helicopters evacuating the last few Americans from the Green Zone. The world-wide high-def broadcast of American defeat will do much to entrench our jihadi enemies and dishearten what is left of the West.
Very few Americans are anti-war. Most Americans are anti-losing the war. The Bush administration made the serious mistake of not fighting to win in Iraq, which in turn means the war dragged out past the (roughly) six year span that Americans will tolerate being at war. With the mainstream media still controlling the terms of discourse, and using that control to relive their glory days of bringing about American defeat in Vietnam, Americans got the sense that we were losing in Iraq. Americans hate a loser, and so they turned on the party in power.
The election will hearten our enemies in Iraq, and we can expect redoubled conflict in that country as they seek to entrench their gains in the American mindspace. The Democratic Congress will seize on this development to push for what they have promised, which happens to be exactly what our enemies want; namely, precipitous American withdrawal. If they get what they want, then the jihadis will have won this campaign, and I think we can look forward to a reinvigorated Islamo-fascist movement worldwide, with all the bloodshed and suffering that entails.
Not to worry, though. The minimum wage will be increased, redistribution of wealth will be accelerated, and many words will be hurled at the real threat, global warming. And isn’t that what really matters?
Well Nancy Pelosi and her friends are overjoyed – higher minimum wage levels, more government spending, especially on education and heath care (buy stock in the stem cell companies that the Democrats intend to increase subsidies to) – and an end to the timid Republican experiments in choice in schools, medical care and in pension accounts, more regulations (and efforts at world regulations – such as Barney Frank’s dream of a world government financial services regulator) and all the rest of it. And I do not expect President Bush to veto much (Captain Veto he is not – this is not the Administration of President Ford and William Simon).
Turning to the election itself:
It looks like an odd combination of some Fox people thinking a Senator was too old and tired and the Libertarian party have handed the United States Senate to the Democrats.
Conrad Burns looks like he has lost by a few hundred votes – he was denounced on Fox (on the O’R. Factor) as “too old and tired” to have any hope of victory. And the Libertarian candidate (Mr Jones) got 3% of vote in Montana (my guess is that some of those voters would have gone Republican, some stayed home, and just about none gone Democrat).
So one Fox News prediction, that the Libertarians would act as spoilers this time round, has been proved correct.
However, the Republicans deserved to lose. Their ‘compassionate conservatism’ (i.e. be soft on spending and wink at Pork) finally irritated the base so much that they stayed home. And Mr Foley did not exactly help either – Democrats may be ‘cool’ with man-boy stuff (Congressman Frank got away with the under-age male prostitution that operated from his home, and another Democrat got away with sex with House page years ago), but Republican voters are not cool with it. Perhaps these voters are ‘bigots’ but that is just a fact of life.
The money of Mr. Soros and others could be counted on (via various front organizations) to bring out the Democrat vote (and finance adverts – such as the tissue of lies that destroyed JD Hayworth in Arizona).
And John McCain’s ‘Campaign Finance Reform’ sometimes meant that some Republicans found themselves outspent (because spending by the leftist groups did not count as spending by their opponents).
And yes virtually all the newspapers and mainstream television acted as part of the Democratic party (Arizona was a good example of this in the House races).
But even where the Republicans had a friendly newspaper they lost – both seats in New Hampshire in spite of the ‘Manchester Union Leader’.
“It was the war stupid”
The voters are quite happy to use force overseas in order to (for example) kill or capture O.B.L. – but they are (for better or worse) not prepared to spend money and blood on some ‘War for Democracy’ in Iraq or anywhere else.
The neo-cons coming out just before the elections and sneering at President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as morons for the conduct of the war that they, the neo-cons, demanded was also unhelpful (and disgusting). Supposedly the war would have been fine if ‘smart people’ had been in charge – yes right. As I am part Jewish myself I will resist a Mel Gibson moment about the neo-cons – the sooner these backstabbers are forgotten the better. → Continue reading: The last great leftist victory in the United States
WASHINGTON, DC—After months of aggressive campaigning and with nearly 99 percent of ballots counted, politicians were the big winners in Tuesday’s midterm election, taking all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, retaining a majority with 100 out of 100 seats in the Senate, and pushing political candidates to victory in each of the 36 gubernatorial races up for grabs.
The Onion notices the awful truth. Their overall election coverage is quite chuckle-inducing, too.
Update: All right, there are a couple of decent ones in there. I like Dr No.
(h/t: Avatar Briefs)
It looks like we have caused the Republicans a bit of grief:
So far, losing because of libertarians hasn’t caused Republicans to move toward the libertarians ideologically. But maybe things will change this time.
Our election results are available as they come in via our party headquarters.
For years I have felt alone on election nights with nothing to follow except the voting tallies and changing balance between the left and right wings of the ruling party. Kudos to LPHQ!
Over on Antoine Clarke’s Election Watch, I am running results and commentary on the U.S. mid-term elections tonight.
The most reliable source last time was RealClearPolitics. However, they’re admiting a huge range of possible outcomes in the Senate, from only two Republican losses, to six, which would mean a change of majority.
Well, I am off to bed and despite my interest in politics, have not really the desire to wait up to see what happens in the U.S. Congressional races. My hunch is that by the time I wake up here in London, the Democrats will have taken the House and the Republicans might just hang on to the Senate, but it will be a very close call. I sympathise with the argument, put by various libertarians and small-government Republican supporters, that Bush needs what we Brits call a mighty kick in the bollocks for a number of bad moves, such as the explosive growth of spending on non-defense items, tariffs, the Patriot Act, growing interference in people’s private lives, etc, etc. I can see why many voters, even hawkish ones, have become bitterly angry over the mess in Iraq and wondered whether the Coalition should have heeded the voices of caution and pursued a containment/deterrence line rather than pre-emption. (I backed the ouster of Saddam pretty much from the start but have had my doubts about how the power vacuum might get filled without a sufficiently strong effort to help rebuild the country). The Republicans might, just might learn a valuable lesson: they have had power in Congress since 1994 and more recently, the White House. People do not tend to vote for centre-right parties in order to see a big rise in the size and power of the state. Maybe someone should send Bush a copy of Barry Goldwater’s old classic, The Conscience of a Conservative.
My main worry, drawn from the experience of Britain’s Conservative Party, is that a defeat for the Republicans may not lead to the sort of questioning of the Big Government philosophy known as “Compassionate Conservatism” as championed by Bush in recent years. We have seen how David Cameron has sought to meld the Tories into a pale imitation of NuLabour, in some ways trying to outdo Blair in the spending and taxation stakes. For all the talk that American politics is deeply polarised, perhaps the real truth is that the choices in front of the electorate are not distinct enough.
In case you want to scare off a mugger, why not buy some of these and put them on your coat? Tastes may vary.
Nancy Pelosi was on fine form on Friday – denouncing the people who made certain documents (now withdrawn) available on a United States government website.
As the New York Times (and, surprise surprise, a United Nations agency) reported the story it was all about wicked Republicans publishing documents that could help people build atomic bombs. Of course, what Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the left really objected to was that the documents came from the government of Saddam Hussain and show that he WAS planning to build atomic bombs right up to the invasion of Iraq (information the left has been trying to sit on for years).
The Economist (a journal that has often been very critical of President Bush and other Republicans) also published an interesting article (subscription required) on Nancy Pelosi in its present issue.
It is well know that Nancy Pelosi represents (and reflects) the extreme left San Francisco area, but her money raising activities (at least one hundred million Dollars over the last few years) are less well known, as is her history.
It is not just that Nancy Pelosi’s father was a leftist Congressman and then Mayor of the corrupt city of Baltimore (no one can help who their father is), it is the fact that Nancy Pelosi personally “kept the book” for him – i.e. the record of favours received and delivered. I do not know how the lady can keep a straight face when she talks about the “culture of corruption” in Washington DC Nancy Pelosi has been involved in corruption her whole life – but I doubt that one voter in ten knows this.
The Republicans are at least partly to blame for people not knowing what they are getting. I can guess the sort of talk that justifies just making token attacks rather than full attacks – “Nancy Pelosi is a women, we can not attack her all out as we would look like beasts” and “we can not say what Nancy Pelosi is as it would look like an ethnic slur and we do not want to upset Italian-American voters”.
So the ‘attack dog’ Republicans (or at least the Republican leadership) do not really fight – and thus help give the United States a Speaker Pelosi.
Another point that the Economist article makes is the iron discipline that Nancy Pelosi has imposed on the Democratic party. Whoever the voters think they are being presented with (“the Democrat is very nice and they went to Iraq”) the fact remains that these people will vote the big government way that Nancy Pelosi tells them to (the Republicans may have been soft on spending, but the Democrats want to spend hundreds of billions more – and it is a similar story on regulations).
Almost needless to say, the Democratic party leadership supports Nancy Pelosi – including the people set to head the key committees in the House. Barney Frank is already boasting (for example to the British Financial Times newspaper) of the world government financial services regulator he intends to help create.
There will also be lots of ‘investigations’ – designed to tie the Administration up in knots (in order to bash Bush) and, thus, lose the war (both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan – and everywhere else).
Radical Islam (of both Shia and Sunni types) will win and moderate Muslims (and the West) will lose.
I very much doubt that Nancy Pelosi actually wants this result, but she does not really care – at least not enough for the Democrats not to do it anyway.
Via NewsMax: the troops respond to John Kerry’s ‘joke’.
 Photo: US soldiers, via News Max.
It is not just in the UK that the steady drum beat of the state encroaching on ancient liberties can be heard. There is some good discussion on 10 Zen Monkeys regarding the horrendous Military Commissions Act in the USA. However I do find the lack of concern about the effects on non-US subjects a bit disconcerting given the propensity of American courts to try and apply their laws extra-territorially.
Naturally these laws have been sold as only applying to The Bad Guys… just as RICO was sold as just being a tool to go after organised crime and yet it ended up being used again anti-abortion activists. Regardless of what the politicians say when they are selling a prospective law, once enacted, legislation gets used against anyone it can be used against, not just the targets intended at the time the laws is passed.
I must say that anyone without a US passport who is politically active and less than flattering about US government’s policies should serious reconsider taking that holiday in Florida or going to visit American friends.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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