Mad Cow wants me to respond to his political standpoint. (Find that discussion here.)
My post will basically follow right along his post, so it’d be good if you read that one first.
For starters, I will second the position that government should be small. This doesn’t mean just that there should be less people hired, which is certainly true. This means that the government of the US of A needs to stop overstepping it’s bounds. Welfare, Social Security, and all that just adds layers and layers of fat onto our government that we have to pay for.
Mad Cow also mentioned that Bush seems to believe in smaller government just being consolidating power, but I’d like him to be more specific about this claim. Sounds like malarkey without any backing to me.
As far as right to choose, that is what freedom is about. Choices. However, I don’t know if you could go so far as to give people the right to choose to kill another human. That’s infringing pretty hard on somebody else’s rights.
Here’s my stance on abortion: I don’t think it’s fair to think of a fetus as anything sub-human. We can all admit that (barring some form of medical difficulties) the fetus would eventually become a human. There’s no questioning that fact. After conception, there will be a human born (again barring medical difficulties). No ifs ands or buts about it.
The question then becomes, does the person who is not yet a full human deserve the right to have the chance to be one? If not, then why does a baby who was born yesterday deserve that chance? It’s not much better off at that point than it is in the womb. It probably isn’t going to think to itself “Hey, you can’t kill me because that’s wrong.” So where do we draw the line?
Moving on to the issues of gays. They already have civil rights. I want people to stop asking that they receive them. A gay man is just as allowed to marry a woman as any other man. The government won’t stop him. What gays want are new rights defined to fit their style. To redefine civil unions to fit them is to give them new rights, not rights everyone else already has. Get it straight. (Ignore the pun value of that last statement.)
Moving right along:
Our national government’s incessant need to throw money at people with problems.
I think people misinterpret the idea of charity as being the role of the government. Yes, helping people is an important thing for those more fortunate to be doing. It’s very much their duty. But it’s not the government’s duty.
Our government should certainly not be spending the money we pay them to run our country to help other countries run themselves. That’s why it’s not in our country’s Constitution. Funds to take care of the country shouldn’t be routed to Indonesia or something. If we want, as an American people, to help someone, we should be allowed to decide who we donate our money to and do it personally.
Charities are good, but forced charity leads to abuse and problems. It’s immoral for any person to force another person to pay for your problems. It’s immoral for them to turn a blind eye to your problems, but that doesn’t mean you can, or should, force them to pay. That’s all there is to it, for now. This post is just an overview of all the issues anyway.
Next topic Mad Cow mentions: the idea that reforms of any sort should not be happening under Bush’s administration. This is an absurd notion. Why is it that whenever the person you don’t want is in the White House, nothing should be allowed to happen? Bush doesn’t write the laws. He’s just a part of the system, not the entire system. To suggest that because Bush is in office we shouldn’t be writing laws is absolutely absurd and anti-democratic.
Let’s now focus on Iraq a bit. First, let’s stop blaming Bush for sending us to war. It was a decision made by Congress. Kerry included. In fact, several key Democrats signed a resolution begging the president to go to war. It was House Joint Resolution 114 of the 107th Congress: Vote Record. You can use Thomas (official online records of bills and resolutions) to read the full text. Search bill number “hjr 114″ and pick 107th Congress)
We weren’t sure of our safety, and it was not unreasonable to assume that a man who used chemical weapons on his own people would still try to have them. No, we didn’t find any evidence of those weapons left, but on the plus side we got rid of a man who’d been a ruthless dictator digging mass graves and all. Something that both Democrats and Republicans were for doing. Kerry signed the resolution to make it happen. Democrats need to stop blaming Bush for the war in Iraq.
That subject sort of brings us to Guantanamo Bay, something I’d like to hit on. The place Senator Durbin, a prominent democrat, said was as bad as Nazi prison camps. People are shouting that the people in Gitmo need rights as if they were American citizens, blah blah blah. Does anyone stop to mention that these are people taken on the battlefield as enemy combatants? As in, they’re prisoners of war? Duh, of course they aren’t going to get a trial by American civil courts, that’s not how wars work. And as far as mistreatment, there’s not a shred of evidence for the fact that it was more than an isolated incident. People who say Gitmo needs closed need to get a clue.
I’m tired. I think I’m done for the night. Stay tuned for the continued slugfest between Mad Cow and myself. Oh, and Mad Cow, I suggest we pick certain topics of discussion, so we’re not all over the place all the time – how about we write up in-depth opinions on a specific subject next? I’ll let you have the first go.