Good Stuff

Kim du Toit
May 14, 2008
11:48 AM CDT

Bob Bidinotto posts his thoughts on November’s election, and they’re good ones. Here are a couple of samples:

Someone just posted a comment to a previous entry, asking, in essence, whether I thought it was better to vote for Republican John McCain (because of his stand on the war, and his likelihood of appointing better Supreme Court justices) or Libertarian Bob Barr (because of his superior political philosophy).

My answer is a qualified “neither.” The qualification hinges on the word “for.”

I won’t be voting “for” any presidential candidate in November. I’ll be voting against one.

As good as Bob Barr is on most domestic issues, the Libertarian foreign policy is suicidally naive. Also, I think minority-party “protest votes” are futile and wasted.  Either a Republican or Democrat will occupy the White House in 2009. Those are the only realistic alternatives. For me, therefore, my November presidential vote will be between the two major party candidates—and that vote will be purely tactical, not philosophical.

Obviously, I can’t support either Obama or McCain on philosophical grounds. Both, in different ways, would be national disasters—Obama both at home and abroad, and the McCain mainly on the domestic front. Unlike conservatives, I have zero confidence that McCain, as a conservative progressive in the Teddy Roosevelt tradition, will select limited-government justices to join the Supremes. So I think that there is only one public-policy reason to pull the McCain lever: the war against radical Islam. Period.

Can’t argue with any of that. Pragmatic approaches always win out for me, especially when facing the Antichrist socialists. Also:

It looks like the GOP will suffer crushing defeats at the congressional level in November. I would not want the Dems to take the White House, too, and thus have an unobstructed path to unlimited expansion of federal power. Since limiting federal power—to whatever extent possible—is my top political priority, I’d probably want a Republican (however nominal) in the White House, as something of a check on Congress. In other words, I’ll be voting in hopes of some measure of gridlock.

Yup.

And for those who are thinking of sitting this one out, allow me to quote some other guy:

Fact is, our choices are going to be Maverick Johnny McCain (Self-TV) or Messiah Obama (Soc-IL). That’s the hand we’ve been dealt, and that’s the one we’re going to have to play.

Remember, this is not like a poker game, where if you’re losing, or don’t like the stakes, you can walk away from the game with your money.

If you walk away from this game, the others will continue to play your hands, with your money.

Time to restart the conservative revolution later.