🚀 go-pugleaf

As I've said before, this isn't news.  Kerry isn't a threat, since
with a Republican congress, he won't be able to enact much of
anything, but Bush, with a blank check, is scary.

Here' the view from

http://www.lewrockwell.com/ocregister/kerry-doherty.html

A case for Kerry
In praise of gridlock: In the past, growth of federal spending has
slowed only when the national government was divided

By Brian Doherty

Can you imagine Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist proudly standing beside President John
Kerry in a Rose Garden signing ceremony as he signs a bill that they
handed him - a bill that will increase government spending over the
next decade by more than half a trillion? Especially if that bill
would give Democrat Kerry the loyalty of a politically powerful
constituency?

Of course, the GOP's congressional leadership did help President
George W. Bush - their own party's man - pass his Medicare bill, whose
projected costs keep rising above that budget-busting level. In fact,
Bush, with the exception of his tax cuts, has been a shockingly
big-government conservative.

It's an insight of libertarianism and a key reason this newspaper does
not endorse candidates for office that politicians can't be trusted to
deliver on the principles they might verbalize. In fact, politicians
can be trusted only to be politicians, to work for partisan advantage
and more political power.

That's why, in the context of November's election, a victory for
Kerry, who will finally officially become the Democrats'
standard-bearer in Boston this Thursday - even though he's a
big-government man all the way - could paradoxically be the most
likely hope for curbing excessive government growth in the next four
years. Why? The party stereotypes don't always hold up, and a
Democratic president and a Congress led by Republicans creates a kind
of institutional impasse that actually slows the momentum of
government.

It seems counterintuitive, though, to expect limited government from a
Democratic president. Ever since the Goldwater vs. LBJ contest of
1964, the two major parties have staked out rough philosophical
positions along these lines: the Republicans are, at least
rhetorically, for a lean and limited government; the Democrats are
unreconstructed advocates of state power, state spending and state
solutions to every problem.

But the facts - the performance of the parties when they have the
power - have never borne that out. We got such regulatory state
measures as the Clean Air Act and wage and price controls under Nixon,
and the Americans with Disabilities Act under the first George Bush.
And it was under Democrat Bill Clinton that we got meaningful welfare
reform that has knocked nearly 3 million families off the federal dole
so far, even as child poverty rates shrink.

But the most vivid example that Republicans can't be relied on as
consistent defenders of smaller government is our current Republican
president. Bush has increased domestic discretionary spending 25
percent in less than four years, compared to an increase under Clinton
over his entire two terms of only 10 percent.

Bush's administration is spending over $20,000 per American household,
the highest level, adjusted for inflation, since World War II. He
can't blame it on war and post-9/11 security measures alone, either.
Even with those taken out of the equation, according to an analysis by
the usually GOP-leaning Heritage Foundation, discretionary spending
under Bush has increased 16 percent, from $340 billion to $395
billion.

And then there's his Medicare expansion. Clinton had an opposition
Congress to curb his health-care expansion enthusiasms; Bush, alas,
had a GOP Congress mostly compliant to his wishes.

Bush has betrayed the humble, restrained small-government vision of
the Republican Party in other ways as well, for example, by engaging
in a spectacularly expensive nation-building project in Iraq, despite
talking intelligently against that sort of big-government hubris while
campaigning in 2000. He's shown no firm dedication to free-trade
principles, hiking tariffs on steel and shrimp. He's supported
restrictions on free political speech by signing the McCain-Feingold
campaign finance reform bill.

This is not to say a Republican Congress (which seems very likely to
stay Republican after November) will always have the clout to stymie
any tax-raising, big-spending, big-program instincts Kerry may have.
But it seems reasonable to assume that it would.

Given the likely results of 2004's congressional elections, Kerry's
desires to be a bigger-government president than Bush will doubtless
be curbed through the logic of partisan conflict and "divided
government" - when the executive and legislative branch are controlled
by opposing parties.

Nothing is certain when contemplating the political future. But we do
know some things about the recent political past that should help
guide a strategic voter who wants smaller government: In the past,
divided government has shown great power to curb federal spending. As
William Niskanen, a former chairman of President Reagan's Council of
Economic Advisers, has noted, the only two post-World War II periods
of genuine restraint in federal spending growth (with annual increases
of less than 1 percent) came during the Eisenhower and Clinton
administrations. Both presidents mostly lacked Congresses controlled
by their parties.

It couldn't be clearer that the combination of Bush in the White House
and a GOP-dominated Congress has been a disaster when it comes to
curbing the growth of government spending and programs. It might just
be that partisan spite can make a Republican Congress do the right
thing where a principled dedication to reining in government seems
MIA. When GOP lawmakers don't have the political reputation of their
party's standard-bearer to protect, they are more likely to stiffen
their spines and help obstruct much of the damage that John Kerry
might attempt.

And if George Bush doesn't receive some electoral punishment for his
profligate ways, the Republican Party's value as a vehicle for
limiting government will plunge lower than a 10-year-old Ford Escort.
Bush might earn some short-term electoral advantage through expensive
schemes like his Medicare reform. But such schemes are sure to
bankrupt the republic in the long run. His own party's Congress won't
stop him. They just might stop President John Kerry.

As paradoxical as it seems, for those who believe in the Republican
Party that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan promised, Kerry may be
their greatest realistic chance to express their support for
preserving that tradition.



franklinjefferson@hotmail.com (FranklinJefferson) wrote in message news:<735b8de2.0410251656.2a9746c4@posting.google.com>...
> A Contrarian View: Why conservatives should not support Bush.
> 
> One reason that conservatives have had for supporting the candidacy of
> George W. Bush is not that they favor Mr. Bush (many of us have grave
> reservations about his policies) but that they worry about a Democrat
> victory presaging a sharp turn of the country to the left.  But this
> is an unfounded fear: it's simply not going to occur.  The Reagan
> revolution happened, and, regardless of who is elected in November,
> it's not about to be undone.
>  Actually, a Democrat winning the presidency in November would have
> remarkably little effect on policy.  Republicans hold both houses of
> Congress, and that's not about to change-- in fact, the best estimates
> are that the Republican majority in both the house and the senate will
> increase.  Liberal or not, a Democrat president isn't going to effect
> any changes that won't first take a thorough Republican scrubbing.
>  There are, in fact, many advantages in having the president and the
> Congress elected from opposite parties, and it's argued that America
> is strongest when they are.  The congress can serve as an effective
> anchor on presidential excess, and a skeptical president can cut the
> worst of congressional pork-barrel spending.  I am not one to argue
> that the government shouldn't be trusted... but when one party
> controls the government's purse strings, without anybody watching out,
> congress always seems to see the public treasury as a great big candy
> store.  That's when you see pork-barrel spending running out of
> control.  (It's worth noting that the budget surplus the later part of
> the Clinton administration came from a Democrat president held firmly
> in check by a Republican congress.)
>  But the main reason that conservatives shouldn't support Mr. Bush is
> very simple: George W. Bush is not a conservative.  When you ignore
> his talk, and looking at what he has actually done, you see that over
> and over again, George W. Bush has betrayed every ideal that the
> conservative movement has.
>  The heart and soul of the conservative thinking is fiscal
> conservatism: the government should be responsible for how it spends
> money.  The conservative economic view has always been very simple:
> balance the budget, and quit deficit spending.  That idea somehow went
> out the window when George W. Bush was elected (in fact, suddenly we
> are even hearing how deficit spending is somehow good for the nation.)
>  What happened to the "lock box," where George Bush said he would put
> the budget surplus to save it for social security?  The instant he got
> elected, he seems to have forgotten his promise.
>  The fact is, George W. Bush has run up a record budget deficit-- the
> largest deficit in history.  And, before you say that terrorism and
> the response to the 9/11 atrocity is the source of the unexpected
> budget deficit-- look at the data.   Only a small portion of the Bush
> deficit can be tagged to the 9/11 terrorists.  Bragging about
> "cutting" taxes while actually increasing government spending at the
> same time isn't really a tax cut; it's just increasing the tax next
> year.  America is about our children, and leaving our children and
> grandchildren in debt is not what we mean by "family values."
>  The heart of America is our business.  Americans aren't afraid to
> work... but where are the jobs?  A conservative president should be a
> pro-business president, but in fact rather than helping business,
> American businesses are going out of business; and the ones that are
> staying in business are shipping jobs oversees.  No matter what Mr.
> Bush's advisors may think, ramping up the deficit is not helping the
> economy.
> Mr. Bush says that education is his priority.  This is excellent, but
> is the federal government really the right place to reform our
> schools?  Education needs to be done at the local level-- right at the
> level of homes and families-- and not by big-government mandate.  The
> "no child left behind" laws, stripped of rhetoric, consist of nothing
> except new  government-mandated standardized tests-- another unfunded
> mandate from Washington that our states and cities have to pay for. 
> Teaching children how to do well on standardized tests-- is what we
> want to teach our children?  When did conservatism start believing
> that the government in Washington is the right place to run our
> schools?
>  The conservative world view is that the era of Big Government is
> over. Ronald Reagan knew that, and for that matter, so did President
> George H. W. Bush.  But the younger Bush just hasn't gotten the
> message.
>  Iraq.  It goes without saying that America needs to be strong, and
> that we should use every means of defending ourselves against those
> who detest our freedom and despise our way of life.   Destroying the
> Taliban, the stronghold of the Al Qaida terrorists, was necessary and
> unavoidable; it was required for the defense of America.  But invading
> Iraq? Long ago, John Quincy Adams wrote, "Wherever the standard of
> freedom shall be unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her
> benedictions, and her prayers be.  But she goes not abroad in search
> of monsters to destroy."  It doesn't matter how loathsome a dictator
> Saddam Hussein was; America should go to war only with great
> reluctance, and as a matter of last resort.  America isn't in the
> business of nation building.  Once, even George W. Bush understood
> that.  During a debate with then-Vice President Al Gore in 2000, Mr.
> Bush said: "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's
> called nation-building . . .. Maybe I'm missing something here.  I
> mean, we're going to have a kind of nation-building corps from
> America? Absolutely not."   Apparently to Mr. Bush, it depends on what
> the meaning of "absolutely not" is.
>  And fear of terrorism is no reason to erode our liberty. 
> Conservative leader Pat Buchanan said, "It is remarkable how
> complacent Americans seem to be, as our freedoms are gradually
> restricted, and more and more power and wealth flow to Big Government
> to protect us from terrorists."  Do we really need the 342-page
> Patriot Act, to protect us from terrorism by giving the government
> more rights?  Has we finally become a place where American citizens
> can be picked up and held without lawyer and without charges,
> indefinitely?  It is worth quoting Benjamin Franklin:  "They who would
> give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither
> liberty or security. "  When did we decide that we prefer our security
> to our liberty?
>  A final reason why conservatives should not support Mr. Bush is that,
> quite frankly, he is not merely destroying the credibility of the
> Republican party, he is damaging the credibility of conservatives,
> period.  Is Bush really the person who we want the world to view as
> the public image of conservatism?  For the last twenty years, Ronald
> Reagan has been the image of conservatism in American.  Do we want
> George W. Bush to be the intellect who will shape conservatism for the
> next  twenty years?  Conservatism can survive a term of  Mr. Kerry as
> president-- it may even make us stronger and more focussed.  But can
> conservatism survive another term of Mr. Bush?
>  No one will deny that Mr. Kerry is a liberal.  But even if he wins
> the presidency, he will find a solid Republican Congress, and an
> America united.  He is no threat to America.
>  Bush, a wolf in sheep's clothing, is eroding our economy, our
> liberty, and the very standing of our nation in the world.  His words
> say that he is a conservative.  His actions, on the other hand, say
> exactly the opposite.
> 
> 
> Recommended reading:
> Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan
> Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, by Pat Buchanan
> 
> American Conservative magazine:
> http://www.amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover1.html
> War without end: http://www.theamericancause.org/patthecheney.htm
> The Case against Empire:
> http://www.theamericancause.org/caseagainst.htm
> The war party http://www.theamericancause.org/patthewarpartys.htm
> 
> 
> 
> max@yu.know (max) wrote in message news:<808b3f9bfb5d4465474deec9773c2d7a@userbeam.net>...
> > Boycott Bush In 2004
> > By Robert Locke 
> > 
> > Like most Republicans, I supported Bush the last time, but have
> > finally been forced to the conclusion that the immigration-reduction
> > cause, and the conservative cause generally, would be better off if he
> > lost in 2004. So I urge the reader to withhold his vote and write the
> > president why.
> > 
> > The calculation of the Bush administration and the globalist wing of
> > the Republican party is very simple: they can count on your voting
> > Republican in November no matter what. Therefore, they believe that
> > they can get away with anything they want, and that if they get away
> > with it this time, they will be able to get away with it next time,
> > and the time after that, forever.
> > 
> > Frankly, they are right unless conservative voters do something to
> > disrupt this calculus.
> > 
> > Karl Rove is right now telling Bush that he doesn't have to fear a
> > revolt from anti-globalist Republicans because "they have nowhere to
> > go." Well, they've forgotten a great American place: home.
> > 
> > I'm not suggesting you vote Democrat, it being an entirely different
> > matter to actually support the opposition as opposed to withholding
> > your vote from your own party when it strays from its principles. But
> > I am suggesting that you either not cast a vote for president or write
> > in a suitable protest candidate. Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, an old
> > acquaintance and founding chairman of the House Immigration Reform
> > Caucus, would be the obvious choice.
> > 
> > Even before Bush announced his proposal to legalize virtually all
> > illegal aliens in this country and open the borders to everyone on the
> > globe who can underbid an American for a job, many conservatives were
> > critical of him. Here's a partial list of why:
> > 
> >   * He endorsed the revolutionary Grutter decision that placed
> >   nakedly anti-white racial preferences in the U.S. Constitution.
> > 
> >   * He has refused to tell the truth about the 1,300-year-old
> >   civilizational war we are in, calling our Islamist enemies merely
> >   "terrorists," as if they were a threat on a par with the ETA or
> >   the Weathermen.
> > 
> >   * He has subjected the American people to intrusive random
> >   security checks at airports while continuing to protect Muslim
> >   foreigners from the racial profiling their own countries
> >   practice.
> > 
> >   * He has left in office high-level Clinton appointees whose
> >   competence and patriotism are dubious and whose ideology is
> >   openly liberal.
> > 
> >   * He has left in place a feminist agenda in the armed forces
> >   which kills women and impairs our defense.
> > 
> >   * He has pushed and signed the insanely egalitarian, hugely
> >   expensive, and unconstitutional "No Child Left Behind" Act.
> > 
> >   * He has legitimated the white-guilt theory that is rotting
> >   Western Civilization, giving a speech in Africa denouncing
> >   historic white America in terms that exceeded Bill Clinton.
> > 
> >   * Then he sent $15 billion to African dictators under the guise
> >   of fighting AIDS, a disease almost wholly caused by immoral
> >   living.
> > 
> >   * He has declined to respond in any serious way to the Democrats'
> >   outrageous blockade of his judicial appointments.
> > 
> >   * He has renewed the funding of the radical anti-American
> >   organization UNICEF.
> > 
> >   * He has signed the largest expansion of the federal welfare
> >   state in a generation, the funding of prescription drugs for
> >   Medicare recipients.
> > 
> >   * He has signed the patently unconstitutional McCain-Feingold
> >   law, the aim of which is to subject political speech to
> >   bureaucratic controls as in the soft-totalitarian European Union.
> > 
> >   * He has sought to buy off social conservatives with his faith-
> >   based initiative which, far from helping strengthen religion in
> >   America, will co-opt churches and other religious organizations
> >   by making them dependent on federal largesse.
> > 
> >   * He has evaded the issue of gay marriage and then proposed a
> >   constitutionally-dangerous amendment that he knows will be almost
> >   impossible to pass.
> > 
> >   * He has continued the free-trade extremism that is gutting
> >   America's industrial base and has given us a jobless recovery.
> > 
> > As a result of these betrayals of conservative principles, Bush was
> > barely deserving of support prior to his (latest) immigration-
> > expansion initiative. With it, he has finally crossed the line into
> > being a proactively destructive force in American life who must be
> > stopped before he destroys the Republican party, the country, or both.
> > 
> > I am inexorably forced to the following conclusion: Bush is no more
> > than a wolf in sheep's clothing, a liberal and a globalist who merely
> > pretends to be a conservative, like he pretends to perform manual
> > labor on his luxury ranch in Crawford, in order to get elected. He
> > proactively believes in the racial sodomization of America, in
> > globalism, in his fantasy that everyone in the world, in the Middle
> > East as in California, is going to just forget the intergroup
> > conflicts that have been the driving force of history for thousands of
> > years and just "get along" under a bright blue sky of stock options.
> > He even sees a family interest, through the future career of his
> > dynastic heir his nephew, in the Hispanicization of America. His
> > idiocy is not the product of mistaken advice and it is not the product
> > of tactics: he genuinely believes in every dumb thing he says and
> > every dumb thing he does. He is not our friend; he is just another
> > sector of enemy territory.
> > 
> > The Republican establishment does not take grassroots conservatives
> > like immigration reformers seriously unless it is forced to. Its
> > priority is its careers and its core agenda is corporatist globalism,
> > dressed up in conservative veneer just thick enough to fool the
> > gullible rednecks. Nothing less than bringing down a Republican
> > president, which would wreck many of their careers personally, will
> > get their attention.
> > 
> > But oh boy, would it do that!
> > 
> > 
> > http://www.americandaily.com/article/4687