Getting off to a fast start, I will assume that Americans are too smart to send a loser like President Barack Obama back for a second destructive shot at the White House. In recent decades, America has witnessed three tragically bad presidents: Johnson, Carter and now Obama. President Obama, as the economy craters and we lose our AAA credit rating, is a lame duck. I see the Tea Party-led House of Representatives fighting the Obama crowd on every issue between now and the 2012 elections. No compromises, no Boehner jive. It’s time for heels to be dug in and a hard line taken.
So just who moves into the White House in 2012? Between now and the election, you will be supplied with all the firepower you need to make an objective, independent decision. As detailed and objective a source is not to be found. Am I personally biased from the start? I am, but not in a way some people might think. I am not a Republican, and most of what I write about the politicians in Washington is not positive. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Cato Club 200 member and believe that Cato Chairman Bob Levy is one of the more principled and knowelagble students of American history in the country. I consider Cato to be the outstanding public policy organization in America.
Much of my thinking is based on the writings of Thomas Jefferson, as well as of Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and John Taylor of Caroline. Each has much to offer a believer in a states’ rights Federal Republic.
Among prominent Americans who have been most troubling to our federal republic and an originalist reading of the constitution are Alexander Hamilton, FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Chief Justice John Marshall, Harry Truman, the three presidents outlined above, and current Supreme Court justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor. Any senate member who voted to confirm either Sotomayor or Kagan should not be elected to a new Senate term.
Social issues do not have a place in the conversation of presidential elections. Such discussions should be left to the states, as the federal government does not have a constitutional mandate to interfere in states’ rights on social issues. As such, any candidate’s view on, by example, religion, abortion, or gay marriage should not be part of a campaign dialogue.
Candidates need to be specific on their views regarding Supreme Court nominees, America’s unconstitutional military/industrial complex program of intervention, the Second Amendment, and the explicit duties of Congress and the president, as clearly summarized in Article I Section 8 and Article II Section 2 of the Constitution.
In no special order, here’s my short list of actions needed: Accelerate an orderly withdrawal from both Iraq and Afghanistan. Withdraw from the U.N. and NATO (enough of the New World Order nonsense). Audit the Fed. Junk the U.S. tax code. Reform our legal system, starting with an end to both punitive damages and class actions and introduce loser pays. Pass a National Right to Work law (check out my Liberty and Freedom map at richardcyoung.com).
Coming soon is chapter one of my new 2012 Presidential Playbook, a detailed outline of the emphasis of neocon thinking in America’s foreign policy initiative, including a roster of neocons you do not want to see as advisors to Republican presidential candidates.
C. Bradley Thompson, executive director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism in Neoconservatism Unmasked (Cato’s Letter), writes about neocons as follows: “The neocon’s basic moral-political principle is clear and simple: the subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the nation-state. … The neoconservative vision of a good America is one in which ordinary people work hard, go to church, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, practice homespun virtues, sacrifice themselves to the common good, obey the government, fight wars, and die for the state.” Neocons, he says, are “… the conservative version of FDR’s brain trust: they want to regulate virtually all the areas of human thought, from the bedroom to the boardroom. They are the false prophets of Americanism.” This is the crowd that co-opted the Bush administration and drove the military/industrial complex program of nation building and intervention that persists under the Obama administration.
Look for my upcoming scorecard of neocon players past and present, their thinking, their goals. You are in for an awakening.
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