Ugh. Has anyone read his "manifesto"? And who was the one who said that there's nothing more dangerous in this world than a liberal with a gun?
> ...I am, I know, more hawkish than I was last year at this time. But
> then, I supported the Gulf War -- or what I guess we'll be calling Gulf War
> I pretty soon -- at the time. My first reaction when I heard about the
> invasion of Kuwait was, "We should do something to protect an ally, but of
> course we won't." And I was 20 years old at the time, so a war could have
> had some profound effects on me. I think I underestimated the impact the
> end of the Cold War would have on our willingness to intervene. Anyway,
> about a year later, I took to saying that the US Marine Corps was the
> greatest force for good in the world.
> The worst thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party was the
> Vietnam War. Of course, the D's were the least of the victims of the war,
> but from the 1968 convention to the 1992 primaries (when Clinton and
> Tsongas laid a smackdown on the left) the party was essentially captured by
> its lunatic fringe, and that fringe hated the military. Even those (the
> majority) who weren't out-and-out pacifists couldn't understand that the
> military was not only necessary, but a necessary good.
> My mother (the Ginpundit) tried to raise me a pacifist, but it didn't
> take. When I was young -- about ten, I'd guess -- one of the hot topics was
> the nuclear freeze/nuclear disarmament. Continental Europeans, I remember,
> were really big on that. My reaction was basically: "Wait, if we disarmed,
> wouldn't the Russians just take over, or kill us all?" I was told it was
> more complicated than that, and I was young, so I believed. A few years
> later, I realized that it wasn't more complicated than that, and that the
> Russians would have either taken over or killed us all....
>
> However... I don't consider any of this contrary to "liberalism" as I
> understand it, to the slightly left-of-center politics of the New Republic
> or the Democratic Leadership Council, or Bill Clinton for that matter.
> President Clinton is, of course, a repugnant human being. But I probably
> agreed with his policies about eighty percent of the time, and I'd guess
> that if you took out the times when he was clearly pandering and going
> against his best political judgment (and there was never anything wrong
> with his political judgment) it would be more like 95%. "Liberal" was used
> as a smear word by Republicans in the eighties, who used it to mean,
> basically, "Socialist". I've never felt that way. <A HREF="http://kinen.blogspot.com/">Glenn Kinen</A> today said
> that he thinks he's a (John) Kennedy Democrat, and I feel I'm in that
> tradition, and that of Truman, and FDR.
> There are a number of things I don't normally talk about here, because
> they haven't been part of the national debate lately, but where I'm far out
> of step with the Republican Party, and more or less in agreement with the
> Democratic. I'm an environmentalist, though whenever possible I prefer the
> carrot of tax credits to the stick of regulation. And I favor our current
> progressive income tax. I think the current Federal income tax structure is
> more or less right; not perfect, but at least in the top 5 percentile. (I
> also think that taxes were ridiculously high before Reagan's cut, but most
> Democrats these days would agree with that.) I wish the State of Alabama
> would raise the income tax and lower sales taxes. I'm biased (in that my
> father and my communist sister are trial lawyers and my brother is in
> training to join the crowd) but I think "tort reform" is mostly a scam
> corporations are trying to pull to get away with selling defective products
> and services. (I'm not saying that there aren't times when juries go too
> far, but that's what judges are for.) I think Ralph Nader's politics range
> from stupid to abhorrent, but I also think he did a lot to make this
> country a better place to live, back in the sixties and seventies. I just
> think it's long past time for him to go. And though I may be a hawk, I
> think that National Missile Defense is a huge boondoggle and liable to be a
> waste of time even if it worked, though we should probably keep
> researching. I'm theoretically pro-union, though I think the AFL-CIO's
> trade positions are immensely stupid and counterproductive; the American
> union movement is living in the past and needs to catch up with the
> postindustrial world....
>
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20020511/65245527/attachment.htm>