[ExI] What Makes People Vote Republican

[Emlyn]

2008/9/19 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
>
>> > ...These people are not libertarians they are just poseurs... Fred
>
> I see this as yet another problem we libertarians have.  We cannot even
> agree among ourselves how to define ourselves.  We end up a motley
> collection of a lot of odds and ends with no party cohesiveness.
>
>> True. But I think more common are the people who have
>> libertarian values, but vote republican or democrat based on
>> the hot-plate issues at the moment...Kevin Freels
>
> Roger that.  Consider this election year. They try to convince us that if we
> vote for this ticket then we are racists, or if we vote for that ticket we
> are sexists, and if we vote for neither we are both.  But everyone can see,
> even non-yanks, that the major parties have put forth the weakest candidates
> in memory.  This should be obvious regardless of which party one favors:
> both Palin and Obama are lightweights.  No, scratch that, they would need a
> lot more experience to be lightweights.  They are both featherweights.
> Lionel Hutz vs Marge Simpson.

I'm pretty amazed to hear anyone say that about Obama. To me, he is
the most compelling candidate the Democrats have run in my living
memory. The things he is proposing to do, particularly related to
corporate influence on politics, boggle the mind. From outside the US,
it has always seemed strange that you allow such overt corporate
manipulation of your democracy, culminating in the current executive
level regulatory capture.

And yes, as someone else said in this thread, the idea that the
democrats are socialist is pretty amusing; both of your major parties
are incredibly right wing seen from outside, so much so that you have
interesting colourings of right wing (neocon? christian right?
libertarian right?) which we just don't see in Australia. Something
like the apocryphal multifarious names for snow amongst the Inuit.

And back to Obama, all he's really proposing is to take the US a
tentative step toward the kinds of policies that have been quietly
working in the rest of the west for, what, a hundred years?

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com - my home
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