President Obama’s press conference last night was a disaster.  He came out swinging, and ended up as guilty as anyone he’s criticized for “playing politics.”  Let me summarize Obama message last night: “I’ll talk to anyone about the economy except libertarians.”  Libertarians – or Austrian, free-market economists – might be “sincere” (condescending, wasn’t it?), but Obama thinks our point of view on the economy – how we got into this mess, and how we’ll get out of it – is so patently absurd, it doesn’t even get to be on the table of options.

In the first place, Obama portrayed free-market economists as dogmatic idealogs, unable to realize that a philosophical disagreement about government intervention in the economy needs to be set aside, because the crisis is bad.  That’s silly.  Free-market economists are against this “stimulus” because we believe it’s only going to make the problem worse. Our concerns are just as practical.

Secondly, Obama basically went so far as to decide that anyone who is an Austrian economist isn’t really an economist.  Because he claimed quite plainly that almost all economists agree with the need to “do something.”  He’s quite wrong about this: Cato put together a list.  That’s a long list.

Update: Read iMonk’s Whine and Sheesh Party.  Excellent stuff, from someone unenthusiastically voting McCain.

Bob Barr is not a candidate to get excited about.  At least, I’m not excited.  I’m kinda lethargic about the whole thing.  I haven’t listened to his speeches, read his press releases, watched him on YouTube, or read the blog.  If something unexpected happens, preventing me from getting to the voting booth, I won’t cry about it.  But I’m certain I’ll get there, and I’m fairly certain I’ll be voting Bob Barr.

What I’m absolutely certain about is that I won’t be voting for John McCain.  Ready for something shocking?  Gun to my head, forced to vote for one of the two major parties, I’d vote Obama.  No, I don’t like his policies. I don’t think Obama with a hugely Democratic Congress is a good thing.  But there’s no way in hell I’m rewarding the party that’s supposed to be representing conservatism with my vote.  

And least of all for John McCain.

I can’t understand the reasons conservatives are contriving for supporting McCain.  I can’t.  I don’t get it. He is manifestly not a conservative, and the fact that some people have figured out ways to convince themselves that he is just shows how far the definition of “conservatism” has shifted.  

I mean, come on.  He complains about Obama’s economic policies.  Are you kidding me?  The man whines about socialism, redistribution, and earmarks, but he supports bailouts and the government buying up bad mortgages.  One blogger complained recently about Obama’s Kenyesianism, citing it as one of the reasons he’s voting for, you guessed it, John McCain.  I can respond with just three letters:   W.T.F.

Complaints from McCain supporters about Obama’s tax policies are equally shocking.  I mean, after all:

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent.

Beyond his obvious silliness in trying to make some actual distinction between himself and Obama on domestic policy, his foreign policy is beyond frightening.  Should he win, I think we’ll see a Lieberman Secretary of State.  And then that dynamic duo, along with Palin who seems to think we’re already at war with Iran, we’ll be changing our national anthem to “Bomb Iran” and taking over the whole Middle East.

And speaking of Palin.  Come on, folks.  She’s … nevermind.  I’m not even going to start.  If you don’t get why this woman can’t ever be our president (including, but not limited to, her complete misunderstanding of the simplest part of the First Amendment), and why her selection by McCain was reckless and demonstrated terrible judgment, I’m not going to convince you with anything I write here.  Yes, the media has been biased and vicious toward her.  But still.  

John McCain is a man who served his country honorably, but who dove head-first into Rove-style politics as soon as he got the nomination.  He is bad for conservatism, even if I do believe his desire is to honorably serve his country.

So I’m voting for Bob Barr.  He isn’t a great candidate, but he’s the only one who’s close to what small-government conservatism actually looks like.  

And because the Republicans deserve an embarrassing defeat on Tuesday.  And I hope they get it.

A couple days ago, when the Obama “redistribution” audio clip came out, I braced myself, considered responding how I really want to respond, and withheld.  Look, Obama’s policies scare me.  But there’s nothing quite as disingenuous as McCain criticizing Obama on this point, or Bush-supporters doing the same.  Jacob Sullum of Reason goes ahead and says it:

…there’s no difference in principle on this issue between Obama and McCain. Both want to take money away from people who work for it and give it to people they believe deserve it. How else would you characterize McCain’s plan to rescue reckless lenders and borrowers by using taxpayer money to buy “bad home loan mortgages”? Medicare, Medicaid, progressive income taxation, and Social Security, to name just a few redistributive programs that both candidates support, also entail taking one group’s earnings and giving them to another group, and in some cases the beneficiaries are more affluent than the people compelled to subsidize them. McCain’s outrage over “redistribution of wealth” is awfully selective.

(Can you tell I’m a bit upset with conservatives?)

The McCain campaign is pretending to be all in an outrage over Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” statement.  Apparently, that was sexist, even though it wasn’t about Palin, and “lipstick on a pig” is a commonly-used idiom.  

Here’s McCain on Hillary’s health care proposal just last year:

When asked about Mrs. Clinton his speech, he said her proposal was “eerily” similar to the plan she came up with in 1993, when she headed a health care reorganization effort during her husband’s administration. “I think they put some lipstick on a pig,” he said, “but it’s still a pig.”

Ugly.  Really ugly.  The only hope I held out about an Obama/McCain race was that we might be able to get past Rove politics for just one election and talk about issues.  Obama is doing that.  McCain is not.  

You couldn’t pay me enough money to vote for McCain.*

*I live in NY State, where a vote for McCain wouldn’t matter in the least.  So that statement is not true.  Go ahead, pay me.  I need the money.

Remember that “comeback” I was talking about for this blog?  Here it comes, and politics will drive it.  Coming down the final stretch, I figure it’s time to start blogging politics again.  Lots of stories lately, and here are the brief summaries:

Obama’s Acceptance Speech:  I’m not voting for Obama, and I didn’t think this was his best speech.  But his shots at McCain were bang on.  I’m not sure about the complaints that Obama didn’t mention enough policy.  He did what every candidate does at this stage of the game: he gave a broad overview of the policies.  But there’s no time in an acceptance speech to deal with particulars, counterarguments, and rebuttals.  Of course the speech raised questions.  It was one speech.  Nevertheless, despite the fact that I think he’s less big-government and more personal-responsibility oriented than 90% of the Democrats I’ve heard, he’s still too big-government for me.

McCain’s VP Pick – Sarah Palin:  It’s a brilliant pick, and I’m mad about it.  I like Sarah Palin, and having read more about her today, I wish she was representing the next generation of Republicans, and not attaching herself to the Bush-McCain neocons.  I think, though, that I’ll be slightly less disappointed about a McCain win with the Palin pick.  Slightly.  There’s always the possibility that Palin is nothing more than a two-month political move, and that McCain will brush her quickly to the sidelines if elected.

Rally for the Republic:  I wish I could be there.  Despite the fact that I’m 99% sure I’ll be voting for Bob Barr, I can’t seem to get enthused about him like I was about Ron Paul.  Paul had an energy about him that Barr doesn’t have.  If you’re libertarian-minded and haven’t joined the Campaign for Liberty yet, do so now, so they can reach their 100,000 goal by September 2!

So says George F. Will in Newsweek.  This is one of the reasons that, though I won’t be voting for Obama, I don’t buy the “he’s really, really left” meme.

It’s always nice when someone is able to discern the absurdity of political spin.  Here’s Jesse Walker of Reason on the political spin of the Obama-Ayers “connection” -

The point of Sunstein’s comments, obviously, is not to “equate” Epstein with Ayers, just as the point of Obama’s earlier comments, obviously, was not to “equate” Ayers with Coburn. The point is that Obama associates with a lot of very different people and that it’s foolish to assume his loose connections to one of them define his politics. Serving on the same board as Bill Ayers doesn’t make Obama sympathetic to Marxist terrorism any more than shooting hoops with Epstein makes him a libertarian.

If there’s a legitimate story here, it isn’t that Obama is one of the many Chicago politicians (even the mayor!) who have interacted with Ayers. It’s that Ayers, after playing revolutionary for a spell, has managed to find a place in the Chicago establishment. The Weather Underground was made up of the children of the elite, and after all the shouting of the ’60s and ’70s died down those Weathermen who managed to avoid prison or self-immolation have often been able to return to high-status professional positions. I’d love to see a Marxist analysis of that class dynamic.

…and in the interest of truth and fairness, here’s proof that (a) the recent ABC debate was absurd and by far the worst yet, and (b) that all the Clinton-Obama debates have been overwhelmingly biased against Obama as far as “scandal” and “gotcha” questions go.

And yes, the person who conducted this little study needs a hobby.  But still.

Bill Kristol, neocon par excellence (if you can even use the word “excellence” when talking about a neocon, which you can’t…I’m still irritated that the NYT picked that guy as the “conservative,” though I’m not surprised. It is the NYT, after all.) has written an abysmal response to Obama’s speech. In the first few paragraphs, Kristol noted that he “didn’t shudder” at all the things that he considered disingenuous political positioning on the part of Obama (accusing him of not addressing difficult questions, using “ridiculous and unfair comparisons” to make a point, and “doing a disservice to the best” in the black community). No, none of those things bothered Mr. Kristol. That’s politics as usual, and that’s how he’d like to keep things. Here’s what really bothered him:

The only part of the speech that made me shudder was this sentence: “But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.”

Allow me to paraphrase: “Please, Mr. Obama…stick to politics as usual. Lie, propagandize, whatever. Just don’t make us talk about race. We need to ignore that discussion.”

Allow me to sarcastically dissect the rest of this piece:

As soon as I heard that, I knew what we’d have to endure. I knew that there would be a stampede of editorial boards, columnists and academics rushing not to ignore race. A national conversation about race! At long last!

“Endure.” Oh, poor Mr. Kristol. You’ll have to “endure” a discussion on race. What will you do? How will you survive?

Of course, memories are short. In 1997 President Bill Clinton announced, with great fanfare, that he intended “to lead the American people in a great and unprecedented [if he did say so himself] conversation about race.” That conversation quickly went nowhere. And just as well.

Phew! We dodged a bullet that time. Hopefully we can do the same this time.

Alright, I’m not going to go through the entire rest of the article. But, look. Mr. Kristol is, I’m sure, weary of the political positioning of the left, which has done every bit as much to perpetuate racism as (and perhaps even more than) many on the right. The answer to not having the conversation at all is NOT doing another rehash of the liberal side of the conversation.

Here’s what bothers me: he cites Moynihan in 1969 – which is, what, 5 years after Civil Rights legislation? – saying that “the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect,’” and says Moynihan was right.

Folks, that is shocking. Let’s do a quick review of American history up till that point – White Europeans showed up here a few hundred years before, and then stole and enslaved countless Africans in the process, many of them dying along the way, the rest being treated as less than human to varying degrees until, at least legally, 1964. By just five years later, a white guy in power was saying, “It’s time to stop talking about race now, isn’t it?”

Over forty years later, the effects of hundreds of years of racism continue, and folks like Kristol are just weary…why do we have to keep talking about this? Come on, we white folks made everything equal back in the 60s.

I’m a libertarian. I look forward to and pray for and hope to work for a time when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “dream” is fulfilled. But you can’t do that by not talking about the problem, or pretending it’s gone. You can’t do it with a welfare state, either. What I’m suggesting is that there is a different option available to us – something other than either a welfare state or a “color-blindness” that has to be just as blind to the ongoing walls of racism that still exist. Even Kristol admits, “problems remain” (though I’m wondering if he’s ever taken the time to think about and write about those problems with the passion with which he writes against any discussion on race…or perhaps he’s too busy plotting American Empire…). If “problems remain,” then we still need to talk. I’m kindly suggesting that it’s a lot easier for a white man like Kristol to say, “We don’t need to have that conversation.” It’s a lot harder for a poor black man to say the same thing.

I’ve been reading John Perkins, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that, because I’m looking for a distinctly Christian way forward – one which eschews the welfare state but still recognizes a deep, ongoing racial problem in the U.S. that needs to be addressed. Perkins seems to be the man for that discussion.