“There is an opinion,” Washington said, “that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.”
Partisanship can be volatile. Mix in factors like universal suffrage at the age of eighteen (it may as well be aged seven in the case of most American eighteen year olds) and a government that buys voter loyalty with statist ‘goodies’ like “free” health care and “free” education for millions, and the situation becomes explosive.
(“When the people find that they can vote themselves money,” Benjamin Franklin warned, “that will herald the end of the republic.”)
Still, maintaining the proposition that both mainstream political parties are ‘equally bad,’ is on the order of holding that a sore throat and a violent case of rectal cancer are ‘equally bad.’
It’s true, both parties share the blame for the federal Nanny State, the permanent-war mentality, the devaluing of the currency and the bastardization of the greatest economy in the history of the world. But this is sort of like saying a battered wife was as much responsible for the dissolution of her marriage as her aggressive husband because she let herself go. I mean, sure, that probably ticked him off.
From the French Revolution to Vietnam, some form of Democrat always had war fever (that’s if one sees a continuing line between Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama; I however see a discrete and discernible branching point somewhere around Otto Von Bismark). Granted, several of those wars were justifiable. But the attitude was indiscriminating and hubristic, and characteristically Democrat.
Enter George W. Bush.
Enough has been argued about the moral and legal justifications for the Iraq and Afghan Wars to fill a million blogs. What’s certain is that from Lincoln to Reagan, Republicans were hawks, but temperate and resolved. Lincoln had no options. Robert Taft was weary of Cold War adventures into Asia. Reagan never fought the Soviets on the battlefield, nor did Nixon. Nixon began our exit from Vietnam. Goldwater was a hawk, but Johnson was the cowboy, pissing in the wind. Democrats from Wilson to Truman, Kennedy to Johnson, and Clinton to Obama have been militarily ambitious, globalist, at times even imperialist. George W. Bush cited Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman among his heroes.
Setting aside the moral justifications for Iraq and Afghanistan – indeed, even for Korea and Vietnam – let us be fair and assume Bush broke with his party’s form.
Among other breaks from tradition, Bush supported the expansion of Medicare, amnesty, the expansion of federal education spending, all the while fashioning himself a “Compassionate Conservative” (as a Conservative, I deduce that the qualifier in that phrase is intended to insinuate that (1) persons like myself are not compassionate and that (2) Bush and his ilk were at least somewhat-big government bleeding hearts).
The 2008 standard-bearer of the party, John-reach-around-the-aisle-McCain authored the First Amendment killing McCain-Feingold bill, restricting federal campaign expenditures in an unprecedented manner. He too supports amnesty, permanent war with whoever looks at us funny, and repealing the Bush tax cuts.
But can it even be argued that these examples create a moral equivalence? Conservatives, many Independents and Conservative-Republicans plugged their noses to vote for John McCain, and now he might loose his own Senate primary in Arizona.
Obama’s amnesty scheme comes with the support of the mainstream of his radical party. Bush fought multitudes of dissenters in his party, and the attempt failed.
Bush, as the story goes, supported an “unprecedented” expansion of Executive power and was a war-mongorer (then again, he never suspended habeas corpus, like Lincoln; imprisoned a vast concentration of persons on the basis of race, like Franklin D. Roosevelt; executed enemy combatants, like Franklin D. Roosevelt. He did however, like Clinton, lob missiles into Iraq on the basis of a Weapons of Mass Destruction proliferation program and Saddam Hussein’s violation of U.N. sanctions). Fair enough, and Obama is doing what again in Afghanistan and Iraq? I mean, I know he stopped using the words “Enemy Combatant” and “War and Terror.”
Bush’s Afghan War was mild compared to Barack Obama’s Afghan War, where double the amount of casualties have occurred in one-seventh of the amount of time. This is because Obama promised a resurgent Afghan policy and a quick-as-can-be 2011 exit (Gotta get back to handling the more important domestic agenda. You know, ruining the economy, killing jobs, maybe a little golf.)
Moreover, unlike Obama, it was at least believable that Bush supported racial equality (save that racially-charged Hurricane he caused). In what is surely a casebook example of voter intimidation, in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (passed by 94% of Senate Republicans and 73% of Senate Democrats), the New Black Panthers stood in front of a Philadelphia polling place on the night of the 2008 election brandishing batons. (I don’t know, surely Black Panthers with batons outside a polling place is only theoretically intimidation on the basis of race. It’s not like the voters were Harvard Black Studies professors or anything).
The Bush Justice Department initiated a lawsuit which Obama’s DOJ pursued, at least, up until recently.
Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli overruled a unanimous recommendation from six DOJ attorneys to pursue this case. This prompted one of those attorneys to resign from the DOJ and blow the lid on this incident. Testifying at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission (which has now opened an investigation into the Obama DOJ), J. Christian Adams further added the shocking detail that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes suspended enforcement of sections of the VRA’s “Motor Voter law,” which requires states to purge voter rolls of dead people, felons, illegal aliens and voters who have moved out of state.
According to Adams, Fernandes’ refused to pursue such cases: “We’re not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it.”
(Fernandes and Perrelli are both Obama appointees. New Black Panther head Malik Shabazz’s name appears on the White House guest list numerous times. But let’s not jump to any conclusions or rush to judgement here. No, leave that to be done by Obama anytime a pompous Harvard professor of Black Studies is arrested. In that case, let’s leap as far as we can to our conclusions about racial discrimination.)
And, unlike Obama, Bush didn’t carve a hole in the Commerce Clause, just wide enough to squeeze two disastrous radicals through. For two consecutive summers, we have endured the nonsensical babbling of Sonia Sotomayer and Elena Kagan. Asked during her hearings whether the Commerce Clause (an enumerated Constitutional power of the U.S. Congress, designed to facilitate interstate commerce among the several states) allowed Congress the power to require Americans to eat vegetables, Kagan had no clear answer. She simply refused to deal with the hypothetical in any direct manner.
Just to recap, this Congress just said, via their Commerce Clause authority, that all Americans must purchase health insurance. If you think the vegetable analogy is weak, or that Kagan was being “judicious” in not answering such frivolous questions and not disclosing how she would rule on hypotheticals, imagine this: What if a Senator asked, “Does the General Welfare clause allow Congress to require 18-25 year olds to tap dance three times a week?” Is there a judicious way of answering this? The answer is “NO,” simply put the answer is “NO.” Any person who can’t answer “NO,” whether you’re a lawyer or a plumber living in the United States, needs to be locked away permanently.
So, is there any credible reason that the answer to the question about vegetables would be something different? Or even, “No, but…”
And yet the same party that is requiring us to purchase health insurance via the Commerce Clause, and planting judges on the Court who can at least conceive of ways for them to require us to eat vegetables, just found the limit of the Commerce Clause. The Obama DOJ has decided to sue the state of Arizona on the grounds that its completely reasonable and lawful immigration law violates the Commerce Clause!
Equally bad? You must be drinking….
In my humble opinion, your analogy of the two parties doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head.
To me, its not as similar to an abusive husband beating his wife, as it is to an abusive husband beating his children while the wife watches on. I put just as much blame on the woman who refuses to protect her children (maybe more) as the husband who is beating the constitution… I mean children.