Insanity: Obama campaign.
Stupidity: McCain.
McCain is clearly the less-bad candidate, but in the scheme of things both candidates are about as bad as it gets in US presidential elections.
(via Babalu and Instapundit)
12 thoughts on “Insanity vs. Stupidity”
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Yes, as a friend of mine once crudely observed about a similar dilemma, it’s something like having to choose between being buggered by a horse or an elephant. Either way you’re not happy.
I’m not sure that McCain is necesarrily the less bad candidate.
Giving his lack of regard for individual freedom combined with his buy-in to global-warming hysteria, I suspect that he may do far more damage than any O’Bama spending, ghg regulation, or protectionist pandering.
O’Bama may be better on healthcare too, he seem more apt to increase supply of services (fund education for health care services and doctors, steamline certain specialties, etc.).
“Given”, oops.
Aaron,
O’Bama may be better on healthcare too, he seem more apt to increase supply of services (fund education for health care services and doctors, steamline certain specialties, etc.).
That’s based on the assumption that the political process will make better decisions about the allocation of health care resources than does a system based on free, voluntary association. I rather doubt that especially in regard to “streamlining” specialties.
Back in the ’90 there was a lot of hue and cry about limiting specialization because the advocates just assumed that doctors became specialist just for the money and that specialist on the whole did not offer superior care. After a few years of study it turned out that, surprise, surprise, specialization of labor works in medicine just like it does everywhere else. Doctors who specialize in diseases of the heart do actually provide better care for heart disease than do general practitioners.
A lot of people operate on the assumption that only profit motive produces bad decisions when history suggest that power motive, the force that drives government decisions, systematically makes worse ones.
Specialization in medicine is a bad idea only if you look at our national medical system as a giant HMO, administered by the government, whose principal goal should be the control of aggregate costs. However, if you look at the medical system as a market the main question becomes, how well does it serve the needs of customers? From the POV of patients, medical specialization is a boon.
On the bigger question, I agree that McCain might be a worse president than Obama on many issues. However, on national defense, which I think is the most important issue, I think that McCain is clearly better. And on other important issues, even though I think he’s often wrong, he at least pays lip service to the right principles much of the time. By contrast, Obama seems to me to be unapologetically wrong on most important issues, particularly WRT the size and scope of government,taxation, spending and regulation.
I’m thinking more that the specialties that need steamlining are currently bogged down by unnecessary requirments. I’m also thinking not so much about trying to reduce costs now as to prevent a surge in prices when demand shoots up do to upcoming demographic shifts. Increasing the supply for a known increase demand which individuals do not seem to be recognizing.
Johnathan, I certainly agree with you on defense and meant to include it. I hope that O’Bama will not be capable or willing to do anything very damaging when faced with actual decisions.
(Just to let you know, I think we’re all idiots for even thinking of putting a legislator in the executive chair and I plan on not voting for either. On the other hand, I think they will both be good at the Chief Executive’s primary function of figure head. The past term has proven that this may be more important than one might have expected.)
I agree with Jonathan: an Obama who thinks it is “divisive” to point out that he sees terrorism in “criminal” terms is not someone prepared to be Commander in Chief. McCain can be/will be less than perfect, but his faults pale next to that. Nor would McCain take advice on our disastrous schiools from Ayers. McCain has actually done things – and some of them have been heroic and some good. I can’t see what in Obama’s experience makes anyone sure what he will do as president. A sketch of his past at Protein Wisdom is not encouraging. But then those of us who remember the late sixties and early seventies well remember the arguments of people like Ayers. If it is in their cocoon that Obama has been nurtured, I don’t think we can count on a very healthy attitude toward the Constitution, the people who don’t agree with them, or our traditions. The concept of checks & balances disappears when our history is not taught well. A foreign policy advisor who believes she counters her opponent’s policies by calling them “stupid” and a candidate who daily describes the Iraq War as both distraction and failure do not indicate much more depth of thought than those who hung out in the hallways of Chicago in the late sixties chanting. I can see Obama pontificating to a group of adoring, politically naive but not necessarily stupid, adolescents. Such charisma, yes, but such little thought. Clinton’s crew were bright and cocky, but a governor learns something about governance & compromise. And he still left us vulnerable and confused about the nature of quite real threats.
“Nor would McCain take advice on our disastrous schiools from Ayers.”
He won’t have to. A generation of school children is 12 years (1st-12th grades). Leftists have been in more or less total control (depends on the state) for about four generations. Four generations of America is sick, racist country while Cuba is paradise-style teaching. Unless McCain is planning on firing all reachers, abolishing teachers’ colleges, abolishing the Department of Education, and somehow finding teachers of quality to replace them. Obama is the candidate of the new generation the anti-American, anti-Capitalist, anti-Semitic school system has created. Learn to live in it or be trampled underfoot.
Obama is the candidate of the new generation the anti-American, anti-Capitalist, anti-Semitic school system has created. Learn to live in it or be trampled underfoot.
Are those really the only options? How about fighting it? It’s worked before with other problems.
Tehag says: …Obama is the candidate of the new generation the anti-American, anti-Capitalist, anti-Semitic school system has created. Learn to live in it or be trampled underfoot.
I fear that Obamamerica itself would be trampled by history–perhaps sooner than one would expect.
McCain as POTUS will be an unmitigated disaster. This does not worry me as much as you might think – America has survived such disasters before, as anyone who lived through the Carter years can tell you.
We can survive a disaster. We cannot survive a catastrophe. And a catastrophe is exactly what we will get if Barack Obama is elected.
“How about fighting it?”
That hour has passed. You’ll lose. You will die and be replaced by your opposite.
From where and whence will teaches who believe in America come? Already in several states, prospective teachers must pass tests of social justice to become teachers. Another two generations of teaching social justice will kill America.
Courts will rule against you: your actions will be found to have disparate impact, be discriminatory, etc. Free speech and religion will not allow to violate the laws of the state: that is well-settled law wrapped tightly in precedent. No one has been allowed to oppose feminism or black nationalism because their religion teaches a different morality. So it will be with the entire Democrat platform.
The Democrat majority plans to create its own American Pemex, allowing it unlimited slush funds, Mexican-Saudi-style. The American Pemex will fund new anti-American NGOs and activists that will make the current slush funds of Jackson and Sharpton seem like toys.
“And a catastrophe is exactly what we will get if Barack Obama is elected.”
The catastrophe occurred when the sixties generation choose communism at Port Huron, then was allowed to propagate it in schools. Obama is merely a symptom. His ‘church’ is warmed-over Nation of Islam rebranded as Christianity, making it mosque. He will lead us to the inevitable Islamo-Socialist future. Imagine the U.S. as a mix of Kazakhstan and France.
tehag