When it becomes Hillary v McCain

[Radar]

My cock is a lover, not a fighter.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Radar

My cock is a lover, not a fighter.

Someone needs to cut it off and give it to Obama for his mantal in the White House.

Ha. Obama in the White House.

[Radar]

Get used to that idea. It will be a reality in January.

McCain has as much chance of beating Obama as Michael Jackson has of beating Mike Tyson on a street fight. In both cases, the black guy will win.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Radar

Get used to that idea. It will be a reality in January.

McCain has as much chance of beating Obama as Michael Jackson has of beating Mike Tyson on a street fight. In both cases, the black guy will win.

I hope he wins and the dems take a complete majority for the next 8 years. The American people will get just what they asked for.

[Radar]

I'm not a Dem or a liberal or a conservative, but no matter what he does, he can't be worse than Bush 1 & 2 or Reagan. He will win.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by headsplice

That was one of the most entertaining, politically-based, cockfights I've seen in the past hour. I applaud both Radar and TheMercenary.

wow. welcome back from the territories, or the Kuiper Belt, or... wherever... long time no see.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Radar

. . . long enough to take their huntin' rifle to shoot Obama.

Out of bitterness? Or religion? Or because it would annoy everyone else in Bugsplat Junction to shoot somebody more local?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Radar

Only scary for enemies of the Constitution or champions of socialism/fascism or any other form of authoritarianism.

You aren't particularly scary to these: unlike me, you are neither willing to shoot socialists/fascists, nor to see them shot, as we are doing daily in the Iraqi and Afghan theaters of war. You become very, and irrationally, angry at the very prospect. Too much fascistosocialist sympathy on your part, I say. Don't prate to me about not coercing them -- for the fascists are coercing already, and they must stop -- or so say the libertarians. Being a disciple of freedom, I say the antidemocrats' survival is very, very secondary to their halting their coercions. Yea, tertiary. Quaternary.

It's hardly un-libertarian to shorten slavemakers' lifespans, isn't it?

[Radar]

It's unlibertarian to initiate aggression, even against someone who is using aggression against a third-party who didn't ask you for help. It's unlibertarian to use force against anyone who is not using it against you first. It's also unconstitutional to start wars with a defensive military, especially without a Constitutionally required formal declaration of war has not been made by Congress.

Libertarians are against government stepping beyond its limited authority. Libertarians are also against forcing our brand of freedom on to others.

I, and other libertarians, do support your right to go on your own or to put together a private militia to go about overthrowing monsters in other countries as long as you don't expect any support from America when you do it.

Also, I'm very willing to shoot socialists and fascists as long as they are attacking people right here in America. The people in other countries have to worry about their own monsters unless they can find suicidal, unlibertarian, war-mongering, idiots to come into their own country to help them overthrow their oppressors. Before I worry about the freedom of people in other countries, I prefer to worry about the freedom of my own countrymen. America is far from the free country it started as, and it's getting less free all the time.

[headsplice]

Originally Posted by BigV

wow. welcome back from the territories, or the Kuiper Belt, or... wherever... long time no see.

Thanks!
To Radar: why are you lumping socialists and fascists together? They are two distinct political ideologies that fought against each other.
To Merc, re: the 8 years and Democrats comment: I have hopes that it won't be worse, though politicians in general are not to be trusted. But really, they're going to have to work to make them worse than the past 8.

[Radar]

In the end, both socialists and fascists are authoritarians. Both assume that your property and earnings belongs to the state, both tell you how to live, both have no qualms about killing, etc.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Headsplice, one thing you really should understand about socialists and fascists: they are not merely brothers under the skin, they are identical twins under the skin. Google "beefsteak Nazi" for some expatiation. Fascists and Socialists fought against each other in WW2 not because they were antitheses -- they were competitors. See also Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Leftism Revisited. Believe me, you'll never look at the various brand names of antidemocracy the same way again. You'll probably have to hunt it up in university library stacks or online used book dealers; I believe it is unfortunately still out of print. I last read it about 1990.

Woo! -- maybe not! Check this on Amazon.

I am really very pleased with the behavior of this Republican President: unlike any Democratic one since LBJ, he is trying to remove undemocracies (at which LBJ quite failed), and he is concentrating the Federal government on international matters and foreign policy, rather than in meddling with internal matters and trying to push the Bill of Rights aside, as Clinton so signally did. For seven years I've heard a great deal of yelling about how Bush is destroying our civil rights, yada yada yada he did this and he did that -- while the evidence on the ground clearly shows me that no he isn't. Look around the Cellar -- are we in any wise censored? Is anyone? How many guns can't you buy, and is that number, if greater than zero, any different than it was under Clinton's misrule? It is somewhat greater than under Nixon's, if you like -- that ought to be fixed. When was the last time you were made to incriminate yourself in a court of law? When was the last time anybody was? And so on and so forth down through the Bill of Rights. It is little appreciated by the Dem Kool-Aid swillers that this Administration isn't interested in trammeling them. They're busy. Successful, too: no more planes in any more buildings. Reagan, and the younger Bush: they are both into limited government, and that is how they will go down in history. Some pundits remark that Bush less resembles Reagan than he does Truman -- a Democrat -- in that while he suffered heavily in popularity polling, he's set up and founded the policies and institutions that will pay off in the present conflict, enabling our victory. Truman did this for the Cold War, Bush for the War on Terror. The biggest detail difference I see in these protracted conflicts is the first revolved around nation-states and the second features transnational terrorists demonstrating that the power to destroy is increasingly available to aggrieved private persons, and that what used to need a nation's resources now can be attempted by a millionaire.

Radar, the antidemocratic antilibertarians have initiated the aggression -- neither you nor I need be worried about that, really ever. As antilibertarian antidemocrats, they should also be viewed as enemies of mankind. You don't seem to grasp this, and thus you are reluctant to actually replace antidemocratic antilibertarians with libertarian democrats by whatever means the savage fascists make needful. Countervailing violence is not made illegitimate by the numbers of people doing the countervailing nor whether they're in uniform, Radar. I read your opposition to removing the sources of mankind's political troubles as you making one rationalization after another to conceal a deeply xenophobic streak in your makeup. I am not crippled by xenophobia, have no need to veil it with an infinity of rationalizations for never removing a single fascist, and thus I think more clearly and more morally than you do -- or perhaps can. (I'm assuming while there's life in you, there is also a possibility of redemption.) My working assumption is that good, libertarian governance is good for any human society anywhere, and ought not to be denied anyone, anywhere, simply because they're furriners. As corollary, I consider human liberation and its consequent tendency to prosperity (viz.: America) of such importance that I cannot see a moral difference or delegitimization whether a native group performs the tyrant-excision, or an outside group like the US Army performs it. It's all being done by humans, making other humans free. Freer, if you're actually willing to accept Plan B. After all, that freedom makes prosperity is a libertarian tenet. (That prosperity demands and begets freedom is a T.P.M. Barnett one.) What kind of libertarian finds excuses, rationalizations, for not pushing freedom? Might it be a xenophobic, narcissistic one?

In fact, I don't know of any reason to deny a free society to them at all, and consider that any attempt to do so on anyone's part, regardless of how native they be, an act of at least moral violence and improper aggression, to be met with a successful campaign to neutralize such oppressors and remove the threat they present. Don't stop short of hanging such miscreants to capital-city lampposts if you want their threat removed and the success achieved. No one weeps for fallen oppressors, and highly motivated sociopaths who make it to head of state -- all too frequent a phenomenon, right? -- only create sociopathic states.

Just the kind of outfits that make us libertarians feel needed.

Then too, I distrust radicalism, even as a leavening of the lump(-enproletariat, even): the more radicalized and extremist a society is, the less sustainable its stability or its radical condition; the pendulum always swings to center. The centerpoint itself slowly, evolutionarily, incrementally travels, apparently under impetus of a people desiring not to repeat history. Though there may be something to Marx's quip about history's repeats: first as tragedy, then as farce. It would lead one to expect two-fers. A democratic society, tending as it does to longterm stability, evolves less in great sweeping changes than by increments; day-to-day stuff that passes almost unnoticed. I'm patient enough to work with that. Societal tantrums are trouble. They also tend to destroy those who spark them.

[deadbeater]

Urbane, a lot of people disagree with you. Bush had a chance to finish off al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but due to the foray in Iraq, bin Laden, the Doctor and most of al-Qaeda hierarchy found relative haven in Waziristan.

Bush called Iran, Iraq and North Korea part of the 'Axis of Evil'. Seeing Bush invade Iraq for what it turned out to be spurious reasons, N Korea and Iraq revitalize their nuclear programs, forcing Bush to halt his world-wide crusade in Iraq.

Bush got two terrorist groups elected into foreign governments (and both are a stone's throw from Israel no less). Bush stood helpless as Hezbollah killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers, precipitating in a war that all but set Hezbollah up to take over all of Lebanon.

Bush all but invited Sunni terrorists to move into Iraq ('Bring them on!').

Bush also started with a surplus and ended up with an even worse deficit than Reagan. At least Reagan's deficit spending served its directives, and consumer confidence was still high. Bush have very little to show with his deficit spending and consumer confidence is waning. At this rate of his declining popularity, the 'five percenters' would refer not to a sect of the Nation of Islam, the Nation of Gods and Earths, but instead to backers of George W Bush. Small wonder why McCain is trying to shed off the image that his presidency would constitute a third Bush term.

If Bill Clinton did all that, you would be screaming for his head, forget about impeachment. But then, all that is okay if you're a Republican.

[headsplice]

-1)Socialists are quite different than Leninists/Stalinists.
-2)The metrics of 'freedom' are not whether we can post statements on the internet and how many guns we can buy. There's also things like the expanding power of the executive, specifically the use of signing statements and the expansion of the President's Article II powers.
-3)As a libertartian, do you support the largest expansion of the federal government in the history of the United States (hint: the DHS)?
-4)Democratic societies do NOT lend themselves to long-term stabilities. That's why the US, when it was founded, was known as the 'Great Experiment.'
-5)I challenge you to name one way in which the United States is better, domestically or internationally, as a direct result of the policies of George W. Bush.

[DanaC]

Socialism and fascism are antithetic to each other.