Why

Why Obama? Anyone who intends to support this man has it incumbent upon themselves to articulate why. Preferably, they will do so without using the word "awesome", thereby proving themselves marginally more substantive than most people who voted for George W. Bush.

I have two great fears about Obama. The first is the potential for demagoguery. The second is his domestic policy positions. The former we have seen, and the latter we shall see soon enough. Both must be tempered if Obama is to be as effective leader as I feel he can be.

The potential for demagoguery is real, as anyone who has seen Obama speak to crowds of tens of thousands must realize. It is less a danger to the country, however, than it is to the man himself, as it takes a very special man to be lionized as he has and remain sober and grounded.

The flip-side of this coin, endlessly shilled by Shrillary Clinton, is that an infectious and genuine admiration of a leader is somehow suspect or at the very least unfair. It's a bit surreal, or it would be if it were anyone other than a Clinton saying it, to hear Hillary Clinton infer that popularity is a useless quality for a leader of a democratic country.

Obama's popularity is precisely one of his strengths. When citizens genuinely admire a leader, they will trust him, they will sacrifice for him, and they will be disinterested in scandalizing him for short-term political posture. For Hillary Clinton to argue that such a dynamic must be based on delusion or subterfuge only reinforces how unlikeable she is, and how apathetic the country would be about following her anywhere.

I get the feeling that Barack Obama is running for president and Hillary Clinton is running for queen. The theme of her campaign seems to be "give me the fucking keys, get in the trunk, and shut up", whereas Obama seems to be asking us where we want to go and how fast we should drive.

Clinton seems to argue that it should be manifest for all to see that, once this ridiculous charade of democracy is over, she will be able to govern with an efficiency and wisdom that Obama is simply incapable of matching. But therein lies her fallacy; she's not running for queen, which means that "governing" will require something she has proven disinterested in, namely compromising and building sustainable coalitions.

What I fear from Obama's domestic proposals is what I fear from the proposals of every presidential candidate of either party, save Ron Paul; every one of them makes proposals based on spending money that does not exist. Obama and Clinton take this tendency quite far, as each of them promise to insure virtually every American via government mandates.

The health care proposals are indicative of the differences between Obama and Clinton, who many have rightly pointed out have essentially identical proposals on many fronts. Hillary Clinton, who is running for queen, is promising something that no Congress will ever pass. Barack Obama, who is running for president, is proposing something that, since it avoids a universal mandate, holds the promise of being passed in some recognizable form.

Where Obama makes his case, as far as I am concerned, is with foreign policy. Here is where the "hope" and "change" platitudes carry real weight, and here is where the right-wing will attack mercilessly and where potential assassins will lurk. For Barack Obama, more than anything else, is the first man to run for president in a long, long time who has the courage to reject the conventional "wisdom" about American violence.

Obama opposed the Iraq invasion when doing so was politically suicidal. He chose conviction over ambition, and he made a leap that is still not adequately recognized. He did not just oppose the tactical modalities of the invasion or the occupation; he rejected the premise of the entire enterprise.

John McCain supported the invasion from day one, and will not back down. Ever. Points for consistency. Hillary Clinton supported the invasion but then withdrew that support when it became clear that her ambitions dictated that she must. In other words, she had no problem violating international law, waging a war of aggression, and signing on for an indefinite occupation of an Arab nation; she just had a problem with sacrificing her ambitions when the war became unpopular among Democrats.

She has tried on many excuses for this shift, most of them centering on how this ultra-competent, ready-to-lead, vastly over-qualified Senator was duped by an idiot into believing provably ridiculous fantasies about Iraq. It obviously takes a delicate balance (or is it a delicate shamelessness and pathological inability to take responsibility for her actions?) to argue that Hillary Clinton was fooled by George W. Bush. The point is, Obama was not.

Recently Bill Clinton explained his wife's vote, which to date has cost a million lives and a trillion dollars and, far more importantly, Hillary Clinton's assumption of the presidency, by reminding an audience that "Hillary is the Senator from New York City. She was down at ground zero. She understood the threat and the consequences." Of course. Because Iraq was responsible for 9/11. Need we more evidence that the truth, like everything else, is a value-less tool to be employed in the service of America's one noble pursuit, namely the restoration of the Clintons' dysfunctional dynasty?

Obama was right on Iraq. There are no good options looking forward, but if we have a choice, we should take the person whose judgement was right at the beginning over the one who, five years into this war, is trying to justify herself with rhetoric that would make Dick Cheney blush. Or shoot someone in the face.

Hillary Clinton waxes un-poetic about "experience", as if only a naive naif such as Obama would not understand that in the "real world", which Clinton apparently occupies, it is necessary to wage wars of aggression. If that's naive, then so am I. And so were we as a nation, when we hung Nazis for the very same sin.

Obama talks about ridding the world of nuclear weapons, the most necessary of endeavors, and beginning that process with incremental reductions in the stockpiles of Russia and America, a realistic and tactically achievable first step. Hillary Clinton calls this naive.

Obama promises not to use nuclear weapons, which, to anyone who knows anything about what these weapons do to humans and to the Earth understands, is simply a promise not to engage in indiscriminate terrorism. Hillary Clinton calls this naive.

Obama promises to not just aim for one more electoral vote than John McCain, but to reach across every sort of divide that exists, building a workable coalition of liberals, moderates, and conservatives, in which all will give up some and in which all will gain even more. Hillary Clinton calls this naive.

Obama has his flaws, which I briefly alluded to above. More importantly, he clearly understands America's role in the world, the realistic utility of violence, and the mindset of a critical mass of the American people in a way that John McCain and Hillary Clinton don't even seem interested in.

Last but not least, we need an election about the future. Not about Vietnam, not about Ronald Reagan, not about who promises to kill more terrorists. About the future, unclouded by fear and vengeance. That's why.

New Blog

The incomparable Michael Dickerson, one of the funniest and smartest people I've ever known, has launched a blog that I urge all to visit.

www.exorcisedaily.blogspot.com

Rainy Day Women

A funny thing happens to conservatives on the way to the real world; they become fascists. I've told people for years that, if "liberal" and "conservative" actually mean anything, then I'm a conservative.

Somewhere along the way, however, the parlance of our times was cast inside a hall of broken mirrors, and the terms "liberal" and "conservative" emerged bloodied and disfigured, to the point where "conservative" means "self-righteous prick / international outlaw" and "liberal" means "terrorist lover / probable pedophile defender".

For those of us old enough, or wise enough, to realize that "conservatism", if it is allowed to retain its actual meaning, is the most American idea imaginable, it is clear that the so-called War on Drugs is the ultimate exemplar of the wholesale hijacking and mutilation of the premise of conservatism.

Ideas and ideals that fade immediately in the face of a real test are worth less than the paper they are written on or the tongue they are professed by. Just as diplomacy is the art of engaging adversaries rather than friends, the idea of conservatism is redeemed only when one allows that fidelity to that idea necessitates the tolerance of behavior by others than one would never sanction for himself.

Freedom of speech does not stop when that speech offends people. If it did, it would be no freedom at all. Freedom of religion does not apply only to Evangelicals. If it did, it would be no freedom at all. The right to an impartial trial applies to those who are probably guilty for the very same reason.

The point here is that freedom is messy. It necessitates allowing other people to do things, to say things, that may strike you as reprehensible. There is a sense that has taken hold in this country that our freedoms are much more negotiable that the Constitution would have it. Unfortunately, many conservatives are the vanguard of this apostasy.

Here's an example: I have been pulled over by police officers about half a dozen times in my life. On two of these occasions, the officer asked if he could search my car. In the first instance I consented. In the second, I refused. I refused because I know the 4th amendment to the Constitution, protecting me against unreasonable search and seizure.

Since the officer had not told me either why he pulled me over or why he felt compelled to search my property, I invoked that quaint and supposedly sacrosanct protection. When I invoked this right, I was told that I could either be searched then and there, or I could be searched "at the station". In other words, my assertion of my Constitutional rights was an arrestable offense. More succinctly, rights are crimes. So, rights are to be rhapsodized about, but when they are asserted, they are taken to be evidence of guilt. Things don't get more backwards than that.

The War on Drugs is a vast and futile artifice built on an insidious and entirely un-American foundation of illegal search and seizure, legislation of morality, mass incarceration, and criminalization of disease, poverty, and personal choice.

This argument has nothing to do with the merit of using drugs. I am not arguing that people should use any specific drugs; I am arguing that the government has absolutely no authority, under the Constitution, to criminalize personal consumption of anything, and that the cost of enforcing certain peoples' ideas of rectitude is astronomical in blood, money, and liberty.

Federal drug laws are unconstitutional because the tenth amendment, which is just as studiously ignored as the fourth, states that all power not explicitly granted to the federal government lies with the states or with the people. That's easy.

So let's pretend that the federal government gave a shit about the constitution, and that all anti-drug laws were local in nature. Even if this were the case, the premise of criminalizing consumption of any product is incompatible with liberty, that idol that conservatives bow to but largely despise.

Legalizing drugs, or sodomy for that matter, does not mean that people are somehow condoning those actions; it means that they are refusing to give the government the authority to deprive fellow citizens of their property and physical freedom for the "crime" of engaging in private personal behavior that some find distasteful. To fail to recognize this distinction is an act of willful blindness that mocks the very idea of liberty.

There are things I would never do. I would never have sex with a man, for example. I would never shoot heroin into my veins. But, more certain than either of those claims, I can say that I would NEVER consent in putting a fellow American in a cage for doing either of those things, because it would be an utter waste of the $30,000 per year that it costs one taxpayer to lock up another and because, much more importantly, it shows a contempt for liberty that no free nation can long abide.

Why do we have so many people in prison in this country? Is it because such a large share of us are predatory sociopaths? Or is it because our tyrannical government has managed in criminalizing so much of our behavior, that I know literally zero people who are not criminals? Murder is a crime. Theft is a crime. Marijuana is a plant.

When we talk of willful ignorance and contempt for liberty, those trends are only magnified by the fact that we have attempted Prohibition, which stands as the starkest illustration imaginable of the futility of legislating personal behavior that does not infringe on the life or property of others.

What did Prohibition accomplish? Did it decrease alcohol consumption? No, it did not. Despite that fact that the government made clear that it disapproved of drinking and that it was willing to criminalize citizens for the supposed crime of tying on a buzz, drinking did not decrease. What does this prove? It proves that consumption of illegal substances has absolutely nothing to do with the legality or illegality of the substance.

To believe that making a substance illegal will decrease the consumption of that substance, one must believe the following proposition: There are millions of people who would use cocaine or heroin if it were legal, but are dissuaded from doing so because they refuse to commit a crime. There are millions more who have always wanted to try marijuana, but have refrained from fear of arrest.

Any person with an average level of common sense knows this to be an absurd line of reasoning. Does anyone know anyone who would try heroin if it were suddenly legal? Does anyone know anyone who smoke cigarettes primarily because it is not a crime? Does anyone know anyone who drinks alcohol because it is legal but who would quit were Prohibition to return? Does anyone know anyone who would smoke a joint on their lunch break if it were legal, but has never tried marijuana precisely because it is not legal?

When people decide whether or not they will try alcohol, or cigarettes, or marijuana, or cocaine, or heroin, or homosexuality for that matter, the relative legality of the act is not among their primary considerations. Prohibition proved that, as if common sense were not enough.

What Prohibition did accomplish was the ascension of organized crime. How? Well, when the government criminalizes an action that a huge proportion of the citizens will participate in regardless, the government simply shifts the supplier from businessmen to black marketeers. And, since alcohol distribution was now a criminal act, the distributor governed and regulated themselves with criminal methods such as murder and extortion.

Where do gangs come from? Where does out highest-in-the-world murder rate come from? They come from the government criminalizing wide swaths of the population for actions they choose to indulge in in the privacy of their homes, however distasteful others may deem those actions.

We say we live in a free country, but I am not free to do what I choose in the privacy of my home, plain and simple. We have more of our citizens in prison than any other "free" country on earth. If I choose to smoke marijuana in my home, the government can put me in a cage. Let freedom ring.

This argument has nothing to do with the merits of drugs. It has to do with liberty. It is insulting and absurd to argue, as many do, that this is a zero-sum game in which one must either surrender their privacy and their liberty to the government or consent to life in a nation-wide crack house.


Liberty is NOT about condoning the behavior of others. It is about depriving the government of the means to invade the lives, the property, the very bodies, of ones fellow citizens, unless that citizen has deprived another of life or property. Many excuse condoning the violation of others' rights with that age-old excuse "that would never happen to me; I haven't done anything wrong."

That attitude, when applied to the War on Drugs, assumes two things. It assumes that marijuana is more important than the Bill of Rights. And it assumes that governments know how to restrain themselves. Only someone on drugs considerably harder than marijuana could believe that.


Certain portions of the Constitution, like the 2nd amendment, are clung to with such obstinate literalism that one questions the sanity of its proponents. The same person who will insist that they have the "right" to own a machine gun will insist that I do not have the right to smoke a joint. They need their machine gun, they say, to guard against a tyrannical government. Guess what, morons, it's already here.

Mitt Hits the Fan

I have to admit that I developed something of a soft spot for Mitt Romney over the last couple of months. Partly this had to do with the fact that my conservative brother was deeply invested in Romney's campaign, volunteering time and energy to spread Mitt's message. It also had to do with the fact that Romney towered over his opponents in terms of substance and competence, which isn't saying much, but which is still saying enough.


Romney got a bum rap, castigated for being a Mormon, as if the beliefs of Mormonism were any more absurd than the beliefs of Mike "I majored in miracles, not math" Huckabee or John "I'll stay in Iraq for 100 years" McCain. He was also castigated for having earned a fortune, which necessitated the bizarre spectacle of a bunch of Republicans playing Lenin to Romney's White Russians.


Lost on his attackers was this: are we really at a place in America where a man's faith precludes him from being President? Clearly, we are. Are we at a place in America where, when a man sacrifices a lifetime's wealth in pursuit of a thankless job in which he honestly believes he can serve his country, we cannot refrain from questioning his motives? Clearly, we are.

Say what you will about Mitt Romney, but had he been elected, nobody would have owned him.
Can we say that for anyone else? To ask the question is to answer it.


I was also very uncomfortable with Romney's speech on religion some months back, in which he lauded quotidian drivel masquerading as praise on all religions ("I admire the Muslims' commitment to frequent prayer...") and then castigated all secular people by insisting that "freedom requires religion." No small irony that secular folks were the only demographic other than Mormons who proved willing to vote for Romney. Know your enemy, mor(m)on. It wasn't the godless that rejected Romney; it was the God-fearing.


That said, I got a fresh reminder via Mitt Romney's concession speech of why I hate these assholes. The speech, which my conservative brother witnessed (and loved) contained two lines that let us know exactly who Mitt Romney has become and of what the price is for any length of exposure to presidential politics.


First, Romney articulated his greatest fear. Terror? Disease? Environmental catastrophe? Bankruptcy? Civil unrest? Anything remotely logical? Nope. France. Romney resurrected one of the jingoistic chesnuts from 2002, when right-wing America suddenly realized that France was the mortal enemy of the United States.


France's crime then was refusing to join with the United States in the invasion of Iraq. It was shameful for a country so rich in culture and democracy to selfishly refuse to liberate and uplift the wretched masses of Iraq. If only the French knew how well everything was going to go for us in Iraq, surely they would have joined us. Oh well, their loss. I'm sure there's some pithy French phrase for that.


Romney's biggest fear was that the "United States would become the France of the 21st century." Huh. We know that France is right-wing for "pussies", but what exactly is Romney getting at here? France is one of the richest, freest, healthiest, safest countries on Earth. Top ten, to say the least. It is more left-wing than America, and less given to waging agressive war and torturing prisoners, but hey, variety is the spice of life.


Surely we have bigger fears than ending up like France. If that's the worst case scenarion we're in pretty good shape, since 190 of the 200 nations on Earth are worse off than France.

I've been to France three times. I'll tell you, while there are certain things about French culture that I find pretentious and unappealing, there are a great many more things that any reasonable person would be amazed by. To put it simply, as I walked through Paris or Avignon, I thought alot of things. Here's something I didn't think: "Oh my God, what if the United States looked like this?!" Actually, I did think that, but in the opposite sense that Mr. Romney did; I experienced it as a hope, not a fear.


How can any sane person walk through Paris and be filled with the cold dread, the horror of the thought that such a awful fate could one day befall Akron or San Antonio? While walking along the Seine past Notre Dame, I never thought "thank God Detroit doesn't look like this." When I walked past hospitals staffed by doctors who have no idea what health insurace is, I didn't think "God, I can't wait to get back home."


I dont wan't to live in France. I'm an American. I belong here. But, let's be honest. France provides a much better life for its people than does the United States. This is the only world power that the United States has never fought a war against. This is the country that secured America's victory in the Revolution. If this is the enemy, if this is something to be feared and viewed as inferior, then we literally have no friends in all the world.


Mr. Romney's second rhetorical flourish, after invoking the horror that the United States could one day resemble one of the most beautiful and civilized places on earth, the birthplace of democracy, existentialism, and the blowjob, to quote a decidedly American movie, explained why he would devote his energies to assuring that neither Senator Clinton nor Obama would be president. Such a result would, in Romney's words, be "a surrender to terror."


First of all, only someone stupid enough to accept the rationality of a "war on terror" could contemplate a "surrender to terror." Second of all, it is preciself this rhetoric which caused the Iraq War and causes it to proceed. Romney is talking about Iraq, since no candidate has talked of withdrawing from Afghanistan or renouncing the goal of caputring and killing terrorists wherever we find them.


To say that leaving Iraq would be "a surrender to terror" implies that the war there is an American war against terrorists, pure and simple. The American military says that at least 95% of the violence directed at Americans is carried out by Iraqis of all stripes. That leaves, at the very most, 5% of the violence being carried out by Salafist jihadi groups. These are the Pentagon's numbers, not MoveOn.org's.


What about the 95%? Well, in Mr. Romney's universe, they are terrorists too. In Mr. Romney's universe, anyone who would defend their home from invasion is a terrorist, as long as the invaders are Americans. I don't need to patronize the reader by explaining how such a mindset guarantees endless war. Kick in the door. Any resistance? Terrorist!


Mr. Romney lives in a world where anyone who would not welcome an American soldier into their country or their home would gladly fly a plane into a building. It's hard for Americans to put ourselves in the position of Iraqis because we havent been invaded and violated for 200 years, but we still have our common sense. Right?


In summation: France is not the gate to hell, and Iraq is not populated strictly by camels and terrorists. The fact that these things need to be stipulated is evidence enough that, as successful and attractive as Romney seemed at first, he was seduced by the patronizing siren we call presidential "politics." Thank God he lost. If only all the others could, too.

The Democrats vs. Democracy

There are a couple of things we need to keep in mind about the Democratic Party. The first is that the Democrats were the party of the Confederacy and the party of segregation, the party of Vietnam and the party of spying on Martin Luther King. The second is that, given this background, it should not shock us that the Democratic Party has total contempt for democracy.

Here's the operative term: superdelegates. The superdelegates are the smoke-filled room elites' last line of defense against the passions of the masses, or against "democracy", if you want to be uptight about it. While both parties nominally democratized the nominating process through the last half-century, the Democrats always jealously guarded their veto power over the people. Just in case.

Superdelegates must be distinguished from regular delegates, which are akin to the electors of the electoral college. Electors and delegates are an elitist and antidemocratic check on the expressed will of the people, and either institution can occasionally exercise an outright veto over the wishes of the people, as most recently evidence in the coup d'etat of 2000, when nobody even attempted to assert that more Americans had voted for George W. Bush than Al Gore.

As corrupting as delegates and electors may be, they still roughly reflect the will of the people except in rare cases such as 2000, which proved that one exception to the rule is one exception too many and that a universal popular vote is the only way to hold any election. Superdelegates have even more of a stranglehold over the will of the people than electors.

Electors are essentially bound to vote for whichever candidate won their state's popular vote, however thin the margin. Delegates have even more discretion, often giving candidates proportional benefits, therefore wisely averting the winner-take-all flaw. Superdelegates, however, neither owe nor excercise any such discretion.

Superdelegates account for 20% of the total delegates. So, 80% of the Democratic party's electorate is nominally bound to vote in a way that in general reflects the will of the people. The remaining one-fifth can vote for whomever they want, regardless of the will of the people. This means that if there is a race with a margin of less than 20%, the superdelegates decide the winner. That race is now.

Clinton and Obama will be much closer than 20% after all the primaries are over. What then? Do we look at who has more delegates? Do we look at, God forbid, who has more votes? You know, like they do in France and South Korea and fucking Afghanistan? No, we look to the superdelegates. In the blink of an eye, millions of voters are cast aside, including the first generation of young people to be passionate about anything in 40 years. Why? Because the Democrats hate democracy.

The superdelegates are the elitists' defense against the peoples' nomination of a candidate that is deemed too flawed or radical by the elite. Looking past this contempt for the people, Barack Obama is not that candidate. He's not a bombthrower, he's not a pacifist, he's not an atheist. He can win.

The Democratic elite, however, seems to have decided that he can not win. While people of my generation find Obama's ethnicity interesting but ultimately irrelevant, it is clear that many of the party elite doubt that he can win the general election. Certainly the Clinton's have gone to great pains to remind us of this. But since half the country despises Hillary Clinton and the other half despises aristocracy and most of the planet despises the war Hillary voted for, how is she a better candidate? Well, Obama's......black.

What is it called when you define someone by their race? Oh yeah, racist. The Clintonistas assure us they're not racist, then insist that they must destroy the black candidate because Americans are too racist to vote for him. And Hitler killed the Jews to save them from the French, who eventually would have killed them all, as everyone knows. He didn't have anything against the Jews himself, mind you.

Who are these superdelegates? These few, these proud, these shameless who exercise veto power over democracy itself? Well, every Democratic member of Congress is a superdelegate. You know the Congress that has gotten tough on the Bush administration by only allowing him to suspend the Constitution for 6 months at a time rather than indefinately? Yes, those moral giants, those steel-spined statesmen, these 3-day workweek shit heads are going to tell us who our candidate will be.

We also have Democratic National Committee officials, various formerly elected Democratic officials, in short, the party elite. The pathetic, venal, perpetually petrified, perpetually bitching, perpetually powerless, even when they hold the majority, those chumps. They decide. This is unacceptable, and its made even more unacceptable when you realize that superdelegate is a synonym for Clintonista.

The superdelegates have overwhelmingly pledged to support Hillary Clinton, regardless of what "the people" decide. The people, unfortunately did not get the message, and when the convention rolls around, more of "the people", that uncouth rabble, will have voted for Obama. What's a Clinton to do? Well, they burdern is assuaged by the fact that, in addition to scores of people who owe Bill Clinton their careers, Bill and Hillary themselves are superdelegates.

Yes, this deserves its own paragraph: Bill and Hillary Clinton are going to vote for whether Hillary Clinton will be the party's nominee. Not me. Not you. The candidate and her husband and a bunch of people who used to work for her husband and are hoping to work for her. Pakistani much?

The Democratic Party, to put it simply, is poised to inflict a Bush v. Gore on itself. They could have a candidate with the popular mandate, with more votes, standing against a candidate with nothing but the arcane machination of an entrenched elite which, regardless of how you spin it, has contempt for democracy, as understood by the rest of the planet.

One of the most frequent criticisms of the Democratic Party is that they don't trust the people with their own money. Should we really be surprised, then, that they don't trust us with our own votes, either?