Voting For Bush, I guess...

I'm a Libertarian, darnit, and I'm voting for Bush. It really ticks me off, but there it is. Michael Barnarik is a space cadet as far as I am concerned. I have also begun leaning towards actually being in favor of the US having invaded Iraq, rather than merely hoping that since we're there we better do a good job of restructuring it.

My favorite Socialist president of the US is FDR, and as far as I am concerned, he was just a few steps short of being a Communist at heart. And look at World War II, which was FDR's Iraq. In the first place, Japan attacked us, not Germany, yet the day after we declared war on Japan, we declared war on Germany. But they hadn't attacked us! We could have gone for four years beating Japan into submission without once making a stir about what was going on in Europe. In fact, we could have settled Japan's hash in two years, not four, if we had concentrated on it to the exclusion of Germany.

But no, we declared war on Germany, who hadn't attacked us, though, as Japan's ally, they had a relationship with Japan, and even had secret high-level meetings with each other.

So, what we ended up doing was defeating the Germans first, and then the Japanese, and in both places we created freely-elected democratic governments, governments which remain friendly to us to this day, and have been allies with us in important ways.

So, here's George Bush facing HIS Pearl Harbor --- 9/11. And recognizing that the Taliban in Afghanistan is harboring the perpetrators of the attack, goes to war with them and in a couple of months they're out of there. Iraq is some sort of festering craphole that had some sort of relationship with Al-Qaeda (apparently Iraqi officials did secretly meet a number of times with Al-Qaeda officials, in and out of Iraq), but they didn't attack us on 9/11. So GWB "declares war" on them (in the modern version of declaring war, anyway) and cleans their clock in a couple of weeks. Straightening out the place gets under way.

So, three months before Iraq is due to have its first free elections in thirty years (or is it since ever?), Afghanistan has theirs! And a government is freely elected. Not a perfect government, but it HAS to be better than that crock of crap they had before.

And what will happen in Iraq? Surveys of Iraqis indicate they are looking forward to elections and plan to vote despite terrorist threats. So, it looks like they will elect a government, too.

The ultimate outcome of all this is unpredictable. But it cannot be worse than it was.

And as far as civilian casualties are concerned, the number of Japanese, German, French, Chinese, Russian, and Phillipino civilian casualties in WW2 greatly outnumber the entire present-day populations of Afghanistan and Iraq. So what is the verdict? We should never have fought against Japan and Germany because many civilian deaths would result?

And we shouldn't have fought a revolution against the British, either, because of all the civilian and military casualties that resulted. We should still be enjoying our British chains these days, I imagine.

And the complaint that we're getting a more centralized government courtesy of the Republicans? Absolutely correct! But we are headed that way anyway! R's or D's, this country will be a fascist state within a generation (see Leonard Peikoff's "The Ominous Parallels"). So this means we should vote for Michael Badnarik, who will save us? Poppycock. About the only thing Badnarik can do is get arrested for trying to serve papers on the debates because they wouldn't let His Irrelevancy in --- and not even be able to get press coverage of even that! So, get a grip: THE SKIDS ARE GREASED AND WE ARE GOING DOWNHILL. We might as well free a few countries from brutal dictators while we're on the way, IMHO. At least that way we'll have something to comfort ourselves with, even if the Afghans and Iraqis screw up and elect some mullah to be head of state.

Kerry is a Manchurian Candidate in any case: it's very clear HE's the wrong choice.