dropdeadpolitics

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Nostalgia is a dangerous thing.  It infects the mind and slowly takes hold altering opinions and beliefs despite what history said.  I know many people who think the world and our nation is getting worse.  The percentage of Americans who think the country has gotten off track is growing, and while some of that can be attributed to the current economic times we’re facing, it seems consistent with the effects of nostalgia.  Politicians evoke it all the time.  Nostalgia itself isn’t the problem.  I look back on my childhood and remember the good times and smooth out some of the roughness of the bad times.  We all do it.  The problem is when we apply it to our history and our politics.

Politicians love nostalgia, particularly the conservative ones.  They like to convince their base that things are changing too fast and would be better if they were just like they used to be.  The entire notion of conservatism is not founded on nostalgia, but on preserving traditions and the status quo.  Of course no rational minded conservative would preserve things that are violations of human rights even if they used to be practiced.  The irrational ones do, but they are the ones besides themselves with nostalgia.  And politicians, who are smarter and know better, understand that getting the votes of those people requires an emotional plea recalling a “better time” when things weren’t so different like they are today.  Of course liberals do it too.

The governor of Virginia recently let loose a bit of nostalgia that’s landed him in hot water.  The favorite nostalgic game many Americans like to play is that of the Confederacy during the Civil War.  Those who like to be nostalgic claim the war wasn’t about slavery but state’s rights…to have slaves that is.  There was no single bigger issue than slavery at the time of the Civil War and even at the time of the Revolution slavery was an issue.  We simply delayed the argument for nearly a hundred years is all.  The Confederacy is looked back upon as a romantic fight for what they believed in.  Sure it was misguided, but they were defending their home from a more powerful aggressor and we Americans sure do love the notion of such a fight.  So are the Muslim terrorists we’re fighting today, and yet I doubt many of those who look back with nostalgia on the Confederacy would afford Al Qaeda the same kind view.  Maybe in another hundred years or so?  I won’t hold my breath.

But this is where nostalgia gets us into trouble.  The South in particular has been very good at remembering the past the way they’d like to.  Pleasant plantation life, fine warriors like Robert E. Lee, and a host of other things that have some basis in truth but lack the complete picture.  Lee was brilliant, but also foolish.  He took risks that no commander should’ve and he finally paid for them at Gettysberg and in ma.  And yet if you were to tell that to a Southern Nostalgist (no, it’s not a word but it should be) they’d argue all day how wrong that assessment of Lee is.  It is however historically accurate.  The Confederacy gets very good treatment by historians and those in the South despite the simple fact that they were fighting to deny human beings their rights.  That’s the simple truth of it, but of course they claim the truth isn’t so simple.  And yet on other things, such as fighting Muslims terrorists, it is that simple.  That’s the first rule of nostalgia.  The simple rules that apply to others don’t apply to their own nostalgic version of history.

As for the world getting worse, I frankly don’t see it.  In fact, I think the world is getting better.  I know many of us like to think that the 1950’s were great times for America, but ask black people about how great those times were and you’ll get a different story.  Today we are living closer to the high ideals laid out in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.  We are still not there, but closer than we were when we allowed slavery to exist, or giant corporations to form trusts that could abuse the market and the government and in turn the people.  Women didn’t used to be able to vote.  They could be beaten with a switch no thicker than a man’s thumb (hence the origin of the phrase ‘rule of thumb’).  We used to allow children to work twelve hours a day or more and pay them next to nothing for it.  We used to have no safety net for the poor, elderly, or unfortunate.  And we used to have standards of living that were much lower.  We didn’t understand diseases the way we do now nor have the medicines and medical procedures to cure them.  We didn’t understand our universe the way we do now and as a result we’ve seen great advancements in both our technology and our humanity.  We still have a long way to go of course, but I just don’t see how things are getting worse.

Arizona is going about illegal immigration the wrong way.  The recent bill to pass the state Senate, that has already passed the House, is headed to the governor.  He should veto it.  The bill doesn’t address the actual problem.  Rather it merely addresses the symptoms.  It’s a common push by conservatives who think that tough enforcement of the law against illegal immigrants is the answer.  It’s not.

Immigration works like a flowing fluid.  When you have air in a balloon, it’s at a higher pressure than the air outside the balloon.  Let the end go and the air rushes out to fill the massive void in the room.  This is referred to as a pressure gradient.  There is an economic gradient that drives immigration, both legal and illegal, in the United States.  It’s not as simple as we have jobs and they want jobs, that’s just what’s visible on the surface.  The real issue is why are there jobs that illegal immigrants are sought after for.  This is the heart of the issue as it seems as Americans we have reached a point where we are refusing to do certain jobs.  I can’t say if it’s declining work ethic or being sold on an American dream that is all gains and no hard work, but somehow we’ve lost our willingness to do these jobs.  I know some will shout back at me that we haven’t.  But that’s frankly wrong.  If we were lining up to pick lettuce in Arizona, then there would be no illegal immigrants filling those tasks.  If we were so eager to clean houses, then why is there room in the labor market for illegal immigrants in that industry as well?

The answer isn’t a lack of work ethics a lone.  I’ve seen plenty of hard working people out there.  The other part of the answer is our culture.  We have a nasty habit of praising certain job types and looking down on others.  When someone tells you they clean houses for a living, you know it’s hard to hold back the judgment.  In fact, it’s hard not to pity people who do what many of us consider ‘menial’ jobs.  Career snobbery is part of the problem.  No one ever judges someone for being a lawyer or a vice-president of a failing bank or a doctor.  Of course the irony being that none of those professionals could function without someone to take out their garbage, clean their offices, watch their children, or pick the crops that become their food.  Without someone doing those ‘menial’ jobs, society would cease to function.  And yet we tend to think that such jobs aren’t necessary or are less important.  That’s wrong, they are vital.  More so than a lawyer.  Who cares about the law if you spend all your day growing food to last you the year?

The other part of this problem is in two parts.  One is the American Dream, and the other is the undervaluing of labor.  Our government and our corporate plutocracy is hard at work selling us on the American Dream.  Everyone should own their own home, right?  Look how well that one worked out for us.  We think America is a house in the suburbs with two kids and a dog, two cars in the garage, and never having to say no to the things we want.  Within reason of course.  We subscribe to the more is better policy, like most humans do, and our society embraces that natural instinct to horde.  Wal-Mart’s slogan is “save money, live better.”  In other words, buy a bunch of cheap crap and you’ll have a better life.  That cheap crap of course is made overseas because even labor in Mexico is too expensive for them.  How ironic is it that Wal-Mart passes itself off quite successfully as an American institution with nearly 90% of it’s products are made in China?  What’s even better is that so many of the ignorant citizens of this country actually buy into it.  And so we push a lifestyle that involves a too big house to hold our too much stuff so we can pretend to be happy.  And we all know you don’t get the too big house and too much stuff picking lettuce in Arizona.  Why?  Because the owners of those fields would rather undercut their competition anyway possible so they do it by cutting their biggest expense which is of course labor.  And in order to do that, they cut wages to the point that most Americans refuse to take the job given they can do slightly better at McDonald’s, though we have plenty of snobbery when it comes to working in fast food too.  This underpriced wage makes it that much easier for illegals to fill the void.  It’s simple economics.  If you have a job that needs doing and you offer five bucks an hour and no one applies, you aren’t paying enough.  Food tends to be a high demand item.  Not being able to sell it, especially since almost all our food comes from large industrial farms that have plenty of means to move their product, is rare.  What that means is you can offer 7 bucks an hour and raise your price of the lettuces, which would be much less than two dollars a head, and fill the job.  Assuming seven dollars is a high enough wage.  Remember, your potential American employees are looking for that too big house with too much stuff from Wal-Mart to fill it.  They might not take anything less than ten dollars an hour.  And we wonder why illegal immigrants flood the nation in spite of stricter laws designed to keep them out?

So how do we fix it?  First, we stop with the right wing, conservative clinging to an idea that doesn’t work.  They simply don’t want to address the real problem because doing so would hurt their donors, the business community.  So they attack the people who have no political clout, the illegal immigrants.  We have to realize that this is our problem too, not just theirs.  We have to start accepting that unadulterated consumerism isn’t equal to freedom and liberty.  It’s the opposite.  That’s how slaves are made.  We need to start accepting that our lettuce and other goods and services in industries that are hiring cheap illegal labor are going to get more expensive if we hire Americans to do the same work.  There’s no getting around it.  The labor market demands a certain wage and that is what it is.  We will have to live with a medium sized house that is properly furnished and outfitted.  I know, not very American of me.  We need to be willing to look at the issues actual root causes, not the ones that we see on bumper stickers or the ramblings of the likes of Tom Tancredo of Colorado.  We have to be willing to address our own faults that contribute to the problem instead of trying to blame it completely on the immigrants themselves.  Finally, we need to remove race and talk of culture from the issue.  Immigration isn’t about either.  It’s about economics.  If the culture and race aspects distract us, they will take over until we find ourselves divided over which group said what instead of unified in stopping the economic gradient that creates the influx of immigrants.

Barack Obama announced that he will lift the drilling ban on coastal regions in the Gulf and off the coast of Virginia.  I know this will upset environmentalists and rightly so.  But the measure will include other things such as a clamp down on drilling in sensitive areas in Alaska, fuel standards for trucks and cars, and the purchase of hybrid vehicles for federal fleet.  Barack Obama has proven he can compromise, but the question is will those on the left accept it?

I know what liberals are thinking.  They’re thinking we had eight years (but it was really only six) of Republican rule in Congress and the White House.  They forced their stuff on us, tax cuts, wars, Patriot Acts, and now it’s our turn.  While that may sound fair, it’s far from mature.  And the reality is, liberals voted for some of those things that were allegedly all Republican ideas.  Apparently both sides enjoy shoving things down throats, which raises a number of awkward questions that are beyond the scope of this discussion.   As liberals, we like to think that we are the champions of the environment but that’s a bit of a myth.  There are many conservatives who do quite a bit for the environment.  Some, such as Teddy Roosevelt, have been thrown out of the conservative camp as a result of it by talking heads like Hannity and others, but the reality is conservatives have their fair share of environmentalists.  Even George W. Bush, Mr. Oil himself, has many green technologies at his Crawford Ranch.  The house has solar panels, geothermal pumps, and the recycling of water from the house to use for irrigating the landscaping around the home.  How many of us liberals have homes like that?  Not that many.   You could argue we don’t have his money, but if the cause is so important to us wouldn’t we find the resources to do what we could?  My point simply is that those of us on the left aren’t the only ones worried about and taking action to help the environment.

As for compromise, Obama has a history of it.  He did it back in the Illinois state legislature and was praised for it by republicans there.  Anyone voting for the man with the expectation that he would be a crushing conqueror of right wing policy simply didn’t know enough about whom they were voting for.  The health care bill is a prime example of a compromise.  You know how I know?  Because no one’s happy with it.  Those on the right didn’t get what they wanted in reform and those on the left didn’t either.  They each got pieces of it, but not all they wanted.  And so they will whine about that, but the truth is, that’s compromise.  And this proposal is reeking of compromise as well, both on energy policy but also as a bit of a peace offering over health care.  Liberals may question angrily why Obama would do this, but we must remember that not every American is a liberal and liberals alone didn’t vote Obama into office.  He cannot cater his policy specifically to us and get re-elected.  The alternative to Obama in 2012 isn’t promising for liberals anyway.  The president is an office that was supposed to be above the partisan bickering by design.  We’ve since altered that design under the guise of democracy, but the truth is Obama is playing the executive role that all good presidents realize they must do.  They must compromise.  There is no such thing as a mandate that lets them steamroll their agenda over opposition.

The 2010 elections are racing towards us and the Democrats are worried.  But the truth is, the Republicans aren’t really on solid footing either.  Their reputation still hasn’t recovered from 2006 and while Karl Rove is predicting victory, he also predicted victory in 2006.  The Republican strategy is to oppose him at every turn and force his agenda to crash and burn.  Well they lost on health care, they lost on the jobs bill, and to make matters worse, Obama is now stealing their thunder on energy independence.  He’s not the stubborn ideologue they were hoping.  You can’t blame Republicans for assuming he was, after all so many of them are these days.  Obama’s compromise may anger some of us on the left, but it’s necessary to keep the right from forcing their agenda…uh…down our throats?

We like our Presidents in this country.  We like the President, typically, more than Congress.  And given most of us can’t name the Supreme Court Justices nor what they do, the President gets a lot of our attention.  When we elect Presidents, we look for certain qualities.  Strong leader, someone who sticks to their guns, someone who will go in and change Washington, someone we’d have a beer with, and someone who can answer those important calls at three in the morning.  There are others that are more specific to each voter, but for the most part people boil Presidents down by these qualities.  The funny thing is that not ONE of our founding fathers who became president would likely live up to his list above.  The list above is a modern perversion of the presidency and it has the potential to take us down the road of tyranny.

Do we really want a strong leader?  We already refer to the president as the ‘Leader of the Free World’ and yet no where in the Constitution do we give the President such a lofty title or duty.  George Washington went by Mr. President or at least preferred to go by that title.  If it was good enough for him, why is it not good enough for us now?  Our founding fathers feared a “strong leader.”  Libya, Cuba, Iran, Iraq (well not so long ago at least), North Korea, North and South Vietnam, China, the former Soviet Union, present day Russia, most African countries, they all have “strong leaders.”  Men who command power via the perceived qualities of strength.  They decide the direction of their country and their country follows.  None of these ideals are American.  Nowhere in the Constitution does the president have the authority to do that.  Executive orders are a somewhat gray area and I find it odd that my alleged conservative friends don’t take issue with them given they are not explicitly granted power in Article Two of the Constitution.  Note that it’s Article Two, not Article One, that is for the president.  He comes second, not first, and while he balances the other two branches he does not rise above them.  Congress has largely given war powers to the President to respond to a rapidly changing world.  He is the commander-in-chief of the military (not of civilians despite us also using that powerful and strong title for him), but this does not give him the power to send us to war.  We’ve given Presidents power out of fear.  We did it after 9/11 and we’ve done it many times before.  We think we need a strong leader to make tough decisions in fearful times.  We don’t.

Sticking to their guns is something the presidency is supposed to embody though not in the manner we’ve seen lately.  The presidency was designed to be just a bit more insulated from the whims of the people than the House of Representatives or even the Senate is.  The President’s job is to run the executive branch and that ability can be hampered greatly if the whim of weekly changing public opinion gets in the way.  Of course we’ve let that part happen while at the same time voting for ideological hard heads who talk up a tough campaign and then get into office only to realize they don’t have the authority to stick to their guns.  Whoops.  But we admire them for going down in flames and taking the country with them.  Whether it’s Reagan’s supply side economics or Bush Sr.’s ‘read my lips’ promises to Clinton’s insistence on always taking the middle of the road ideology to Bush Jr’s everything.   And now Obama will show us how he intends to play healthcare reform.  He has two choices.  He can play it as a president or as partisan ideologue who feels compelled to give into his bases’ wishes for the sake of getting re-elected.  I hope for the former but expect the latter.

Why would we want one person to have the ability to change how our government works?  I know why, it’s because we watch too many movies.  We see these heroic loners who go in and shake up the whole system.  Neo in the Matrix, any Western, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, all of these movies talk about how one person can change the world.  Well that’s just not true.  It sounds very inspirational especially with Hollywood scoring in the background but our Constitution makes it virtually impossible for any one person to change how the government works.  Congress is supposed to be slow and to drag out debate.  That’s not a sign of it being broken but rather functioning as intended.  It should be hard to pass large and sweeping legislation no matter how vital it is because when you make it easy you subject it to shifts in the political winds and the possibility that someone will find a way to destroy the delicate balance of democracy we live in.  The President is not given the power to change Washington.  In fact, he has the least ability to do so.  His ability to change things without oversight is limited to the departments that report to him and they are all limited severely by the law and the courts.  The President can’t write his own bills despite our apparent desire that the President should as we expect President’s to get major legislation passed so we can score the office holder based on quantity.  It’s a stupid standard and a stupid thing to expect from the Office of the President.  Most importantly, it’s not the President’s job.

My favorite is the guy I’d like to have a beer with.  The common every-man.  A comedian whose name I can’t recall said, “Next time you’re in a bar having a beer, take a look around.  See any presidents?”  Of course not.  They are all drinking single malt 100 year old Scotch at country clubs that would never let any of us in.  Even the Reagan’s and Bush’s are.  Just because someone wears flannel instead of a suit doesn’t make him an ordinary or common man.  We elect blue blood, highly educated rich men to the presidency.  The last common man that was president was Harry Truman and it’s not to say that he was better or worse than an FDR or a JFK, but he was a common man.  Too often, we ascribe common sense as something we think Washington has little of.  But common sense has become a virtue of the ignorant, something that Sarah Palin claims to have loads of and yet I wouldn’t trust her with a potato gun much less nuclear weapons.  The Presidency requires someone who can empathize, not someone who simply looks for the common solution every time.  Harry Truman wasn’t a Harvard graduate, but he was able to see beyond the common sense solution and consider the consequences.  He didn’t drop the atomic bomb because it made sense, he did it because he had more reasons to do it than not.  Problems that our government faces don’t always have a right and wrong answer.  They often have several answers and any number of them can be acceptable though different solutions.  A president needs the ability to see that.  Not to have the stain of what they learned in the first eighteen years of their life dictate their actions as President.  I don’t care if my president drinks beer or the finest liquors.  It’s an irrelevant and silly measure of the person in office.

And then there’s the ever important three in the morning phone call.  I don’t doubt the White House gets many calls at three in the morning.  I wonder how many the president sleeps through.  Probably many more than we think.  Making those decisions, like the atomic bomb decision above, isn’t something anyone is ready for until they have to do it.  There is no litmus test for that.  A candidate can say one thing on the campaign trail and get into office only to discover that what they thought they knew is wrong or that the process won’t let them meet their prior goals.  The three in the morning phone call is a moment where there is no way to measure how someone would respond.  Anyone who can answer how they would respond is speculating at best and lying at worst.  We can only hope we vote for someone smart enough to surround themselves with people smarter than them who may have a good answer for that phone call.

So what should our president be like?  Well ever since Washington, they’ve sort of gone towards what we have today.  Adams faced bitter partisanship that paralyzed his administration at times.  Jefferson became the first of many small government promising presidential candidates to expand the powers of government as he did with the Louisiana Purchase.  This unproven theory of small government flies in the face of what most of us want from our country which is to be number one in everything.  You don’t get there by being cheap.  I prefer my presidents to be like Dwight Eisenhower.  Maybe not like him in terms of all of his politics, but his demeanor.  I don’t care if the president plays more rounds of golf than the number of bills they push through Congress.  I’d prefer the president to do their job outlined in the Constitution.  And nothing more.  I’d prefer them to be Mr. President, and no more.  They don’t need to lead the free world or even us.  They need to administrative branch and let Congress do its job.  They need to get declarations of war instead of using the War Powers Act.  They need to stop being celebrities and we need to stop making them into something more than they are.  A person we vote into a temp job.  They are an office holder, a caretaker, not a leader.  For a nation that talks up our Constitution, we need to live by it a bit more.

There’s one quality of Americans that isn’t as talked about as the others.  We talk about our patriotism (defined as blind devotion to the government regardless of their choices), our love of liberty (for the most part), our sense of individualism (unless you’re a failing big business), and our optimism (well, maybe this one has expired).  However it’s our love of all things abundant that is both our most consistent and somewhat insidious trait.

The notion of abundance is easy to see.  We used to have abundant everything.  We would say things like, “we’ll never run out of trees,” and you can insert whatever you like in place of trees be it water, food, money, it doesn’t matter because they were all seen as so abundant we could never use them up.  We were founded on and sold on an idea of abundance from day one and it’s the one trait of this country we will likely give up the hardest.  We believe it’s a right, though it’s hard to find in the constitution.  If we can afford it, then we can afford to waste it should be printed just below “In God We Trust” on our currency.

It’s everywhere from our breakfast to our healthcare.  Bacon and eggs was a traditional English breakfast designed to add energy and protein first thing in the morning before people went out to work the fields.  Today, a full English breakfast comes with fried mushrooms, fried or grilled tomatoes, fried bread or toast and sausages.  In America, it can come with steak, pancakes, French toast (not sure how the English feel about that), chicken fried steak, hash browns, fried potatoes, and/or corned beef hash.  In addition to three eggs and four strips of bacon.  Oh and sausages are available too.  Following this breakfast, we then either go to work where most of us sit in a chair or at best stand and walk a bit, or on our days off sit on the couch and watch other people play sports that barely burn off all the calories we just consumed.  And we have the gall to wonder why we’re getting fat.

It’s in our energy policies too.  Last year, Barack Obama had the audacity to suggest that perhaps we couldn’t go forward with the notion that we can always have our houses cooled and heated to those two magic numbers, 72 and 68 degrees.  Of course “conservatives” (funny how conserve is in their namesake) lampooned him for saying it.  But he was noting, having lived in Indonesia and seen just how much abundance we truly have, that perhaps we have to give a little too.  We all know that all six billion people on the planet cannot live like we do.  There aren’t enough resources for that.  And yet, we pretend as if we want the whole world to have what we have.  In reality, we don’t realize that in order to do that we have to give up some of our abundance.

The worst offense of Continue reading “America’s Abundance” »

Liberty is a tricky thing.  I don’t think many of us really understand it.  It’s both powerful and delicate.  It can be taken with the slightest of ease and yet it can rally people to overcome the most impossible odds.  We live in a country that claims to cherish it.  It’s up there with the other two inalienable rights, not above or below but sits as an equal.  Adlai Stevenson once said, “The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live and our fear breeds repression.  Too often, sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-Communism.”  Of course you can replace anti-Communism today with anti-terrorism.

And we are very afraid of terrorism.  Even as the events of September 11^th start to become another isolated tragedy in our history, we still fear terrorism.  We think it’s lurking around every corner.  Never mind than when it comes to terror attacks the US has been coddled and spared.  Ask Israel or the Palestinians about fearing terrorism.  Ask the people of Iraq or Pakistan or India or even those who lived in Northern Ireland just back fifteen years.  Perhaps that’s why we’re so afraid.  We have never really been threatened by terrorism.  But we act like we know.  We’re much like the sixteen year old who just had one fleeting experience with life and is convinced they know things they really don’t.

We started with a Patriot Act, which is a clever name for something that expands government powers over our lives.  Remember that patriotic cloak Adlai mentioned.  Then we moved on from our past tramplings of liberty that date back before Lincoln, extend through his presidency, to FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans, to our use of Rendition, to suspending Habeas Corpus and the Geneva Convention, finally to no longer outsourcing the torture and doing it ourselves.  We kept it offshore though.  We prefer our torture, like our terrorism, to happen in third world countries.  I’m sure India will come up with a whole torture industry and will be able to provide the services at a fraction of the cost of using American labor.

We started restricting free speech to zones.  We said ridiculous things like “you don’t criticize your country in a time of war.”  That’s exactly when you do criticize it.  We started wire-tapping like it was going out of style.  We trust our government when it says that everyone at Gitmo is a terrorist yet we don’t trust them when they tell us anything else.  When the government said the Branch Davidians were criminals, many of us did not agree.  Those same people now accept the government’s destruction of liberties and ideals without question and have the gall to attack those who do question it as unpatriotic or un-American.

I could blame the republicans but Continue reading “Liberty and the Politics of Terrorism” »

My cousins used to live in a rural part of New Mexico just south of Albuquerque.  They had a good amount of land and two cows.  One cow was appropriately named Chuck.  They sold them to a local slaughter house. Chuck and his friend whose name escapes now some fifteen years later probably made for some good eating.  I’ll come back to the cows later but allow me to swing this towards something more relevant for a political website, abortion.  In my opinion, it’s the single most divisive issue in American politics and our nation as a whole.  I don’t have stats on just how divisive it is so I suppose something else could sit higher on the divisive scale which I imagine is something like the Richter Scale where each number is ten times more divisive than the one that comes before it.

So we have two sides…people oppose letting women choose to have abortions and those who support letting women choose to have them.  Each side has a clever name, pro-life and pro-choice respectively.  Of course neither label is quite accurate although the former is much more deceptive.  Pro-life sounds like they are ardent defenders of life in all its glorious forms.  In reality most who oppose abortion simply oppose abortion.  They gladly ate Chuck.  Chuck was alive.  I don’t know too many pro-lifers who adamantly oppose war in all its forms, nor do I know many who think we should stop genocide in foreign countries (you know, policing the world) or feed the starving around the globe with our tax dollars despite the many innocent children who will die this very day from hunger.  But I’m nitpicking and getting off-topic, right?  What this really is about is why some feel it’s not acceptable whatsoever for their tax dollars to fund abortions.

I understand not wanting to pay for things that one doesn’t agree with.  I demanded refunds for my share of the Iraq War for the last seven years and have heard nothing back from the IRS.  Maybe this year?  I didn’t vote for George W. Bush and my Congressman didn’t vote for the war resolution either.  Unfortunatley my senators did, so maybe I’m obligated to pay 1/3 of my taxes.  I’ll accept 2/3 of my tax dollars refunded electronically to my account, just in case the IRS happens to be reading this.  Of course, that will never happen and the government will continue to take my taxes to fund various programs I disagree with.  Arguing that abortion is somehow different because it’s a moral choice ignores that fact that war is a moral choice that kills people.

As for the morality of abortion, pro-choice is the most in line with liberty.  Those who oppose abortions have every right to oppose it by not having them.  That should be enough for anyone who cherishes liberty, but they want to go one step further by claiming they are fighting for the liberty and rights of the unborn.  They like to point out that famous phrase that says, “No person shall be deprived of life…” Of course they ignore the most important word in that sentence which isn’t the word “life” but rather the word “person”. What does it mean to be a person?  Not everything alive is a person.  Chuck wasn’t a person.  He had a name and he became a pet to my cousins, but they nor their parents nor any of us would call Chuck a person.  Chuck was not murdered.  Murder is Continue reading “Abortion and Morality Through the Eyes of a Progressive” »