Comments

Left and right and one-party rule — 45 Comments

1. “The NeverTrumpers see support of Trump as “turning into the thing we hate.”

   I don’t want to derail the conversation but you’re giving them WAAAAAAAY too much credit.

   Let’s keep it simple. President George W. Bush…

   Started a war that got hundreds of thousands of people killed and the primary justification for that war turned out to be untrue.

   Authorized the spying on Americans without warrants.

   Authorized the torture of prisoners.

   Yet I can’t recall ANY NeverTrumper ever having the slightest qualms about George W. Bush. They were certainly perfectly happy to have his brother as the GOP nominee in 2016.

   There are, of course, perfectly legitimate reasons to disapprove of and even oppose Donald Trump. NeverTrump has NOTHING to do with those reasons.

   Mike

2. neo wrote, I maintain that the left’s goal is to be in charge forever: one-party rule. And they believe in breaking the rules to get there, because the goal is so important and they know what’s best for society and for you.

   Or, for some on the left, power is simply the goal rather than some sort of misguided idealism. I think neo is separating two things that are really just one thing–lust for power, be it direct or indirect power, over everthing.

   Hey, I know what is best for a whole bunch of people that I personally know. Yet, I would never force them to take the course of action that I just know so well would be best for them. Heck, I would not even force them to hear my unsolicited advice that includes recommendations that I just know so well would benefit them oh so much.

   Our leftists, Pol Pots in the making, on the other hand, seek to burden us with their crackpot ideas.

3. MBunge: I agree completely.

   As an independent the fact is both parties have changed significantly in my lifetime. (I am a solid Gen X / born in the 70’s). It used to be that each party had an area of strength. Democrats were always looking out for the little guy and the Republicans looked out for the small business owners. Neither one of those are in any way accurate today. The Democrats could give a crap less about the little guy (especially if not high up in their victim groups) and Republicans can’t help but support huge corporations in passing crippling regulations, rules, and health care initiatives, and expanding the H1-B Visa program. If one thing unites both parties it is the fact that although they say the right thing with the appropriate concern they never do anything that actually benefits regular Americans. They simply line their pockets by passing legislation that benefits their benefactors. There is never any end to spending, no focus on improving the economy to benefit American workers, and absolutely no focus on rule of law. In my humble opinion we now have two progressive parties with little to no differences in how they will actually govern. Once Trump is gone we are in trouble.

4. Darn–incorrect html coding above. Here is the correct layout:

   neo wrote,

   I maintain that the left’s goal is to be in charge forever: one-party rule. And they believe in breaking the rules to get there, because the goal is so important and they know what’s best for society and for you.
   Or, for some on the left, power is simply the goal rather than some sort of misguided idealism.

   I think neo is separating two things that are really just one thing–lust for power, be it direct or indirect power, over everthing.
   Hey, I know what is best for a whole bunch of people that I personally know. Yet, I would never force them to take the course of action that I just know so well would be best for them. Heck, I would not even force them to hear my unsolicited advice that includes recommendations that I just know so well would benefit them oh so much.
   Our leftists, Pol Pots in the making, on the other hand, seek to burden us with their crackpot ideas.

5. Trump is a horse of different color. He is unconventional, brash, and drives almost half the people and 98% of the msm crazy. I have come to appreciate his combative nature.

   The hard left is perfectly willing to channel Pol Pot to achieve their totalitarian goals. Republicans are too polite to think about slaughting democrats. There lies the difference.

6. Let’s keep it simple. President George W. Bush…

   Started a war that got hundreds of thousands of people killed and the primary justification for that war turned out to be untrue.

   MBunge: I say, let’s keep it simple with the facts as opposed to the “Bush lied; people died” fantasy that many find satisfying.

   Here’s the official version and it still looks good to me:

   “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (2002)”
   https://web.archive.org/web/20021102072524/http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021002-2.html

   Read that and get back to us. There are over twenty counts and all but the WMD items are slam-dunk true.

   As to WMD: Just about everyone — Democrats, Republicans and other Western leaders at the time — believed Hussein had WMD for good reasons. He indisputably had possessed WMD and even used them against Iranians and Iraqis. He wanted more. He was had been working for more WMD, including nuclear. Although the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire required Hussein to accept weapons inspectors he kept playing cat-and-mouse games.

   Furthermore, WMD were found in Iraq, just not stacked-to-the-rafters stockpiles of them. Then there’s the question of what happened to Hussein’s WMD. The Duelfer Report documented truck convoys transporting something to Syria on the eve of the Iraq War.

   If you want to hash this stuff out again, I’ll be here. I’m sure tired of AlwaysTrump coming in on the side of Code Pink and anti-war Democrats with the same self-righteous ignorance.

7. MBunge:

   I disagree. You are incorrect.

   Williamson himself doesn’t appear to have been a Bush fan, for example (see this). Nor was George Will, a doctrinaire NeverTrumper, a fan of Bush (except quite early on). Au contraire and he was rather vocal about it:

   [George Will] eventually criticized what he said was an unrealistically optimistic set of political scenarios. In March 2006, in a column written in the aftermath of the apparently sectarian bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra, Will challenged the Bush administration—and U.S. government representatives in Iraq—to be more honest about the difficulties the United States faced in rebuilding and maintaining order within Iraq, comparing the White House’s rhetoric unfavorably to that of Winston Churchill during the early years of World War II. Will described the optimistic assessments delivered from the Bush administration as the “rhetoric of unreality.” He criticized the Bush Iraq policy, and broader White House and congressional foreign and domestic policy making, in his keynote address for the Cato Institute’s 2006 Milton Friedman Prize dinner.

   What you said applies to some NeverTrumpers but not to others. One of the things I believe you and others ignore is that NeverTrumpers are not a unitary bunch. Some also didn’t like Bush; some did.

8. Started a war that got hundreds of thousands of people killed and the primary justification for that war turned out to be untrue.

   This is the left’s version. Interesting you are talking about “NeverTrumpers.” The WMD argument was made by Tony Blair to get Parliament to approve. Nobody knew if Saddam had revived his program which was well along in 1991. Bush did NOT use that argument.

   The Bush argument that was used by the left more than any other was Wolfowitz’ argument about why sanctions did not work. Iraq “sits on an ocean of oil.” Which was true and the reason the Europeans were sending Saddam the goods he wanted.

9. Yes, this is the question of our generation: when the opponent takes the gloves off, do we keep the gloves on? Shame them for it? Fight back on equal terms? Hit back twice as hard?

   In WWI, the Brits did not use poison gasses first. When the Germans used it, the Brits used it *more*. The same pattern held for many nasty weapons.

   My hope is that we can expose just how awful the Democrats have become and voters will reject that, but it’s tough when the media, the bureaucracy, and the education establishment is on their side.

   …and it sucks to have to go out and harvest ballots in California to complete with their slimy tactics.

10. I was not opposed tot he Iraq invasion at the time. I thought there was a possibility that Arabs could rule themselves without tyrants. Iraq seemed a better test case since it had had a middle class. I knew some of them but they had all left and what had remained was tribal. The nation building was a mistake, especially with a swamp creature like Bremer in charge,

11. Huxley, you are right.

    Apart from the Right to Keep and Bear arms, the other main subject of my incredible time-wasting foray into Internet debates, was the topic of the Iraq war, and the Valarie Plame brouhaha.

    The same conclusion.

    Saddam needed killing and we had a casus belli cup overflowing; tough shit regarding the Republican Guard and the Highway of Death; Joe Wilson was a demonstrated liar who was caught out orchestrating his agenda with his wife and then David Corn; the 14 words were not “The Cause”, … etc, etc.

    Was Iraq a political and religious crap hole, and we stepped in it? Yeah. But there were no good alternatives. Maybe the Kurds will one day show that some of the effort was not only worth it, but noble.

12. “Valerie”

    Oh… NOW editing shows up …

13. Was Iraq a political and religious crap hole, and we stepped in it? Yeah. But there were no good alternatives. Maybe the Kurds will one day show that some of the effort was not only worth it, but noble.

    The level of violence in the last year in Iraq is the lowest it has been since 2003, with the death toll running at less than 10% of what it was at the peak of the insurgency in 2006-07. Roughly 85% of the deaths appear to be occurring in provinces which have a critical mass of Sunni Arabs. Which is to say that the annual civilian death toll in the Kurdish and Shi’ite provinces is now down to under 400 per year.

    Per the Maddison Project, per capita product in 2016 was the highest it had been (in real terms) since 1990, and double what it had been in 1998. The country remains a monoculture (fuel exports account for about 1/3 of GDP), but no more than it was 50 years ago. (Per capita product declined by 75% in real terms between 1968 and 2003 – the country suffered terribly under the Ba’ath Party).

    Contrary to what the President predicted in 2004, Iraq’s parliamentary institutions haven’t imploded.

14. Iraq seemed a better test case since it had had a middle class.

    Not many places are lacking a corps of merchants, professionals, and salaried employees.

15. Nor was George Will, a doctrinaire NeverTrumper, a fan of Bush (except quite early on). Au contraire and he was rather vocal about it:

    George Will began publishing his work in 1973. Bar Ronald Reagan, he has despised every Republican president to hold office in that time. He was less florid about it in regard to Bush the Younger than he had been in regard to Bush the Elder.

16. Democrats were always looking out for the little guy

    Actually, Democrats were looking out for social workers, public interest lawyers, public employee unions, and the general run of labor meathead. All of these sectors have clients, of course. (L/t welfare recipients, street criminals, and school administrators, among others).

17. in his keynote address for the Cato Institute’s 2006 Milton Friedman Prize dinner.

    A prize given him after his 1,000th column on the perfidy of campaign finance regulation, no doubt.

    Read Will in 1978 and you’ll laugh out loud that he got an award from CATO.

18. One of the things I believe you and others ignore is that NeverTrumpers are not a unitary bunch.

    Well, some are collecting a salary from Pierre Omidyar, some from Jeff Bezos, some from the latest Sulzberger scion, some from PBS, some from NR, some from the Council on Foreign Relations, some from the Ethics and Public Policy Center…

19. Neo –

    Here’s the nut of that Williamson piece to which you linked:

    “President Bush was not wrong in his desire to take the fight to the enemy; this was, in fact, an admirable inclination. But a more effective and prudent strategy would be to exclude the enemy rather than seek him out.”

    Written in 2014 about a military strategy that got hundreds of thousands of people killed…and you think THAT proves Williamson has any sort of real disdain or disapproval of George W. Bush?

    As for George Will, this from Commentary…

    https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/iraq/george-wills-dizzying-shift-on-the-iraq-war/

    …demonstrates that Will was a huge supporter of George W. Bush and the Iraq War…right up until the public as a whole started to turn on both. Which, admittedly, does put him a step above other NeverTrumpers.

    Mike

20. Huxley –

    Weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, biological, and chemical, are mentioned TEN TIMES in ten different paragraphs in the authorization to which you linked.

    It remains simply true that the MAIN reason provided for the Iraq War turned out to be false.

    Go gaslight someone else.

    Mike

21. MBunge: Dream on yourself. The historical WMD stuff was all true. How inconvenient for you.

    Come back if you want to get down to brass tacks on this and good luck.

22. Right on cue:
    https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/08/the-remainer-tyranny/

    You couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of the ridiculousness of the radical left. There they were on Whitehall yesterday raging against Boris the ‘dictator’, while at the exact same time the section of the political class that these leftists support – the Remainer elite – was threatening Boris with jail if he doesn’t obey its demands to stay in the European Union. If anything has the whiff of dictatorship in the UK right now, it is this alarmingly authoritarian urge to imprison the prime minister if he refuses to extend the UK’s membership of the EU. Yet Corbynistas and other so-called progressives were on the streets screaming blue murder about Boris’s ‘dictatorship’-style proroguing of parliament while turning a blind eye – or giving a rousing cheer – to the pro-EU elite’s increasingly tyrannical determination to defy the people and keep the UK in the EU for longer.

    Yes, we have now reached the ‘keep us in the EU or we will send you to jail’ stage of the Remainer tyranny. This furious, anti-democratic wing of the elite, who make up the majority of the contemporary establishment, has been drifting towards extreme authoritarianism for two years now. They openly discuss overriding the largest democratic vote in British history. They condemn newspapers that use strong language to describe Remainer extremism. They make deals with the European Union above the heads of the prime minister, the Cabinet and the people to ensure that we stay in the EU for longer than planned. And now they warn the PM that if he doesn’t follow a new law insisting on an extension of the Article 50 process – and of the UK’s membership of the EU – then he will go to jail.

23. (Spiked continued)

    These people are out of control. They are turning the UK into an entirely undemocratic nation. Such is their arrogance, their aloofness from public opinion, their loathing for the millions who voted to leave the EU, that they are willing to destroy democracy itself in the name of thwarting the people. …These people really do believe, like jumped-up Joe Stalins, that those who defy their undemocratic diktats ought to be punished severely. Including by imprisonment.
    …
    It is now essential that we stop referring to the 21 ‘Tory rebels’ and other Remainers in parliament and in the media as ‘moderates’. Because there is nothing moderate about trying to overthrow the largest act of democracy this country has ever seen or about threatening with imprisonment a PM who refuses to facilitate this overthrow. That isn’t moderate – it is extremist, reactionary and dangerous. These people must be stopped as a matter of urgency. We need an election so that we can clear out this class of people who hold the rest of us and our democratic rights in such open contempt.

24. AesopFan: spiked is the latest addition (and I don’t have many) to my RSS aggregator. I’m pleased with this newbie.

    Party on, spiked!

25. https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/09/12/progressive-free-speech-law-citizens-equality/

    Two weeks ago, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals advanced free speech rights by holding that a video company could not be required by law to make videos of same-sex weddings, even if it chose to make videos of opposite sex weddings. This case should not be a hard one. As Judge David Stras noted for the majority, there can be no doubt that the First Amendment protects videography just as it protects films and photographs
    …
    Unfortunately, there is a dissent in the case, which provides more evidence, if more evidence is needed, that progressives are willing to abandon their traditional support for a robust First Amendment when it gets in the way of their core political objectives, like expanding the scope of antidiscrimination law. Judge Jane Kelly, an appointee of Barack Obama who was mentioned as a possible replacement for Antonin Scalia, would distinguish between “independent artists” who enjoy full free speech protection and mere artisans like the Larsens who receive none. She would expand the scope of public accommodation law far beyond its traditional limits, essentially making all businesses a kind of public accommodation. She expresses concern that it might be hard to make distinctions between videographers and other service providers, as if the difficulty in drawing lines militates against protecting free speech. Each of these moves is likely to become familiar in the progressive playbook, and as such, deserve more extended consideration.

    Judge Kelly wants to ensure that her opinion does not require professional filmmakers like those in Hollywood to make films celebrating events they do not like. It is obvious that that such a requirement would violate the First Amendment. (It would not be in the progressive interest either, because almost all “independent artists” lean left).
    …
    Kelly’s analysis creates class-based differences between those who enjoy the right to create expressions of their opinions and those who do not. Who is to judge who is an independent artist and who is just an artist for hire? Are independent artists not also influenced by a mix of ideological and commercial considerations in what they choose to film? Such a regulatory structure resembles a licensing regime, in which the government shapes who can speak, a practice that First Amendment was emphatically meant to reject.

    The realistic way to understand this progressive version of free speech doctrine is that it wants to constrain a sector where inconvenient messages might be sent while continuing to empower the independent artist sector which can be counted on to send the “right” messages.
    …
    Judge Kelly’s dissent again demonstrates the growing willingness of progressives to abandon their historic concern with the right of everyone to express themselves.

26. “The NeverTrumpers see support of Trump as “turning into the thing we hate.” neo

    Giving them the benefit of the doubt, NeverTrumpers fail to grasp the difference between the cop who kills a criminal with his gun and the criminal who uses his gun to kill an innocent. Both kill, both use a gun. Only the willfully obtuse fail to grasp the difference.

    “President George W. Bush…

    Started a war that got hundreds of thousands of people killed and the primary justification for that war turned out to be untrue.

    Authorized the spying on Americans without warrants.

    Authorized the torture of prisoners.” MBunge

    Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Islam restarted the war. Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda recruits are responsible for those who died. And, the primary justification for the war was never publicized. Instead, a justification for the war was offered that every major democrat (less Obama) had previously advanced.

    The Patriot Act authorized the spying on Americans who were in contact with elements and individuals overseas with whom there was evidence of connection to Islamic jihadists.

    Waterboarding is not ‘torture’. It is coercive. Absent coercion, you in effect support the deaths and maiming of America’s defenders. Nor do the Geneva Conventions apply to terrorists.

    You fight terror by gaining leverage over an enemy by attaching to their aggression, what for them are intolerable consequences.

    The Marquess of Queensberry Rules and the Geneva Conventions are NOT intolerable consequence for terrorists.

27. MBunge:

    Nice moving of goalposts.

    You wrote the following: “Yet I can’t recall ANY NeverTrumper ever having the slightest qualms about George W. Bush.”

    Wrong, period.

    Now you move the goalposts and say you want it to be a qualm that YOU judge to be sincere enough, at a certain point in time, and of a certain time.

    Not to mention that George Will, a committed NeverTrumper, voiced lots of qualms about Bush much earlier than Williamson, and sounded plenty sincere.

    And that’s just what I found in a couple of brief minutes of looking.

    And then there are probably at least 20 posts I’ve written here over the years and countless comments about the run-in to the Iraq War. It’s all been hashed over here many many times.

    In addition, I don’t know when Williamson started writing for NR, but at his Wiki page most of his stuff is from much later than that. So I don’t even know if he was writing about Iraq at all during the years 2003-2008, for example.

    And you thinkyou are the one to decide what the heart of the Williamson piece about Iraq that I quoted was about? How about this?

    President George W. Bush famously proclaimed that in the Middle Eastern democracy project, “We’re turning the corner, and we’re not turning back.” In the event, we have turned many corners, and around each of them we’ve found the same thing: death and frustration.

    What is the purpose of the American military? President Bush had an expansive view: “In Iraq, we are helping the long-suffering people of that country to build a decent and democratic society at the center of the Middle East. Together we are transforming a place of torture chambers and mass graves into a nation of laws and free institutions. This undertaking is difficult and costly — yet worthy of our country, and critical to our security.” At the time, President Bush’s sentiments struck more than a few as naïve, and they have not grown more persuasive in retrospect.

    You’re wasting our time with this.

28. Part of the problem is that the “Left” of today would be unrecognizable, ideologically, from the Left of 50 years ago. If they listened go today’s rhetoric, they would have instantly said, “Why, that sounds like Communism. We know where that leads too. No thank you.”

    But, here we are… right back where we were before we ever knew what Communism was really like. Such a short memory the public has…

29. Roy Nathanson:

    The leftists I knew 50 years ago thought Communism was peachy keen. So I’m not sure what you mean.

30. I suspect Roy means by “they” the rank-and-file “normal” Democrats, who would have considered themselves to be “left” of center, but not “leftists” in the way we use the term now, rather than referring to the actual Leftists included in the Party.

    The Left is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow – and they are the same breed as the Soviet Communists.

31. The left is what they have always been. Those who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.

32. Part of the problem is that the “Left” of today would be unrecognizable, ideologically, from the Left of 50 years ago.

    I think you mean they’d be barely recognizable to labor meatheads, ward heelers, ordinary elected officials within the Democratic Party, and standard-issue Democratic voters. On campus, in metropolitan newsrooms, in odd corners of city hall, in and amongst grant-funded non-profits, they’d be quite recognizable. Ordinary liberals in these venues tended to oscillate between some degree of resistance to these types, indulgence of these types, and general fecklessness. See Allan Bloom’s account of Cornell University in 1969. The professional schools pretended the controversies were someone else’s problem (for which Bloom didn’t blame them), the natural science faculties pretended the controversies were someone else’s problem (for which Bloom did blame them), the humanities faculty indulged and even encouraged disorder. It was only in the social research faculties that there was resistance (and not of the utmost vigor).

    You can see a replication of this pattern in Pelosi’s non-handling of The Squad.

33. Ken Masugi, American Greatness mag: Pink Political Scientists vs. White Men

    You know President Trump’s politics of disruption is succeeding when political scientists begin paying attention. Aroused from their slumbers, startled profs are even revising the old syllabus and lecture notes. Many political science departments are seeing booming enrollments.

    What Trump means for the practice of politics has the opportunity of improving the scholarship about politics. Just as he put the meaning of the consent of the governed back into politics with his disruptive policies on trade, foreign policy, and immigration, and above all with his assault on political correctness, so thoughtful students of politics need to reexamine whether their scholarship has accorded democratic legitimacy its proper place. Why should we obey certain other people? Political “science” has set this key question further and further back from its central place in democratic self-government.

34. How did sheltering behind the letter of the law work out for Thomas More, when he confronted men driven by appetite and power?

    I was once challenged by someone with the following hostile question:

    “So if I beat up your wife, does that mean that you can then beat my wife?”

    I said “No. In such a case a man would be justified in putting the quietus on you, not your wife”

    It’s always possible to parse a question a little more finely in order to get at the real issue. And if you see the issue as one of your personal liberty and lifeway and traditions, and you see the rule book as existing in the first place in aid of your right and the right of others to maintain the same, then the question looks a little different; as do the rules of when and how to abide the rule book: and to whom and when they apply. Self-help after all, is still a principle recognized as fundamentally legitimate by rational people everywhere … Canada, England, Sweden, and batteries not included

    If on the other hand you imagine that the rule book exists to promote human solidarity, and you are just an element in that Kumbaya project, that the rule book still applies in a game where only one abides and demonstrably aims to abolish the game itself, then you will come to a different answer.

35. For the record, I would no more want to life under a one part “right-wing” regime, than I would wish to live under the thumb of a group of snooty 1950’s country club matrons.

    And though I didn’t actually experience that, I saw just enough of it in the 1980s/90’s to know I wanted no part of being suffocated by the right-wing, any more than the left.

36. “to live life”

37. DNW on September 14, 2019 at 2:29 pm said:
    How did sheltering behind the letter of the law work out for Thomas More, when he confronted men driven by appetite and power?

    * * *
    This is part of what is driving the Ahmari-French debates, although Almari is not any kind of acknowledged spokesman for the Right, although French purports to be and is published as such.

38. DNW:

    But that’s exactly the point: where to position yourself between the two extremes, so you don’t end up like More and you don’t end up becoming what you hate?

39. “DNW:

    But that’s exactly the point: where to position yourself between the two extremes, so you don’t end up like More and you don’t end up becoming what you hate?”

    I’m tempted but hesitant to say – because it’s just occurred to me – that there may be something partially akin in operation to the “Liar’s Paradox” so-called conundrum in some of these instances … wherein a pseudo-predicate or referentless sentence is taken as having a troubling existential import … when the fact is, that we’ve overlooked the problem that there is not a valid predication under consideration but rather an empty one which gives the appearance of reflexivity.

    But I’ll have to consider this further as it relates to the class membership problem in the application of the law. Could be just a will-o-the-wisp that crossed my mental screen … LOL

40. AesopFan on September 14, 2019 at 2:59 pm said:

    DNW on September 14, 2019 at 2:29 pm said:
    How did sheltering behind the letter of the law work out for Thomas More, when he confronted men driven by appetite and power?

    * * *
    This is part of what is driving the Ahmari-French debates, although Almari is not any kind of acknowledged spokesman for the Right, although French purports to be and is published as such.

    I’ll have to read that.

    It causes us to ask ourselves what “principles” are in the first place, and what they are in aid of. And I mean this when they are taken seriously and not just mooted as elements of highfalutin rhetoric.

    So, what are first rules or axioms of interpretation and operation, and how, and why are they arrived at to begin with?

    One important question to be answered then, regards the extension of the category or membership class to which the principle applies.

    Universalism has been the parsing rule among liberals for more than a hundred years now … but ironically the justification for an ever-expanding class of coverage was based on a notion of a increasingly revealed nature common to all men; which is precisely what is now rejected by progressives both explicitly and implicitly, in this age of existential and radical diversity.

41. This is a very weird theme.

    We just had a special election in NC…because Republicans engaged in voter fraud. AFAIK, this event is not analyzed on these pages, even thought it would naturally inform us about the accuracy of this theme.

    But Brexit is. Here, the right wing party called for a referendum and is not honoring the results of said referendum. Because they lost. Not unlike NC. But what does this demonstrate in Neo-neo land?

    It demonstrates that the left is opposed to democracy!

42. We know how to do nation building successfully, but Dems are no longer willing to support it:
    find a pro-capitalist, anti-corruption dictator willing to support free markets & capitalism, and support them as authoritarian leaders. Like Pinochet, or Rhee (of Korea, too seldom discussed), or Singapore’s Lee Quan Yew. Not so unlike many of China’s post Deng crony capitalist leaders — supporting fairly free markets allowing buyers more choices.
    Then democracy.

    Democracy before established market capitalism hasn’t worked anywhere, and didn’t work in Iraq. Democrats demand democracy first — but most poor folk, if given the vote, vote in favor of promises of more “free” gov’t money.
    Irresponsible / unsustainable voting.

    Dems are pushing for one-party rule, like in CA; like in most colleges.

    The biggest Rep failure in the culture Wars is giving up the fight to get Rep Professors hired, and to accord higher status, and money & influence, to Rep intellectuals. Like the almost unknown Thomas Sowell.

    I favored the Iraq War – why no mention in these comments of the 17 different UN Security Council Resolutions that Saddam violated? I have 4 kids. A key guideline for raising kids: choose the boundaries on their behavior that you are willing to punish. Those are the real rules – when the kids break those rules, they get punished. “Rules” without punishment for violations are not real rules, merely guidelines, suggestions; they are somebody else’s opinions.

    Not easy as a parent; not easy for the world. Not fair in the world – no real way to “punish” the USA, nor Russia, China, or other nuclear powers. Except maybe with trade.

    After Saddam was overthrown, Bush should have followed Gen. Gardner’s plan, and got out, and let them work it out / fight it out without the US. Of course, Dems would claim for every problem: Bush/USA broke it, USA owns it…

    No. Those who do the bad things are the bad people. Who has how much responsibility for stopping the bad actors? In the US, it’s the US gov’t. Outside of the US, it’s the responsibility of the gov’t. But what if it’s the gov’t full of bad people, like Saddam, doing bad things, like murdering 30,000 Kurds in one city?

    Still no general answer to this, because neither is the US a World Policeman; nor does the US agree that the (child rapist supporting) UN should be the World’s Policeman.

    Lots of Dems think they want a UN – world gov’t. As the gay & women hating Muslims have gained huge influence at the UN, there is a lot LESS talk about the UN being the world gov’t. But Dems still want one, united, PC world — with forcible re-education for any who disagree.

43. “Just for the sake of argument wouldn’t the right also prefer one party rule? : ^ )”

    This is important to understand. We can vote for one group of masters, or we can vote for the other. But we can also vote for *no masters at all*. The idea that the purpose of government and of democracy is to protect the individual’s right to be an individual, and not a puppet.

    I dislike political parties, but I’m more favorable to a group of politicians who don’t see me, or anyone else, as a means to an end, but rather as the end to the means.

44. Democracy before established market capitalism hasn’t worked anywhere, and didn’t work in Iraq.

    Define ‘worked’? And tell me why you fancy it didn’t ‘work’ in Eastern Europe.

45. manju is very, very confused. As you would expect from someone who needs to troll in order to keep his flophouse room stocked with beefaroni.

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>