Do we really want/need more liberals in office?

prior to 1976, school districts were unregulated by the federal government. carter created the department of education and brought the future of the youth under the umbrella of state-sanctioned, bureacratic control. kids today are forced to watch al gore's propaganda fil 'an inconvenient truth'. public education seeks to feed the youth on liberal principles to perpetuate its own existence. it's no accident that a child who receives education in the private sector is better able to succeed in life than a child passed through the socialistic public education system. it's also telling to know that public schools spend on average 10-15k more $ per student per year to achieve lower standards of performance. how does that make sense? if we had a choice, we'd surely choose an alternative.

in washington dc, some school districts have been experimenting with a voucher program. with vouchers, parents can choose where their children go to school. we all pay taxes which, in part, fund public education. the voucher grants a $ value of credit to offset the cost of private schooling. the voucher experiment in dc is so popular that there are five families competing for every slot. dems in congress want to kill the program and it will likely not be renewed next year.

the real crime here is that liberal, socialistic programs are the root cause of failures in every aspect of the public sector. time and time again, example after example of bureacratic administration of social programs prove ineffective and often counter-productive. yet we continue to allow it to happen and we keep letting the guilty parties get away with it when we elect or re-elect them.

at the end of each segment of the 'free to choose' series, in compliance with the 'fairness doctrine' (which was in place at the time the series was made) there is a debate-style format where a liberal intellectual argues against Friedman's findings and in each debate, the liberal argument is exposed for what it is: pure, unadultered socialist ideals. essentially, you and i lack the ability to make our own decisions and it is necessary - no...imperative - that our government make decisions for us.

when exposed for what it is, this line of thinking is rejected wholesale. indicative of this are the recurring "re-alignment" elections of 1980, 1982, 1994. re-aligning elections describe a phenomena where the public so rejects the policies of a party and widely throws them out of office by electing the other party. the "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980's describes an overwhelming re-alignment of social conservative values. it was long in coming.

kennedy for the most part was little more than a figure head. no significant legislation came from his administration and no significant social changes occured. kennedy escalated the vietnam was, but not to the extend that his successor, lyndon johnson did. johnson exploded state welfare programs, doubled the US involvement in vietnam, and enacted the modern affirmative action policies. his policies were such a departure from traditional american value that there was no way a democrat could win in 1968. nixon was a shoe-in.

were it not for the scandal of the watergate hotel break-in, the realignment might have been complete. however, the media - already a breeding ground for liberal progressive ideals - crucified nixon. and Ford's rapid pardon was equally lauded as corrupt in the media....painting the republican party as the party of cronyism and corruption, paving the way for carter's election in 1976.

under carter, the US economy circled the bowl. inflation rose at higher and higher rates, unemployment soared, and US markets suffered shortages of all commodities. we suffered in the international areana as well....when the shaw of iran was overthrown, the us embassy in tehran was seized and several americans were held hostage for over 400 days. carter was a fool and a coward. those hostages were released just hours after reagan's inauguration.

the media and public education continue to cherry pick the story they want us to hear, in keeping with their socialist liberal views. look at the news today...bush = bad. republicans = corrupt. they'll ignore the news about edwards' immorality (until fox news network picked up the story and ran with it - it took the rest of the major networks a whole week to even mention it) but they'll crucify bush for "lying" about intelligence reports to get us into a war with iraq. never mind the fact that virtually every prominent democrat in the congress spoke out in support and voted to authorize force. it would be a non-issue in the news at all if it weren't for the fact that obama didn't vote that way.

and by the way, the "comprehensive immigration act of 2007" failed cloture in the senate. it died on the floor. cloture is essentially an up or down vote in the senate to decide whether or not they'll continue to debate the bill. the groundswell of oppostion to it - fueled by awareness of it (how often does that happen?) - convinced our legislators to abandon the project....for the time being, at least. remember ted kennedy, speaking on the floor of the senate, complained about the overflow of "racist" remarks he received concerning the bill. that "racist" rhetoric, mind you, was ordinary people like you and me demanding that the US enforce its own laws and not grant amnesty to 12 million people who broke the law, drain our public resources, and contribute to poverty in our cities. "racist"

 

Don't even get me started on heath care...

 

I don't see you making an agrument against it....

 

I disagree somewhat. Clinton was the worst thing to happen to national security since Carter. Clinton's administration sucked balls. I've already ranted on the clittin admin on another thread.

 

prior to clinton, we had an 18 division army capable of deploying world-wide to counter any threat. in the decade before clittin, we rescued american hostages in Granada, protected American interests in the Mediterranean Sea when threatened by the Libyans, removed Noriega and his regime from Panama, and kicked the Iraqis out of Kuwait and all the way back up the Tigris/Euphrates River Valley. Not to mention that whole collapse of the Soviet Union thing that made the world safe for democracy.

In the first 5 years of that liberal jackass, we surrendered our interest in the Panama Canal, and cut the combat power of our military by over 60%. we went into Somalia and then ran away like bunch of cowards. meanwhile, terrorists attacked and killed US marines in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, US citizens in Kenya, New York, Yemen, and Tanzania.Our response? we bombed the Sudan.

!!???

clinton then replaced a large segment of the military personnel structure with a bureacracy of government employees. until you've had to work in a socialistic bureacracy where only 60% of the work assigned is enforceably required to be performed, you can't know the frustration and anger that encourages.

have i mentioned base closures yet? military bases - love 'em or hate 'em - are good for any local economy. you'd be hard pressed to find a state in the union that didn't suffer a base closure.

the legacy of the clinton administration is a no-money-for-training, ill equipped, short-manned force shackled to a bureacracy full of i'll-get-around-to-it-when-i'm-ready civil "servants" whose only real loyalty lies in the administration that manufactured their jobs.

intangibly, the military restructuring retired off all our warriors and replaced them with an officer corps full of political cocksuckers who botched the Iraq and Afghanistan war planning and executed half-assed liberation/occupation operations that essentially set the conditions for the mess we're stewing in over there now.

 

Clinton raised government wages (i was in the army at the time) and he raised minimum wage while in office. Both things are bad for the economy. Especialy when done at the same time. All that money that i got extra in pay raises (i think i got three or four while i was in through out a 3 year period of time) comes out of the pockets of productive members of society in the form of higher taxes.

I have a whole thread on minimum wage. That's pretty bad for the economy too. In the long run all it does is make the government more money, and keep the same amount of money in the pockets of the poor because of inflation. Businesses aren't even effected. They pass their extra costs off to us.

 

Bush did that under the pressure of a congress run by democrats. Minimum wage had not been raised for almost a decade at the time, and he got congressional approval for doing it. The democrats were crying essencialy, "Aw come on, we always do what you wanna do, can't we do what we wanna do?". So we raised the minimum wage.

Bush also wanted tax breaks and regulatory relief to accompany those raises so small businesses wouldn't be hurt.

So you aren't really making a point with that. Those raises were still sought after up by the liberals.

 

we didn't "put" Saddam in power, either. we backed Iraq in their war against Iran.....simply because of the situation we had with Iran at the time. That was less than 10 years after Iran took our Embassy and held Americans hostage for over 430 days.

We didn't install the Shaw, either. The Pahlavi Dynasty had been in power since 1925 and was part of a longer tradition of monarchy in that country dating back centuries. We liked (and supported) the Shaw because they supplied oil. When the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shaw and took Americans hostage, we changed our position on our relationship with Iran.

Bin Laden? heh

We didn't "put" Bin Laden in power. We covertly funneled arms and money to the Mujahadeen who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Bin Laden's beef with us stems from the Saudis' decision to invite us in to protect Saudi oil fields from the Iraqis.

The British love us. They remember that it was the US that saved them from being invaded by Nazi Germany. The former Warsaw pact countries love us because it was our position in the Cold War that ultimately brought about the end of their Soviet repression.

So "policing" the world or not, there is a reason why we are at the top of the food chain.