Spare a thought for the stay at home voter
Empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio
–The Rolling Stones, 1968
I think quite a few people, including many conservatives/libertarians, are intending to sit this one out. It’s an understandable sentiment–the “strange beauty shows” have not gotten any more substantive since 1968, quite the contrary, and the “gray suited grafters” have as a class become even graft-ier. And there is plenty wrong with the institutional Republican Party…too much crony capitalism at the expense of the real free market, too much go-along-to-get-along behavior, too many lame candidates, too much incompetence in political marketing.
Nevertheless, I think it is of extreme importance for everyone who truly cares about the future of this country–and who understands the harm being done by Barack Obama and the “progressive” movement that he represents–to vote, and in almost all cases to vote for the Republican candidate.
Because what is facing us right now is not “a choice of cancer or polio.” It is a choice between a chronic disease which is unpleasant, but may eventually be curable, and an accute disease that will kill or permanently cripple the patient in short order.
Free speech is under severe attack by the American Left. There have been moves to have the FCC and/or the FEC regulate Internet expressions of opinion, further entrenching the monopolistic position of the establishment media…and even traditional media companies are finding considerable hostility from the Obama administration should they step the least little bit out of line. “Political correctness” dominates many if not most university campuses. People in the private sector have been driven out of their jobs because of their personal political opinions. The administrative and police power of the State is being used against political opponent; see for example the IRS case and the use of SWAT teams to invade the homes of Scott Walker supporters on highly questionable grounds–actions which, George Will argues convincingly, are politically motivated by a desire to intimidate Walker supporters and defeat him in the upcoming election. Direct violence or threats of violence by Leftists and their supporters, directed at purveyors of non-Left-approved opinions, also appears to be on the upswing; see for example the hundreds of death threats directed against a black Chicago pastor who had the audacity to endorse a Republican candidate for Illinois governor.
Perhaps most disturbing of all are the intrusions into the computers used by former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson and the evidence that government agencies may have played a role in this–including the planting of false evidence against Ms Attkisson. I do not think we can consider this verified at the present time-and may never know for sure who was behind this operation–but it is certainly consistent with the “progressive” pattern.
My point is that the window for deflecting the “progressive” takeover of American politics and institutions is rapidly closing. Intrusions on free expression, and enablement of voting corruption, are likely to make it increasingly almost impossible to change directions in the future. A Republican majority in the Senate, and a maintained or increased Republican majority in the House, together with a goodly number of Republican governorships, will not solve these problems, but will offer a far better chance of bringing them under control than will the alternative.
There are also very serious threats facing the United States and its allies on the international front: especially, the prospective Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons. There is every reason to believe that Obama intends to reach a deal which lifts sanctions without seriously dismantling Iran’s uranium-enrichment capabilities. The likelihood of this happening is definitely increased or decreased by any increase or decrease in the political power of the Democratic Party.
I urge you most seriously to vote–to vote Republican (unless there is an alternative candidate who can really win, not just “make a statement”)–and to contribute money directly to your preferred candidates…you may not be able to match the very large contributions being made by Hollywood types and other wealthy Democrats and entities such as the teachers’ unions, but every bit helps. Voting and contributing now helps ensure that you will have a meaningful opportunity to vote, contribute, and engage in political discourse in future elections.
“I do not think we can consider this verified at the present time-and may never know for sure who was behind this operation–but it is certainly consistent with the “progressive” pattern.”
I share your disdain for the Obama administration, but I’m glad you qualified this. While I don’t think Obama’s minions are above trying such a thing, there is something about this story that doesn’t ring true. I’ll await independent verification.
Mr Barack Ebola will soon seem quite benevolent, to those of you cowering under the Hellaryite terror.
Part of my argument is that defeating Democrats today will improve the chances of defeating Hillary (or the equally awful Elizabeth Warren, or any of the other sinister clowns they are likely to run) in 2016.
Why do you think many are go to sit this one out?
Comments on various blogs, and even a few people IRL, who have said, in substance, “They’re all corrupt, why vote for any of them, nothing can change the course of the ship.”
Re the above two comments, see my post Dangers of “a Plague on All Their Houses”
My solution to all such problems is to sign a chitty that lets my wife cast a proxy vote for me. I don’t always enquire exactly how “we” voted, but I can be confident that “we” vote for whoever seems likeliest, in her guess, to defeat the socialists.
Well, I’m on board.
It took me decades to wtfu but I’m wide awake these days. Not at all impressed with the Republican usual suspects, but this is serious. I was a fool, never thought it would get to this point.
If assume that what she says is true, then the predictable conservative response will be to do nothing.
“Perhaps most disturbing of all are the intrusions into the computers used …”
I believe a number of IT people post and comment here. I’m just looking for an opinion from someone that may have a feel for the possibilities: How many of modern voting “machines” are hacked or rigged, if you will? In Illinois? In the country?
I have zero respect for those who feel, because the candidates offered are not all to their liking, decided to “sit it out”. (Not that my respect probably matters anything to those so named).
Think I liked voting for…(gosh, fill in the blank – everyone since Reagan).
Truly bad politicians rely on an apathetic electorate.
Even a choice between bad and worse – if there is a sizable vote one way or another at least they know someone’s paying attention.
Stopping, and then reversing, the cancerous growth of state at all levels requires some very difficult and tedious work at all levels. The state of the nation is not going to improve if the only thing we are concerned with are big sexy elections for big offices like governor, or federal offices like senator or president.
People who are truly concerned with the excessive growth of the government will pay attention to, and participate in, the party caucuses, the school board and city council and county commissioner elections.
It may take several decades to undo the damage, and dismantle the many bureaucratic structures that have been built over the last century plus of progressive statism.
This work will require dedication and dogged commitment. There aren’t any easy, one-step, sweep it all away answers to the problem. Millions of peoples’ lives will be affected, some for obvious good, but some will endure significant problems when the crutches and supports, and jobs, they had become dependent on start to go away.
This is not the work for hot-heads and ideologues, who think they can make some speeches or pass a few big sweeping laws and everything will be all right.
The situation is analogous to major surgery on a critically injured person—one who has suffered multiple injuries which must be dealt with carefully and in a clearly sequence so that each wound is treated properly for its it’s own sake.
We have had enough, and more than enough, of the sophomoric “experts” who think they know everything, and can cure everything under the sun with some great, sweeping, vaguely written legal program that ends up having more negative unforeseen consequences than any good the makers’ intentions might have accomplished.
The most powerful, richest nation in history has been driven to the point of bankruptcy and moral collapse because the corrosive ideology of it’s ruling elites, based on their lust for power, has undermined and hollowed out the foundational concepts which led the US to world leadership.
A return to that position requires a return to those principles. There they are, written clearly and expressly for all to see, and available for all to comprehend. Follow them, instead of the lunatic claims of a small group of incompetent and corrupt oligarchs.
>People who are truly concerned with the excessive growth of the government will pay attention to, and participate in, the party caucuses, the school board and city council and county commissioner elections.<
1st article v convention: 12 year term limits for house, senate, supreme court and the fed bureaucracy outside dod.
I vote in every election. For those who died to maintain that right. It is the least I can do to honor their sacrifice. May God have mercy on those who don’t.
Feels a little like Prague, 1956.
The Progs are so close to a takeover that all we see is gloom. They have the institutional “tanks” and we have the paving stones.
There is revolution, or rather civil war, in the air. This election may be the last one and then what is the game plan?
At some point, the mildly supportive Prog people will realize that they’ve been fooled again.
Himmelfarb points out that the founders would choose the form “a more perfect union,” while the French would want – think perhaps they had – a perfect one. Their main goal was to leave a certain flexibility since the perfect should never get in the way of the better. The Republicans are clearly better, if equally clearly imperfect.
My sense is that the Republicans have been positing changes and sending up bills – but they’ve been a kind of shadow government. No one could take any of it seriously as long as Reid was in the Senate. Now, if Tuesday turns out as we hope, they’ll have to vote for bills that might well become laws, design changes (hopefully to health care, the IRS and about everything else) that they’ll have to debate, take real stands on and see if they work. What Reid was doing, like what was going on in Wisconsin politicking, is to dissipate energy; their enemies were tied down in paperwork and endless delays rather than being bested in any oratorical, political battle. And if Scott Walker falls after all those elections and all that crap and the clearly improved system, I wonder if it will be because Wisconsin gets what it deserves or it just gave up. Surely Minnesota did – how could anyone vote for the guy who so clearly stole that election 6 years ago? Was Franken that good a senator or did everyone figure, what the hell or what’s the use?
Some day we will look at these 6 or 8 years as just dissipated – money, time, energy, youth gone up in a vapor instead of put to use building and growing and learning. It isn’t just fossil fuel the left hates, it is the life force and energy, pulsing its erratic and not always perfect but always productive, messy way toward birth.
I can’t shake the suspicion that a few of the “conservatives” who comment on sites like Lucianne are fakes, that they are trying to discourage Republican votes with the usual silly arguments about RINOs and the “establishment”, and so on.
Note, please, that I said a few, and that I had suspicions, not evidence, that a few of those commenters are “mobying”.
Most, no doubt, are just taking cues from some of the less responsible talk show hosts. (One of the stranger examples is Rush Limbaugh. He was born into a local Republican establishment, and has worked with people he would call “establishment” figures all of his political life, but he still rants against the “Republican establishment”. People believe what they want to believe, and he likes to believe he is a rebel.)
(For the record: I don’t think that there is a national Republican establishment, in any meaningful sense of the word. You can find a few in some localities.)
“People who are truly concerned with the excessive growth of the government will pay attention to, and participate in, the party caucuses, the school board and city council and county commissioner elections.”
I spent some time in local government, not as an elected officer but as a member of commissions and boards but close enough to see what happens and why. California is corrupt, not like Chicago is corrupt, but by an agreement among Republicans and Democrats to share things and focus on their own interests.
A group of rich Republicans who live in Newport Beach became involved in a plan to close John Wayne Airport in Orange County because they were tired of jets flying over their homes. It was noisy and unpleasant and Newport Beach is lovely. They convinced themselves and some powerful Republicans in the Bush Administration to close the El Toro Marine Air Station in Orange County so the airport could be moved there. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars here, if not billions. El Toro had been there since 1942 and the neighbors did not mind it as most flights were fighters and directed over mountains to the east.
The El Toro Air Station sits vacant today. The buildings are slowly deteriorating as leftist politicians try to come up with feasible uses for the complex. It will probably end up as apartment housing as single family home building has atrophied.
It did not occur to the Newport Beach billionaires that heavy passenger jets could not take off over mountains and downwind in the prevailing winds of southern California. If the airport moved to El Toro, the passenger flights would still have to go over Newport Beach !
Anyway, they got El Toro closed and the Marines moved to Mira Mar in San Diego where there was no dependent housing. El Toro had 1200 housing units for dependents which stood empty for the past 15 years. The Congressman who aided this travesty was Chris Cox who then moved on to the Chair of the SEC where no effort was made to avoid the 2008 meltdown of mortgage backed securities. Incompetence in all fields of endeavor.
In the meantime, Democrats were undisturbed in turning the state over to the public employee unions.
I think this pattern is similar to the Denny Hastert and GOP activity in Illinois.
veryretired, here is a good example of your concern about people getting involved in the basics of politics.
Hilliard said that when she visited the clerk’s office this week to observe the mail ballot verification process, she did not recognize many of the election judges who county officials claimed represented the Republican party in the bipartisan process. She said several appeared to be Democrats with Republican nametags.
She said she also saw judges approving signatures that, from her perspective, were clearly not those of the voters to whom those ballots were issued.
“I’m sorry,” Hilliard said at one point, tears welling up in her eyes. “I get emotional because this is how they win.”
Hilliard implored the crowd to volunteer or find others who could volunteer to take over as the county’s Republican election judges, asking anyone who is available Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to attend a training session at the Boulder County clerk’s office, 1750 33rd St., beginning at 9:30 a.m. Saturday.
Molly Tayer, Boulder County elections coordinator, said that, following her party’s caucus in the spring, Hilliard provided a list of people who were willing to serve as election judges, but few of them agreed to do so when contacted about training for the positions as the election approached.
“Her original list was 95, and only five (of those) have joined this year’s workforce,” Tayer said.
If you don’t care enough to spend a few days on theism, don;t be surprised when elections are stolen.
“California is corrupt, not like Chicago is corrupt, but by an agreement among Republicans and Democrats to share things and focus on their own interests.”
Ditto for New York, which somehow, unlike CA, has maintained a functioning GOP, but that seems quite unlikely to hold for too much longer. In large swaths of the state, people have clearly given up on government, and why not?
“Two-thirds of Central New York’s state legislator races are uncontested”
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2012/06/two-thirds_of_cnys_state_legis.html
Drive around upstate and you’ll see “Repeal the SAFE Act” signs everywhere, all year round. One of the local Dem state senators voted for that abomination, and he’s from a rural area, not Ithaca or somewhere similar, and the GOP can’t be bothered to even field a candidate against him. The likely explanation is that there’s basically a deal with the Dems not to contest his election, in exchange for the Dems not targeting other vulnerable GOP seats.
As for focusing on local elections such as school boards, the state has basically completely taken over financing schools and most other local offices (all in the name of “fairness”, of course), so there’s really not that much power left locally anymore. Governor Andy is openly talking about pushing to abolish as many local governments as possible. In a sense, you can see his point–the state has assumed near total power, so why should counties, cities, villages, etc., bother to have local governments anymore?
I have zero respect for people who tell me I must vote for mendacious, corrupt candidates whose programs, in so far as as candidates identify and tell the truth about their policies, repudiate everything I think is good, true, and just and who actively pursue harming me, all because I should vote against some candidate these people oppose.
As a moral person I cannot vote for a candidate who will contribute, control, or further policies, programs, and activities I believe to be evil.
* * *
OK, I’ll bite: what happened in Prague in 1956?
Duh – Budapest in 1956; Prague in 1968.
The nicer times before the heavy hand of oppression descends.
So it often is “the lesser of two weevils.” You may end up getting a weevil no matter what, but only by making sure it is the lesser rather than the greater weevil can you hope to thin the herd. I’ve worked for immoral, self-promoting and stupid people and often didn’t have a choice (being in the military), but whenever I got a choice I tried to pick the lesser weevil. I view voting in the same way, it is duty, not privilege so make the best of it. If you want better choices, you have to do more than just vote.
Mike
“Duh – Budapest in 1956; Prague in 1968.”
OK. I couldn’t tell if you meant Prague in 1948 or 1968.
* * *
“You may end up getting a weevil no matter what”
I don’t think this sort of discussion will be resolved, but it’s fun to rehearse the arguments.
The problem with choosing the lesser of two evils in every election for decades, is at the end, you’ve reached the same destination as the greater of two evils. Small, vile steps are not a more moral course than large, vile steps. And hope that somehow it’ll all come right if we do it slowly, isn’t a strategy, it’s negotiated surrender (which is one function of democracy).
In short, the two opposition parties (“don’t vote,” “vote compromise”) need each other. I doubt a great number of people stick to one course or the other for an entire lifetime.
Were I somewhere where I had to choose, I’d probably choose the lesser of two evils, too, but I’m not there. Only in totalitarian states is voting compulsory.
Every time an election rolls around I make this plea: get involved in your local election process. If you have time, become an election judge; it’s easy. If not, volunteer as a clerk and start training to take over as a judge later. If not, at least volunteer to be a poll watcher. (And it goes without saying at least vote!–if you aren’t satisfied with any of the candidates, why aren’t you running yourself, for some small, local office to begin with?)
Election fraud proliferates because not enough eyes are on the workers. A few very clever, very determined people can figure out a way to make fraud happen no matter what, but run-of-the-mill crooks depend on being surrounded at all times by safe fellow-travelers. Make them worry that someone is watching who’s not in on the program.
No system of government is safe from falling into petty (or great) tyranny unless there is an active citizenry. A few people can’t exercise unbalanced power unless most people are disengaged enough to give them a clear field most of the time.
There is one final alternative. We did it once before in 1775. And the Brits did it with their Glorious Revolution of 1688. Actually, the 1688 revolution is more appropriate to the current situation than the 1775 one. One final note, the Progressive Barbarians count on the innately civilised behaviour of conservatives and libertarians and the additional fact that most Americans are used to generation upon generation of a largely law-based society. The time may come when people will have to dash the expectations of the Trogressives.
Concerned expat in Seoul
Michael,
If we really are past the tipping point, which I seriously doubt anyone can know for sure one way or the other, than such an upheaval would be a likely consequence. There may be sufficient countervailing influences to reverse our decent into stifling statism, but every day seems to take us farther along the road to serfdom (to borrow a phrase). We may be more like the gradually boiled frog and no resistance of any consequence will come before it is impossible to generate.
I think it is highly possible we are past the point of no return as demonstrated by the 2012 election, but I’m willing to admit and hope I am wrong. If we can restore our culture, it will require considerable privatization of education in the near term and maximizing the current political influence we have. Political withdrawal guarantees we have passed the point of no return. Just electing enough Republicans for a majority in the senate is inadequate, but it beats the alternative, in my opinion. It buys some time to generate solid candidates moving forward. Will we do that? Beats me.
If it comes to an upheaval event or series of events, I’m prepared for that as well, but honestly, a positive outcome is highly unlikely due in measure to external threats poised to take advantage of such an internal struggle as well as the lengthy period it would take to sort it all out.
Mike
I can’t find it right now but earlier today I posted a comment somewhere on the role of family.
Rebecca West, for one, wrote years ago that, in lawless societies or in societies where law was not enforced, like the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, the only structure for protection was family and later a clan made up of extended families. This was what she found among the rural Serbs in Yugoslavia in the 1930s. There was a reason why those Serbs built up clans for protection. Saddam Hussein and Bashar Hafez al-Assad rely on clan and tribe for security because they are all that can be trusted. When the US went into Iraq, we did not understand the tribal nature of Arab societies.
I think that will be our future after the economy collapses and we are in the Hobbesian world that will follow the Suicide of the West.
When that happens the political left that destroyed most of the family will be desperate to recover what was lost. Unfortunately, they do not understand what it was and their attempts to construct it will fail. After the civil society we know as Rome fell, it took 1,000 years to recover to the same point. The Middle Ages were more enlightened than we often believe, but they were very, very hard.
I hope the authors of American 3.0 are right but I am pessimistic. Fortunately, I will be 77 next birthday and have had a good and eventful life. I worry about my children but three of them voted for Obama. I worry a lot about my grandchildren. I fear we had a deflection point in 2012 with the reelection of Obama. I hope not.