United Liberty

I have been very critical of John McCain’s campaign. I believe it has been unduly negative and mostly incompetent. However, I believe that McCain actually did well in the debate last night. He finally made a coherent argument regarding Obama’s tax policy. Although I detest politics by anecdote, I think the Joe the Plumber thing worked well in showing that small business people may get stuck with higher taxes in an Obama administration. On the basic tax and spend argument, I think he won the debate. As the debate wore on though, he seemed to be less coherent, and Obama won most of the second half of the debate. Overall, I would call it a draw.

I do agree that there is noway that I will vote for John McCain. His reaction to the “crisis” (really a much needed correction) completely mystifies me. He repudiated the most basic tenet of Republican philosophy for the last thirty years — government is the problem and not the solution. Instead he completely vilified the “greed” of Wall Street and not only suggested but demanded more government in the form of take overs of the financial industry and nationalizing bad mortgages. What kind of Republican says those things?

I have said previously and I believe that a McCain defeat may actually be a good thing for liberty minded Republicans.

Great post Leon. A GOP defeat will force Republicans to come to terms with their policies and hopefully return them to the basics of conservatism.

Well from our experiences during the primary campaigns I’ll go ahead and pitch in that odds are those polls aren’t exactly honest. Let’s not get into the electoral process as a whole.

In any case, the Obamanation did seem more articulate, what with McCrazy’s stutter stampede, but that doesn’t pull away from the obvious failings in his proposals. Until I start hearing real sanity, like “I’ll abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve, because the power to coin money and determine its value belongs with the people,” and “We’ve got to get ahold of this police state and its encroachments on our civil liberties” I’m going to continue to count on the consistency of failure and inaction on the part of our ‘servants’.

Last night seemed like a competition for who could drop the most hot-button words and still sound like an icon of their party, which was reminiscent of and well parodied at the end of the SNL debate skit.

Dem-“blah blah healthcare, change, people, change, etc.”
Rep-“yadda yadda my friends, maverick, bipartisan, junior-over-there, yuck yuck I’m old.”

I want to reemphasize that we should be more concerned about whether we’re actually going to have an election, and less about which idiot would/will be taking the pilot seat of our Hindenburg. The likelihood of some sort of new false-flag ‘terror’ scare and the clamping down of our police state on the citizenry, another political assassination, and/or the instigation of hostilities with Iran (or whoever, really) is frightening, to say the least.

I’m not even mentioning the imminent collapse of our current world monetary system and how that also could provide the excuse our idiot-in-chief has been waiting for.

Guess who wins? Certainly not the American population, that’s for sure.

CS

“McCain was completely incapable of sustaining any momentum, and clumsily returned again and again to his “Joe the Plumber” gimmick. It was clear that John had “jumped the shark” when he began talking directly to the unseen “Joe”, and congratulating him for being “rich”. I think he realized too that he had blown his “last best chance”. His eyes started flittering back and forth like he was lost and scared, and he began to make the faces that have been the source of so much speculation regarding his temperament and stability.”

Read more at SERENDIPITY.

McCain came across as a condescending, angry, bitter old man. Obama came across as calm and rational. The people that think McCain probably went in to it supporting McCain.

“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson

I’ll be the contrarian here. I’m no fan of John McCain, but I personally thought he was the clear winner of the debate. I thought, despite his ridiculous comments about Joe the plumber, he did a decent job selling himself and his crap policies. Frankly, I thought he made Obama look bad. To me, Obama came off as the cold, arrogant, bold-faced liar that he is — using traditionally Republican rhetoric to peddle socialist ideas. And McCain came off as the well-intentioned but extremely confused and ideologically void statist that he is.

I guess to clarify my previous post, I thought McCain actually seemed like a human being.

A possibly distasteful metaphor of how I viewed them last night:

If they are both killers of capitalism, McCain would be the guy that flinches when he pulls the trigger and then despairs over what he might have done, but refuses to admit it wasn’t necessary lest his conscience devour him. Whereas Obama would be the guy that pulls the trigger with a steady hand, walks over to the corpse, and puts a couple extra bullets in the head just to be sure.

I thought the previous two debates were better for McCain, at least from a public speaking point of view.

Last night he seemed nervous and desperate. His childish, “I’m right, you’re wrong” smile when Obama gave his responses was a stark contrast to the calmness and sometimes sympathetic looks Obama returned to McCain. I think that gave Obama a subtle psychological advantage, in that metaphorically, he’s more capable of listening with a serious ear to opinions he may disagree with.

On a good note, McCain did say he was a Federalist and denied the all-powerfulness of the federal government that Obama assumes he’ll inherit when he’s elected.

Following the candidates since last year, I’ve gathered that Obama is an inexperienced socialist, and McCain is an aspiring fascist. With only a couple weeks left, I’m depressed at our choices.