apocryph.org Notes to my future self

Thoughts on the Presidential Election

I’ve not posted anything on the 2008 Presidential race, since plenty of others have stated my positions better than I could. Those who know my politics shouldn’t be surprised to learn that I voted for McCain/Palin. My objections to The Messiah are manifold, but chief among them are:

• Barack Obama will ban guns. I don’t care what he told you to get you to vote for him; he’s a liberal anti-gun politician with a liberal anti-gun Congress. I expect a ban on private sales of firearms and a new Assault Weapons Ban within the first year. Depending upon how much hysteria the media can drum up with regard to violent crime, I expect to see at least an attempt to restrict concealed carry at the federal level, and attempts at ammunition bans/taxes and microstamping bills. If you believed the partisan MSM and Obama fellow travelers, well, you’re an idiot. A vote for Obama is a vote for gun control, period.
• Barack Obama will raise taxes. I realize he said he’d cut taxes for 105% of the workforce and only soak the super rich who can afford it, but that is not true. Yes, he’ll try to pay for some of his runaway social programs by cutting the military budget to the bone, but that only goes so far. Barack will make sure you pay your “fair share”.
• Barack Obama will grow the size and power of the Federal government much more than McCain would. As a libertarian I despise the power and girth of the Federal government; under Barack it will be bigger, more powerful, and more wasteful.
• Barack Obama will pack the Federal courts with liberal judges. With a filibuster-proof Senate, he can appoint as many of his nutjob far left pals he wants. Maybe Bill Ayers won’t get a circuit court seat, but you can be damn sure some of his ideological peers will make the cut. After four years of Obama SCOTUS appointments, we’ll learn all sorts of things about the Constitution we didn’t know before.
• Barack Obama will preserve Roe v. Wade. The SCOTUS decisions discovering a heretofore unknown Constitutional right to privacy lurking amidst the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution, and the Constitutional right to an abortion that implies, are among the most egregious activist contortions of the Constitution in the least hundred years. There is no Constitutional right to an abortion, and the Federal government has no Constitutional power to either guarantee or restrict access to abortions. It’s a states issue. Under Barack Obama’s larger and more powerful Federal government, states’ issues will be Federal issues.
• Barack Obama will undermine our security. His policy of open dialog with the most vile regimes on the planet, combined with a flat-out refusal to use military force, will make us a little less unpopular in Paris, and weaken us considerably in the eyes of our enemies. Joe Biden and I agree on this: the Ahmedinejads and Kim Jong-Ils of the world will start to probe the fences to see what they can get away with. Future terrorist attacks will be treated as law enforcement matters, with the occasional cruise missle if the plebs need a distraction from domestic politics.
• Barack Obama will reduce our freedom. He is a statist liberal politician, who is unlikely to resist attempts by his statist liberal Congress to expand the role of the Federal government into our everyday lives, on matters ranging from healthcare to Internet access.
• Barack Obama will kick our economy in the balls. Repeal the Bush tax cuts, raise capital gains taxes, impose yet more regulation on the capital markets, all in the name of ‘fairness’ and ’spreading the wealth’. And just wait until you learn the sort of sacrifices Barack will demand of you in the name of saving us from Global Warming.

Don’t get me wrong. John McCain is the Giant Douche to Obama’s Turd Sandwich. I hated McCain for the McCain-Feingold First Amendment Reduction Act of 2001, and his attempts to ban the private sale of firearms. However, McCain is less bad than Obama, particularly given that a Democratic stranglehold on the Congress seems inevitable. If Obama wins, I expect a long, cold winter watching our treasured freedoms eroded for “the children”, “fairness”, “common sense”, and whatever other bullshit rationalizations the Democrats and their media allies can come up with.

Many of my friends and coworkers are voting for Obama. Some of them because they disagree with me on my policy positions, such that Obama’s politics are theirs. I can respect that, as I have strongly-held policy positions myself. I understand if you hate the Iraq war, Gitmo, the PATRIOT act, civilian gun ownership, lower taxes, private healthcare, and deregulation. I get that you support punitive Federal environmental regulations and redistributive tax policies and a powerful central government. I disagree, strongly in many cases, but that’s democracy.

What I hate, though, and what I have a real hard time understanding, are the so-called Rationally Ignorant voters. The type who hear things about Hope(tm) and Change(tm) and how much better it’ll be once The Chosen One is elected, without stopping to ask critical questions like how it will work or what the policies will look like or what it will cost. When America is no more (and realistically, the United States are not exempt from the inexorable rise and fall of great powers, though hopefully I won’t live to see the end) I suspect it will be undone by an unholy alliance of exceptionally evil, exceptionally corrupt political tyrants, and the gullible fucktards who vote for them in return for the vague promise of bread and circuses.

If you’re one of the Rationally Ignorant voting for whichever asshole offers the most uplifting rhetoric and the most bountiful of promises, I HATE you. You are the bug in our otherwise solid system of government. You’re the bastard against whom no number of checks and balances can hedge. You’re the fuckwit who deserves neither security nor liberty. And I leave you with words Samuel Adams penned with you in mind over two hundred years ago:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!

God save us. I think we’re going to need saving.