Where are the Libertarians? by SignyM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Where are the Libertarians?

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 6, 2024 20:16
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Friday, December 30, 2005 8:13 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Bill Clinton Signed Executive Order that allowed Attorney General to do searches without court approval

I'd already linked to that. Yes, Clinton signed an Executive Order. So did Bush, Reagan, Carter, Bush, and Nixon. For all I know, so did Ford, Eisenhower and Roosevelt. But I haven't heard of wiretapping "millions" of people simply because it would be impractical. I HAVE heard of NSA programs that screen electronic communication for key words.

And you somehow have failed to respond to the key question: Where were the Libertarians (or in fact Republicans or Conservatives?) The question wasn't "who" spied and/or wiretapped, the question was: Didn't anyone (besides those nasty pro-government liberals) do anything about it?
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Please don't think they give a shit.

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Sunday, January 1, 2006 7:00 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I realize that there are true small-government Libertarians on this board, and then there are those self-professed Libertarians who believe in small government unless in involves squashing people's privacy, invading nations, or helping monopolies. At that point, they like BIG government. They're fascists pretending to be Libertarians and all my poking and jibing is directed at them. DANG! They're giving Libertarians a bad name!

After reading the various (real) Libertarian arguments, posted by people I both like and respect, I've come to see that large government can indeed be dangerous. There was a post about big government being like the One Ring- when you don't have it, it looks evil. But once you have it you think- well, I can use this for GOOD- and it becomes almost impossible to give up.

And yet, I also think that semi-planned economies are the wave of the future, and that attempts to dismantle a centralized government will only lead to takeover by someone else's monopoly. The mechanism for this is simply the efficient accumulation and direction of capital, and that nations that are not efficiently accumulating and directing capital will wind up like Argentina. In order to break out of this conundrum, we need to find a totally new long-term paradigm. One without stock markets, for example.

Until then, it seems to me that Libertarians and Liberals and leftists have much in common. One strategy, as pointed out by Dreamtrove, is finding an acceptable candidate (of either major party IMHO) that is not part of "the machine". We can gleefully kick Hillary, Feinstein, Biden, Lieberman off the list. YAAAY and good riddance! Just curoius- who else would you kick off the list? (yes, I know- it involves most of the Democractic party. Pretty much like it involves most of the Republican party.)

But- an independent President would be stymied by an intrasigent Congress. And. Congressional elections are coming up. So- who are good Congressional candidates (either party) in your opinion?

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Please don't think they give a shit.

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Sunday, January 1, 2006 1:06 PM

RUE

I have a vote and I'm not afraid to use it!

Quote:
I HAVE heard of NSA programs that screen electronic communication for key words.

Key word screening is gone. In its place is contextual screening which doesn't look for specific words, but words that cluster together. Like funds, shipment, goods, meet etc.

Now I bet that gets me on a list.

But I do agree with you. There is a deafening silence from some self-proclaimed Libertarians.

Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

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Sunday, January 1, 2006 4:47 PM

FLETCH2

I mentioned before that it's useless to view the political situation without relating it to the overall social and economic state of the country. The parties that currently exist and their political platforms are the ones that economics say will exist.

The media says there is a 50/50 red/blue split, so let's start by looking at that. Before the last election I watched a CSPAN program where a Republican polester was giving a lecture at a University. What he said was basically this. For both main parties 30% of their supporters are hardcore, dress a pig in a suit and put him up as that party's canidate and these folks would vote for him. 10% of each party's vote is "Soft" most of the time they will vote for one party or another loyally but the right canidate and policy can steal some of this group away. This is where folk like Reagan Democrats come from. Add that up for the 2 political parties and you get 80% of voters, the 20% that are left are the genuinely independent/undecided crowd. To win you have to attract them.

So politics becomes a juggling act. In the primaries Democrat hopefulls go left to appeal to their activist base. Republicans used to go right, these days they hit the religious crowd. Once a canidate is nominated he moves back towards the center because that's where his 10% "soft" vote is and that is where he has the best chance of picking up some of those 20% undecideds. As the election process continues each party consolidates the middle trying to get and keep as many of the 20% as they can, at the same time they poach at least one of their opponent's trademark issues in an attempt to woo the other party's soft vote. Unlike the undecideds the soft vote is doubly attractive because not only do you gain votes you also take vote's from the other guy. Last election cycle Kerry played the defence card to appeal to soft Republican voters, Bush played the Prescription Drug Benefit card with seniors that usually vote Democrat.

So after all that manouvering what did we get? Almost a 50/50 split. If you look at the two parties platforms on most subjects their possitions are quite close, in all cases appealing to the middle class voters that make up the undecied 20%. Those subjects that do divide them are hot button issues like abortion where there is very little middle ground.

DT likes to see a world where PNAC and the DLC have the next 3 or 4 elections planned out, either because they are the same shadow cabinet or because they have a deal. I see a world where the people that vote want a safe quiet life with good economic prospects and decent security. They will vote for whichever party they believe will deliver that and as what needs to be done is pretty obvious both parties tend to have the same general policy in these areas.

So an election prodiction for 2008. If Bush comes out of this term with no mainland US terrorist event, American troops out of Iraq and a reasonable economy then whoever the regime decides is his successor will probably win. If the world hasn't done anything bad to America people will vote for more. If Bush blows it then Republicans will nominate a Bush critic to be their canidate and will try and distance themselves from the Bush legacy.

If Bush ends his second term more or less ok Democrats will nominate someone with media interest and try to woo voters by going to the right, since that is where the electorate is. If the economy is in a mess they will go left because that's where the 20% will be. If the US has a terrorist attack they will go hawkish to try and get the 10% soft Republican vote.

From our point of view nothing will change.

The ONLY way for a seachange is for things to go bad and stay bad for a protracted period, long enough for the 20% and one party's "soft" vote to permainently drift to one party or the other. That would give that party the seats in congress and the mandate to effect change.

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Sunday, January 1, 2006 7:13 PM

DREAMTROVE

Signym,

Ah, I see you're still thinking too 20th century. That's so democrat of you :). Kidding, and yet not. I think there's a new paradigm in town, and so it needs to be examined.

First. You put Dean (Yale/S&B?..) in the wrong crowd, he's part of team evil. Don't think they would have let him sneak in. Okay, granted, he came in as a partial-outsider. But the media killed him like a rabid dog and then he capitualated with the team evil and they made him Dunce Regent. He waived his right to vote for platform points in the '04 dem con, that's a total capitulation to Kerry, who is Evil. Dean needs to be counted as evil. But that's just a showing that the dem vote totals are pathetic, but this isn't the paradigm, so I digress.

Before moving on to the point, Ted Stevens annoys me, he's likt the GOP's Mary Landrieu, the totally corrupt oil puppetician who every once in a while acts like an elected representative of the people. But he's not conspiring with the actual enemies of the united states, those being al qaeda and the commies, and so I wouldn't kick him out of the the party or anything, just not putting him forward as president.

Anyway, the new paradigm is 'You vote for your guy, no one else does.' Under this paradigm, advertising is uselss, because everyone else is voting for their guy. The assumption here is everybody voting is a de facto employee of one of the candidates. Therefore it behooves you to create a base of support large enough to get your candidate elected. This means when I say it takes 10 million to win, I mean your organization needs 10 million members. It's not impossible, many organizations have 10 million members. If Seinfeld viewers wanted to elect a primary candidate and were organized to do so, they would would win hands down. If the nations black voters were highly organized they could trounce the traditional demohawks.

Most of the GOP is supporting the party. Someone them barely know who Bush is, and the rest don't care. Bush started out with about 10 million supporters, and now I think he has about 5 million. The GOP has 50 million. This is why the primary is so important. As long as you don't spit in the face of the GOP once you get the nomination [*considers bush for a second*] okay, even if you spit in the face of the GOP after the election, they will more or less fall in line.

To say that 55 million people support Bush is to not understand the dynamic at all. All of those 50 million republicans would support John McCain, John Sununu or Larry Craig, Chuck Hagel or even Lincoln Chaffe if he was on the ticket.

Let's take a point to the side for a moment. These voters are not 'stupid.' This is a classic misinterpretation which leads one down the path of bad strategy. These voters are strategic voters who feel they are better off with the worst republican than with a democrat. Most care little about wide-sweeping political issues and care a fair amount aboiut one or two issues. Some care about freedome of religion, others care about tax breaks. Some care about how well their employers do, or to what degree the govt. interferes in their lives. Some of this last group are hating Bush right now, but not enough to vote for a democrat. Many 'Bush supporters' now are even anti-war. Kerry promised more war than Bush delivered, since historically democrats have just about always done so, it would be foolish of an anti-war conservative to support the democrats.

So in essence, these voters are locked in, they support GOP, their support of the candidate is simply a side effect of their support for the Republican Party.

The democrats have similar groups. People who care heavily about affirmative action, feminism, or gay rights. People who rely on a steady welfare check. A lot of these people may have been angry with Clinton for the degree to which he did not support their issue, they may have even hated him for it, but if they, because of that, joined the GOP, then they are fools. These people also aren't stupid. They support the Democrats. In the primary, they are liable to support someone else other than Clinton, but when it comes to the election, they will support the party. I figure the Democrats have about 45 million supporters.

Finally, I think the GOP split in the Senate is very close to 50/50, whereas the democrat split is more 40/4. What's deceptive here is that the anti-Bush republicans hands are tied when they own the executive, because that gives Bush and co de facto total control over the party machine. They need him, it's almost impossible to oppose him. The fact that they do it as much as they do stuns and amazes me daily. It's really very encouraging.

Clinton was not just an evil man, he was a terrible Democrat, even by the values Democrats strive to support, but very few Democrats routinely bucked his lead. Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, maybe the occassional Dick Durbin or Pat Leahy.

Oh, and John Edwards is not a Lib/Lib. He's a Lib/Dem on my big circle. His ideas fall deep in traditional democrat, with slight leanings toward big govt./globalist, and he supported the pres.'s iraq policy.

If you think you cna take the democratic party by all means do it, but I think the gop will be a much easier target. Plus, if I capture the GOP, I would have the dems, a minority with a classical traditional of weak opposition as an opponent, whereas you would have a minority with a majority of strong opposition in the republicans.

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Monday, January 2, 2006 6:03 AM

CENTURYHOUSE

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
These voters are strategic voters who feel they are better off with the worst republican than with a democrat.

This is very true. I can't see that I would ever EVER vote for a Democrat because they are consistantly working to destroy rights that are important to me in a much more dramatic and concerted way than the Repubs. The 2nd Amendment is one major part of that for me, but there are many other main Dem platform items that I am adamantly against. I would vote Republican as a step to keep the Dem-wolves at bay, and it really is a lesser of two evils situation.

If the Libertarians would get a REAL candidate who wasn't a fool and who's policies weren't idiocy, then I would consider voting for them and would help push candidate to people I know. I would actually LOVE for this to happen so I could throw my support in with them.

I feel the same way about the concept of Libertarianism as I do the concepts of Liberalism or Conservativism. All are nice theories and I philosophically agree with all three of them. Individual freedoms from Libertarianism, tolerance and understanding of Liberalism, Small government with limited power & spending and an adherence to the old Constitution and the intentions of the founders from Conservatism.

Unfortunately, these philosophies do NOT carry over to the parties that claim to represent those ideals. Modern 'liberals' are hypocrites and often the least tolerant people I know - coupled with no common sense whatsoever when it comes to real world or the nature of people.

Libertarian politicians seem to have no clue when they start talking policy and governance. It's all good talk until they get to the details.

Conservatives? Where?? GW isn't the demon that many make him out to be in their frothing at the mouth ravings, but he is a typical politician that is for middle of the road big government. The Republican parties has some real conservatives and Constitutionalists in it, but they are far too few and to weak to make it happen with that party. I bet a lot of them would defect if the Libertarians got real.

Repubs are the slow road to destruction as opposed to the Dems who are the fast track. The Libertarian politicians have to get potty trained at some point and get out on their own with a real message and workable solutions - so that they can be taken seriously as a player.

Check out my songs:
http://www.thelightningwaltz.com

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Thursday, January 5, 2006 8:02 PM

DREAMTROVE

Well said

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Friday, February 3, 2006 5:52 AM

JHANCE11

One LARGE differance.( I'll go slowly) President Clinton took the legal method of going through the FISA court to get the wiretaps your talking about( By the way why do we still call them wiretaps, it's not how they do it anymore) The Fisa court was set up to make sure the system was not abused and has worked for many years. 98% of all requests are approved when the Executive branch asks for them. Dispite what hot air is coming from the political landscape, they are quick and almost always rubberstamped. President Bush is trying to extend the power of the Presidency period. I respectt the footsoldgers of the republican party even when I diagree with them but your own party is playing you and you do'nt even know it

jhance11

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Friday, February 3, 2006 6:08 AM

JHANCE11

Guy's try to remember politic's are cyclical. There was A time when this oldman can remember. there was such A thing as A liberal Republican.

Religion can be A wonderful thing. It gives hope,direction and purpose. However when Religion rears it's head in politi'c the end result is always bad. If history tells us anything it tells us that.

The wheels will eventually come off the strangle hold the religous right has on the Republican party bad things will happen when it does. After that there will be A timeof comprommise and talking and things will get done. Hang in there

jhance11

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Friday, February 3, 2006 8:11 PM

DREAMTROVE

Quote:

One LARGE differance.( I'll go slowly) President Clinton took the legal method of going through the FISA court to get the wiretaps your talking about

No, not a LARGE difference. I can't believe I'm going to defend Bush wiretapping. I guess I'm not defending it, Bush is still wrong, but I have to shoot down this argument, err. clay pigeon.

Bush is lazy. Clinton is dilligent. Clinton did NOT acr according to FISA. He modified FISA to suit his purposes in a way that made FISA completely irrelevent. I've posted this six times now and no one gets it:

Clinton FISA works like this:
1. AFTER you tap, you apply for a warrant.
2. If you don't get your warrant, then the evidence becomes inadmissible in a court of law.
3. If you never intended to use the evidence in a court of law, but were instead tapping political groups, opposition parties, and corporations, then you intend to use this information in subversion, political campaigns and business.
4. Thus, the Clinton bastardization of FISA makes it perfectly legal for the president to order unwarranted wiretaps for any purpose OTHER than to protect America.

But there's one other thing that almost no one gets:

Bush is Clinton, Clinton is Bush. Or, in Jossese: Ben is Glory, Glory is Ben.

The thing is that these people, now the Bunton administration, have been pushing for an increase of executive power since day one, and Bush's transgression is the natural extension of Clinton's, with one difference. Bush is lazy, and didn't bother to make it law first. If Bush were Clinton, he would write the new law like this:

"If the president fails to apply for the warrant, then at the end of 72 hours it becomes treated like the warrant was applied for an refused, and the information would inadmissible in a court of law."

If Bush had bother to ammend the FISA law to include this line, he wouldn't be over his head now. But people are talking like Bush made watergate legal. No he didn't, Bush broke the law. Clinton made watergate legal.

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Friday, February 3, 2006 8:36 PM

FLETCH2

All of this is completely irrelevent.

First you have always been spied on, if you have ever expressed a serious political opinion, joined a political party been active in trade unionism, lobby groups, political action comittees or the like somewhere the government has a file on you. It's what governments do.

As to wiretaps, here's something you may not know. In the UK we have an electronic interception center called GCHQ. Back in cold war days it spied on the Soviets. As part of the "Special relationship" a member of the US NSA was assigned there as a liason. If GCHQ heard anything of interest to the US they passed the file to him and he sent it to his superiors. Reciprical to this arangement the UK had an agent at Fort Meade. However, other than keeping tabs on US IRA sympathisers he had little to do. At the NSA's request he would spy on suspect Americans using US equipment, he would then pass his findings to the NSA who would mark them "gathered from foreign intelligence sources" and use them. So Americans were being spied on in their own country by Brits using American equipment to get around domestic spying rules.

Oh and I know I have a Special Branch file -- my crime? My association with that radical group the Young Conservatives while in college. The important thing to note here is that when I was in college the Conservatives were in power meaning that the intelligence machine will actually spy on the current ruling party (well they do in the UK.)

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Saturday, February 4, 2006 7:25 AM

RUE

I have a vote and I'm not afraid to use it!

Just a bit of historical trivia for those who like to keep track of Bush's mis-statements:

"Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html

Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

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Saturday, February 4, 2006 9:05 AM

JHANCE11

Your shot missed the mark here my friend. The FISA court was modified long before Clinton took office. There are times in the inteligence business that information has to be acted on quickly. That was the reason for the modification.

If it sounds like I'm making Bush's aurgument for you not listening. The largest differance between the two processes you discuss, is oversight. By going to the FISA court no matter the method. A judge and the panel are aware of the matter and can step in if they see abuse'es.
Plus the fact the procedure can become public much easier if the court feel's like abuse's are occuring. Accountablility is the key. is the system perfect, anything but. If you have A better Idea to inprove it and still make it afective, now's the time. Bush is not lazy, he just has an ingraned arrougance that comes with the victory's the Republican's have scored.

Yes both wanted to expand the power's of the Presidency as Congress like's to do the same with their's it's the nature of the beast. There are times in society the Executive branch need broader power's and there are times Congress need's more oversight. Back to the original subjuect. Modified or not Clinton followed the law Bush did not and history will judge.

jhance11

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Thursday, November 9, 2006 9:29 PM