Dear Mr. Krauthammer, Part Deux:

McCain for President, Part II

Correction:  Obama for President, Part II

By Charles Krauthammer

By Hot Free Press

WASHINGTON — Last week I made the open-and-shut case for John McCain: In a dangerous world entering an era of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, the choice between the most prepared foreign policy candidate in memory vs. a novice with zero experience and the wobbliest one-world instincts is not a close call.

Tajikistan — Last week I wrote a point by point counter-argument to the silly case for a John McCain/Sarah Palin administration.  It would seem that Mr. Krauthammer’s open-and-shut case is now open again.  It’s one of those cases which, no matter how many times you open it, and how many times you make it, it’s still wrong.

One has to wonder exactly what experience has made Senator McCain the most prepared foreign policy candidate in memory.  He was born in Panama.  He went to the Naval Academy where he performed well enough to graduate at the bottom of his class.  He flew planes and crashed a lot.  He went to prison.  He was beaten mercilessly by gooks.  Finally, he landed himself a sweet gig in Washington, DC, where he has languished in the intellectual backwater which is the United States Senate for a generation.

But it’s all about economics and kitchen-table issues, we are told. OK. Start with economics.

Neither candidate has particularly deep economic knowledge or finely honed economic instincts. Neither has any clear idea exactly what to do in the current financial meltdown. Hell, neither does anyone else, including the best economic minds in the world, from Henry Paulson to the head of the European Central Bank. Yet they have muddled through with some success.

It’s probably true that nobody knows exactly what to do in an economic crisis.  Most, however, do know exactly what not to do, and that is to drop everything and look really erratic and flit around the country making incoherent speeches.  A better way to react would be to study the situation carefully, listen to advisors with varied viewpoints, and come to an informed decision.

I think it’s unfortunate that the one thing the candidates and their parties have agreed on so far is the ridiculous Wall Street handout package…but that’s not what I’m talking about right now.

Both McCain and Barack Obama have assembled fine economic teams that may differ on the details of their plans but have reasonable approaches to managing the crisis. So forget the hype. Neither candidate has an advantage on this issue.

Senator Barack Hussein Obama, however, had the wisdom to choose economic advisors who understand economics at every level, including the poor and middle class, the real kitchen table issues.

Senator McCain, on the other hand, built his team of economic advisors and his entire economic policy around the failed ideas of his ideological godfather, Phil ‘Nation of Whiners’ Gramm.  Senator McCain is all deregulation and trickle down nonsense.  Senator McCain’s policies have already failed, because his policies are identical to the policies of George W. Bush.

The remainder of McCain’s economic advisors are primarily in the Phil Gramm mold of deregulation and tax the poor.  Republicans love the redistribution of wealth, as long as it’s upward.

On other domestic issues, McCain is just the kind of moderate conservative that the Washington/media establishment once loved — the champion of myriad conservative heresies that made him a burr in the side of congressional Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is standing in the way of an audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration, erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on the pretense that he has suddenly become right wing.

McCain spent decades culturing his ‘maverick’ image.  It was never true, but it was a good story line.  Reporters, like their viewers, are more interested in the story than the hard, cold facts.  The story was his POW experience.  The story was his occasional candid remarks.  The fact is that John McCain is and always was a hard-right conservative on foreign policy, social, and economic issues.  He is exactly what the American people want to reject.

McCain’s winking, theocratic sidekick is even more conservative than McCain himself, more vacuous than Bush, and more likely to shoot someone in the face than Cheney.

Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment — a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.

Generally speaking, McCain sees government as a war machine, the ultimate weapon, a gigantic penis to rub in the face of his enemies, a massive scrotum and a mammoth set of depleted uranium balls with which to teabag our former allies.  He sees domestic government as an impediment to the upward movement of wealth from the have-nots to the have-it-alls.  It’s typical Republican mumbo-jumbo.

McCain wants to tackle social programs by privatization and elimination.  He wants to make health care more difficult to obtain by championing his program to tax health care benefits.  He wants to make it easier for insurance companies to cherry pick, offering coverage only to the young and healthy.  It’s a crazy scheme, and I wouldn’t expect anything less from the man who picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.  Did I already mention that?

An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.

Obama, on the other hand, talks less and less about bipartisanship, his calling card during his earlier messianic stage. He does not need to. If he wins, he will have large Democratic majorities in both houses. And unlike 1992, Obama is no Clinton centrist.

Barack Hussein Obama will have large Democratic majorities in both houses, large, democratically elected majorities.  Obama will not have appointed those Senators and Representatives like the Supreme Court appointing a President.  The American people will have spoken, and they will have announced their strong preference for Democratic policies.

What will you get?

Ooooh!  Do tell, my very intelligent, successful, and delusional friend!

(1) Card check, meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will sign.

Ah…no.  That’s not the way it works.  Those large men you’re thinking of are more symbolic of the threats and strong-arm tactics of anti-union workplaces.

Don’t be scared of unions.  Unions have improved a lot of lives, and saved countless others by demanding fair pay and safe workplaces.

It is interesting, though, how so many of your arguments come down to perceived threats and dangers lurking just out of sight.

Hmmm…that must be a conservative thing.

Anyway, if the employees want a union, they’ll support one.  If they don’t want a union, they won’t support one.  Whatever happened to the conservative ideal of letting people make their own decisions?

Oh, I remember!  Conservatives want legal restrictions to prevent the possibility of anyone making decisions that conflict with right-wing ideology.

(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine — a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators — a Hugo Chavez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.

Conservatives have a lot of fear about the Fairness Doctrine.  You and the lunatic Rod Parsley agree on this one.  You say the Fairness Doctrine would abolish conservative talk radio.  Rod Parsley says it would force him and the nutcases at TBN to air opposing viewpoints.

The Fairness Doctrine is a very old doctrine.  It really doesn’t apply to Rod Parsley on his cable television show.  Broadcast television and radio are on publicly owned airwaves and require government licenses.  Not every person who wants a broadcast license will get one.  With the privilege of a broadcast license come certain responsibilities and obligations.  One of those obligations was to provide airtime for contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues.  That’s hardly a radical idea, nor will it in any way damage your Party’s Dear Leaders, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and G. Gordon Liddy.

(3) Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama’s publicly declared criterion: “empathy” for the “poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old” — in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice entirely blind to one’s station in life.

To which legal system are you referring?  I promise you that if you’re poor, African-American, undereducated, or English is your second language, you’ll find yourself in a very, very different legal system than the one say, Charles Krauthammer would face if he were ever accused of wrongdoing.  The legal system the poor, African-American, gay, disabled, and old find themselves in is built on wealth buying courtroom success and might being right.

It’s a great system if you’re rich and powerful.  If not, you’ve lost before the wheels of justice even start to turn.

What the fuck is wrong with a system that offers protection to those who can’t defend themselves?  That is the primary purpose of government.

Has there ever been an incident of ‘constitutional creativity’ more chilling than having the Supreme Court appoint a President after he lost the election?  According to your beloved conservative justices, the federal government shall never interfere in State issues…unless Albert Gore, Jr. is about to become POTUS.  Then, it’s written somewhere in the imaginary constitution only conservatives can read that you have to stop the recount and appoint George W. Bush as President.

(4) An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has already happened. A conservative government has already partially nationalized the mortgage industry, the insurance industry and nine of the largest U.S. banks.

Yes, you’re right.  This is a socialist country just like the Social Democracies in Europe.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s part of the natural progression from animalistic anarchy to a civilized society.  Americans just aren’t comfortable calling themselves socialists, even though they are.

This is all generally swallowed because everyone understands that the current crisis demands extraordinary measures. The difference is that conservatives are instinctively inclined to make such measures temporary. Whereas an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will find irresistible the temptation to use the tools inherited — $700 billion of largely uncontrolled spending — as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake the American economy and social compact.

I wish Obama could use the $700 billion dollar handout to Wall Street thieves to remake the American economy and social compact.  Unfortunately, that $700 billion dollars is already lining the pockets of the McCain-Gramm-Bush-Cheney-Rove bandits who tanked the economy in the first place with their financial gimmicks, derivatives, and leveraged hedge funds.

Conservatives are instinctively inclined to take candy from babies and give the candy to big, fat bullies.

This is not socialism. This is not the end of the world. It would, however, be a decidedly leftward move on the order of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The alternative is a McCain administration with a moderate conservative presiding over a divided government and generally inclined to resist a European social-democratic model of economic and social regulation featuring, for example, wealth-distributing growth-killing marginal tax rates.

When I call something ’socialism’, I’m referring to social interventionism and state control of capital in a regulated market economy.  I’m not referring to complete nationalization of industry.  I don’t approve of the nationalization of the means of production.

Leftward movement is inevitable.  It’s the way of the future.  Republicans should get involved and help to steer the ship.  It may not be moving in the direction they want it to move, but perhaps they can help control where the ship finally makes landfall.

The national security choice in this election is no contest. The domestic policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological. McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him. The hunger for anti-Republican catharsis and the blinding promise of Obamian hope are simply too strong. The reckoning comes in the morning.

The national security choice is no contest.  Obama wins hands down.  McCain is an erratic war-mongerer who chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.  Did I mention that already?  McCain is a really old man who chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.  I don’t know if I’m repeating myself, but i hope I am.

Senator John McCain has made one huge decision in this campaign.

What was that decision?

He chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

Copyright 2008, Hot Free Press

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