Before you vote, think.

General Inspection Topics General Inspection Discussion
1

TODAY IS ABOUT US

[Today we take the measure of the national soul. Do we favor freedom, or an EBT card?
Do we want a government that will protect our borders, or wipe our arse? Is it about what you can do for your country, or what your country can do for you?
This is the fork in the road, and today we decide. This is the date upon which the future of the American Republic hangs.
And the outcome won’t be about parties or candidates. It will be about us.
Across the ballot, from top to bottom, this year’s election is notable for its clear choices. There are few shades of gray, few close calls. In race after race, the differences between candidates are stark and unmistakable.
The Democrats are true liberals and the Republicans are true conservatives.
In that, the parties have served well. For 200 years we have had a see-saw battle between the two great political philosophies of our nation. They have gone under different names and had evolving priorities, but it has always been about liberal versus conservative. And it has always been about a pitched fight between the two. That dynamic tension, that swinging pendulum, has been part of our national brilliance and success. We are not a nation of consensus, we are a nation of conquest – the electoral victory of one philosophy over another.
Today will be that.
The victory of one philosophy over another.
More specifically, today will be a decision about liberalism. Have we had too much, or have we had not enough. Do we need to recoil from our socialist big-government bent, or do we need to more fully embrace it?
One side offers one, and the other side offers the other.
And which we pick will be about us.
Because elections are about mirrors. Philosophical mirrors which the two parties hold up. We look in one, and we look in the other, and in one of them we will see ourselves. In the other one we will not. Simply put, voting in America is about which political mirror we see ourselves in. Which party speaks for our priorities, our values, our hopes and our soul.
The type of car you drive is a statement about you, not the dealer who sold it to you.
How we vote is a statement about us, not the parties whose candidates we vote for.
So today we take the measure of the national soul. And we will read the results very differently. Some will vote for echoes of 1787, when Madison wrote the Constitution. Others will vote for echoes of 1848, when Marx wrote “The Communist Manifesto.” But either way we will push forward from a foundation in the past. One based in America, the other in Europe.
It will be an important check of national sentiment and changing national mores.
America was a nation forged with the ethic of rugged individualism and passionate freedom. All we wanted from government was to be left alone. We were of all people the first and most free, and Liberty’s torch illuminated not just a harbor but a nation.
Nowadays, the government is bigger and we are smaller. The ability and necessity to make life’s big decisions are somewhat abridged, as choice and consequence are mutually stripped from us a paternalistic government.
Whereas happiness was originally framed a pursuit, it is now seen as an entitlement. The things we believe we are owed have grown from freedom to food. Whereas once we had rights given by God, we now have entitlements given by Government.
Whereas government in America, where the people are represented and sovereign, was established to reflect and serve society, it now directs and defines society. We are not the government’s masters, we are its servants. Our whole lives are spent at its beck and call, from the content of our school lunches to the size or our toilets and the nature of our health care. We cannot eat, crap, suffer or die without falling under the dictate of government.
We have replaced a foreign tyrant with a domestic tyrant.
Or we have crafted government as a tool of justice that strips the rich to dress the poor. We have created for ourselves a Mother in Washington who gives to us safety by taking from us freedom.
Some will rejoice and some will weep.
Some will see glory ahead and others will see ruin.
But both can’t be right. One must be deluded, dishonest or false. Because one road cannot lead to both heaven and hell.
America has a choice today.
It is a moral choice.
And today’s results will be an insight into the American soul.

2

well written and accurate.

3

Charles Krauthammer: The choice today

WASHINGTON – “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” That was Barack Obama in 2008. And he was right.

Reagan was an ideological inflection point, ending a 50-year liberal ascendancy and beginning a 30-year conservative ascendancy.

It is common for one party to take control and enact its ideological agenda. Ascendancy, however, occurs only when the opposition inevitably regains power and then proceeds to accept the basic premises of the preceding revolution.

Thus, Republicans railed for 20 years against the New Deal. Yet when they regained the White House in 1953, they kept the New Deal intact.

And when Nixon followed LBJ’s Great Society – liberalism’s second wave – he didn’t repeal it. He actually expanded it. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, gave teeth to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and institutionalized affirmative action – major adornments of contemporary liberalism.

Until Reagan. Ten minutes into his presidency, Reagan declares that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Having thus rhetorically rejected the very premise of the New Deal/Great Society, he sets about attacking its foundations – with radical tax reduction, major deregulation, a frontal challenge to unionism (breaking the air traffic controllers for striking illegally) and an (only partially successful) attempt at restraining government growth.

Reaganism’s ascendancy was confirmed when the other guys came to power and their leader, Bill Clinton, declared (in his 1996 State of the Union address) that “the era of big government is over” – and then abolished welfare, the centerpiece “relief” program of modern liberalism.

In Britain, the same phenomenon: Tony Blair did to Thatcherism what Clinton did to Reaganism. He made it the norm.

Obama’s intention has always been to re-normalize, to reverse ideological course, to be the anti-Reagan – the author of a new liberal ascendancy. Nor did he hide his ambition. In his February 2009 address to Congress he declared his intention to transform America. This was no abstraction. He would do it in three areas: health care, education and energy.

Think about that. Health care is one-sixth of the economy. Education is the future. And energy is the lifeblood of any advanced country – control pricing and production and you’ve controlled the industrial economy.

And it wasn’t just rhetoric. He enacted liberalism’s holy grail: the nationalization of health care. His $830 billion stimulus, by far the largest spending bill in U.S. history, massively injected government into the free market – lavishing immense amounts of tax dollars on favored companies and industries in a naked display of industrial policy.

And what Obama failed to pass through Congress, he enacted unilaterally by executive action. He could not pass cap-and-trade, but his EPA is killing coal. (No new coal-fired power plant would ever be built.) In 2006, liberals failed legislatively to gut welfare’s work requirement. Obama’s new HHS rules does that by fiat. Continued in a second term, it would abolish welfare reform as we know it – just as in a second term, natural gas will follow coal, as Obama’s EPA regulates fracking into noncompetitiveness.

Government grows in size and power as the individual shrinks into dependency. Until the tipping point where dependency becomes the new norm – as it is in Europe, where even minor retrenchment of the entitlement state has led to despair and, for the more energetic, rioting.

An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment – the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance – continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state.

If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent nonliberal.

Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoration of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlements and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievements alone would mark a new trajectory – a return to what Reagan started three decades ago.

Every four years we are told that the coming election is the most important of one’s life. This time it might actually be true. At stake is the relation between citizen and state, the very nature of the American social contract.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071. Send email to letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

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What a ridiculous load of flowery crap.
You don’t have a choice, you have the illusion of choice.
There is no difference between the parties and people enjoy being slaves so long as the chains don’t rest to heavily on them.

Find something better to do with your time than vote.
Play with your kid, catch up with an old friend, lay in the grass and find animals in the clouds.
Anything you do is more productive than voting.

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I disagree. If you still have to think about it, I’d prefer that you don’t vote…

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Says the idealistic anarchist who thinks any government is too much. :roll:

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Yeah, what’s your point?

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There are big differences between the candidates, but I’m with Andrew on this one because on the issues I care about (closing the shameful Gitmo P.O.W. camp, the regressive national debt that requires our Federal Reserve to print until our dollar becomes toilet paper, and our military invasion/occupation of smaller countries)… the candidates’ positions are identical, IMHO.

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That your ideal society can never be achieved.

You can’t put more than a few people in close proximity without government happening.

So unless you have our own sovereign island with about 3 people on it, you will always be frustrated as government is not going to go away.

There is a clear choice unless if you are paying attention.

**There are no perfect candidates.

Do you want more or less liberty?**

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I’ll play.

More. Which candidate offers me more?

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If you have to ask…

Take added regulations alone and that should clear it up for you.

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Regulation isn’t the main thing restricting my liberty… not even a close second.

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It chips away at it piece by piece until it’s all gone.

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What regulation comes even close to wealth confiscation in restricting liberty? I can’t think of many. Maybe requiring our children who can’t afford less expensive private school or who’s parents can’t afford to stay home and home school to attend the overpriced, less effective public school monopoly… would be a regulation that restricts liberty in a big way.

Which candidate wants to crush the overpriced, crappy, public school system so that private schools wouldn’t have to compete with that government-run monopoly? I didn’t here either candidate promise to hire less teachers.

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It’s all part of the same plan Nick.

At least Romney wants Bernake gone.

Bernake has enable the spenders to hide their excesses behind borrowed money. 40 cents of every federal dollar spent is borrowed. That is what is debasing our currency and killing our spending power.

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If you are worried about regulation, you should be worried sick, head-in-the-toilet sick about confiscation of wealth through quantitative easing. Printing and printing and printing of those little pieces of paper with faces on them so that your government can militarily occupy 130 smaller countries is what is ultimately going to restrict your liberty through reduction in purchasing power of the U.S. dollar. It’s happening already. Go to the grocery store with a $100 bill and you’ll note that your liberty to fill your shopping cart is restricted.

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Hoping for even an unachievable goal is better than being deluded enough to think you can make a difference by participating in the ruse.
Your participation indicates your acceptance.
Government won’t go away as long as people consent to being governed.
That may mean never, but it may not.
There are no perfect candidates because there is no such thing as a “good” government.
At this point you’re like Tom Hanks at the end of Saving Private Ryan, shooting his pistol at the tank that’s about to run him over. Only in real life, there’s no P51 to come swooping down from the heavens to blow it up.
So…good luck with that.

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Hoping for heaven with no means to get there is also useless.

Your idealism gets you exactly nothing and has never existed anywhere except in the imagination.

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P.S. See my message board Avatar. That’s the future for the once great U.S. dollar.

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Maybe yes maybe no. I think deflation is just as likely.

Another four years of Obama, Holder and Bernake must be avoided.