Happy Independence Day! Here's How You "Must" Celebrate!
Matt Welch | July 3, 2008, 10:46am
Any time a presidential candidate follows the phrase "loving your country" with the word "must," a shiver runs through me, and not in the Chris Matthews way. Here's Barack Obama yesterday, as part of his week-long patriogasm in the run-up to Independence Day:
loving your country shouldn't just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it.
First of all, as reason columnist Greg Beato has amply documented, it's getting harder and harder for happiness-pursuing Americans to watch their own damned fireworks, thanks to politicians of the nanny-boo Chicago school. Second of all, who died and made this guy the arbiter of what "loving your country must mean"? He's been musting all week, too:
[P]atriotism must, if it is to mean anything, involve the willingness to sacrifice - to give up something we value on behalf of a larger cause. [...]
For the rest of us - for those of us not in uniform or without loved ones in the military - the call to sacrifice for the country's greater good remains an imperative of citizenship.
Sacrifice for the greater good, sacrifice for the greater good ... where have I heard that before?
Read John McCain's alarming views on national service here. Barack Obama's various bad ideas on the subject can be found here. Paul Thornton warned us about national service back in May, and in the June issue, Gene Healy explained just how and why it came to pass that "Today's candidates are running enthusiastically for national preacher-and much else besides."
Other Matt | July 3, 2008, 1:40pm | #
I believe exactly two things about him, policy-wise:
1.) He's for open government. That he has been unambiguous and clear on from the get-go and is my primary reason for supporting him now.
2.) He's a pragmatist who wants to keep his options open, and not be tied down to specific ideological pronouncements. I vastly prefer this to a man (*cough* Bush *cough*) who cannot adapt to new evidence if it contradicts their ideological presumptions.
1) I assume you mean the yellow brick road over the rainbow blown up your backside at high volume sunshine on his website. Rather than waste bandwidth, find something there that is a) workable, and b) is something we don't have already, and c) actually would result in some outcome as a result of it being there that wouldn't happen otherwise. You can't, I tried. You have to actually read what it says, and pay attention to what it doesn't say.
For example, he advocates that people have five days to comment by email on proposed legislation. We don't have this already? It also presupposes that we as a public are informed about things like line items shown as $100M really are $3.1B as in the recent farm bill, but it's ok because they were black farmers I guess. That minor detail aside, even the congresscritters themselves were largely unaware of what they were voting for, so I fail to see the value in saying "Ok, you have five days to comment, go now!" and having spambots from the Ukraine send comments about how badly some guy named John Sanchez wants to show us his tits, but perhaps you and I differ on that.
I see no great shining beacon of open government anywhere, I see a morass of redundant recordkeeping and a focus on people being "heard", whatever the hell that means, but no description whatsoever as to what end will result, nothing indicating things like real time polling (dangerous as it presupposes people know what they're voting on, but it's "open").
I would ask you, why do you trust the "openness" of a man who is obviously so lacking in "openness" and so full of intentional obfuscation in terms of providing his true positions on significant issues?
2) "Keeping options open", you're presupposing that his "options" include only those which are "good" to you, or I guess you're only including those by using this description as a good thing. They don't. As long as politicians "keep options open" while striving for authoritarian government,that leaves all options on the table, including the whole subset that results in "bad for everyone".
Just a note, you resort to defining "against Bush" as your final comment. To vote against someone many times results in voting for someone far worse, which is exactly what I fear with the ignorance of the public and Obama's obviously accomplished ability to be devoid of true substance. They hear a nice sounding speach, and with joe-like absence of thought, they talk about how wonderful the guy is without really knowing what the guy stands for. What they're doing is projecting their version of "good" on his future actions, with no basis to do so. If he's "keeping options open", then he really stands for nothing, and "change" is at best undefined, at worst, well, far worse.
