First, I’d like to thank Lance for inviting me to join the crew; I’ll try not to damage everybody’s reputation too much. I developed a fair number of opinions, having been dragged into conservative politics by the family and the age of 8 and sticking with it for 45 years. Not so much stubborness (though partly); simply because- over time- it has nearly always proven to be bang on. I still have a copy of a Reagan speech I hear in ’63 predicting how the Baby Boomers would crush Social Security if something wasn’t done.
First concept: life is precious, but it is not per se sacred. I mean, come on; there are 6 billion of us, the one thing that is 100% fatal is being born, and none of us are getting out of here alive. I’ve spent too much time around the medical community early on to believe otherwise, including watching a dozen people die as part of CPR response teams before I was 20. As such, I’m an advocate of a properly applied, timely death penalty; it’s the human equivalent of putting mad dogs down and a consistent, assured philosophy of ‘you kill us and we kill you right back’ has preventative value. Not to mention keeping those that have to guard killers safer.
Politically, I like to refer to myself as a Constitutional anarchist, simply because- if the Constitution was actually applied the way the Founding Fathers constructed it- it would cause anarchy in our current federal infrastructure. The primary component that would result in bureaucratic anarchy is the temporal nature of the foundational document of this nation. Specifically the 10th amendment; in adding as an amendment, it supplants the Elastic Clause.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Trumps:
“To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof”
Let’s see how that impacts viewing an issue. For example, I consider Roe v. Wade as one of the worst decisions ever to come out of the Supreme Court, every bit as bad as the Dred Scott decision. The reason: only through fantasy could you ignore the 10th amendment to say that there is anything in the Constitution that grants as a human right a singular elective medical procedure. The ‘control of one’s body’ argument is pure male bovine excrement; an abortion requires the participation of the medical community, which the feds seem to have no problem limiting in other ways. A right to procedures to save your life isn’t constitutionally protected (thankfully, but a discussion of why that would be a disaster is for another day). Roe V. Wade should never had been voted in and should be reversed: abortion then becomes a very messy state issue where it constitutionally belongs.
Note, not one bit of this consideration is based on the ‘morality’ involved; only law and logic. If true morality and ‘justice’ was involved in most legal matters, lightning bolts would come down from the sky and smoke all the lawyers (another topic for another day).
BTW: Fred Thompson has about the same view of this; one of many reasons I support him. As an original Goldwater backer (Yes, I was there for the birth of dirt), polls mean little to me.
On the global front, I am in favor of highly selective, practical interventions when necessary. The military is a last option but it is a viable option, with a good record at resolving things at extreme cost. Nothing in the Constitution precludes it, merely leaving it to the executive to manage international affairs and the legislative to fund them (or not). Isolationists must live in a dream world; militarily, we are the one superpower left, with a military capable of winning any non-nuclear ‘hot war’ in weeks. And those of us who have been out in the harsher world can assure you; evil exists out there, American policy didn’t create it all (nor even much of it) and- if we don’t address it- it will come to find us where we live. And negotiating with people willing to kill you over what you name a teddy bear or draw in a cartoon is not an option.
The Middle East is important and it is indeed because of oil. Not to protect American oil interests there (which we don’t need to care that much about) but to prevent the resources of the oil to be used by Islamic extremists to spread their fanaticism and strike us. I’m of the opinion that, no matter what we do at this point, there is a better than a one-in-three chance that we’ll see a nuclear blast in New York and/or Washington, DC within a decade. Maybe, with the right intervention, we can cut that chance in half; no better. A grim prediction, but there it is; if that horror does happen, the entire world may depend on what we do next.
So there’s a variety of random things to rattle about the cage. Comment to your heart’s content and I’ll detail and defend as needed.
Filed under: Philosophy, Politics, Republicans
Welcome aboard Mike