All Hail The Chief and God Bless ...The Left

We all expect Obama to be a center-left policitian and in the ordinary course of things, capitalist pigs such as myself are supposed to revile the left. Anyone who reads my blog knows I run down the lefties on a regular basis. But I have realized over the years that I have never given the opposite extreme: the lunatic right, the treatment they deserved in this space.

We are coming off of the worst 8 years in geopolitical history since the Viet Nam War. In 8 years, a small, neo-conservative cabal has squandered the accumulated goodwill of a once great nation, has financially bankrupted the same, neutered civil liberties and has set purely ideologically motivated precedents of pre-emptive warfare and American exceptionalism. It was nothing short of insanity and frankly, the rest of the world was sitting on the sidelines wondering how long the American citizenry was going to go along with it.

So yes, President Obama will be "left of center", but when a national agenda is set by Neocon loons (which it has been for the last 8 years) anyone tamer than a Nazi is a leftist.

I have a long-held summation about Leftists, Rightists and Centrists which I label as "Socialists, Conservatives and Libertarians".

Conservatives think they know how everybody else should live.

Socialists think we should all live the same way

Libertarians think they may know how to run their own lives and nobody else's.

While leftists miss the point on the fundamental laws of economics, in general their hearts are in the right place (no pun intended). Most leftists want to help their fellow man, alas, sometimes to a fault. But that said, it is generally out of spirit of brotherhood and community and for that, I salute them.

The right are ideologues and ideologues become so blinded by their own tunnel vision they end up being downright Evil. I once heard the Project For A New American Century crowd: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle et all, described as "Malthusians" and I think that label fits well.

So while the left tend toward "tax-and-spend" (and at the risk of veering off on a tangent rant coersion, theft and taxation), the right are about enslavement, serfdom, war (best racket ever invented), elitism and crony capitalism.

Neither side veers far from "socalism for the bankers" that routinely ruin our economies but at least one side didn't get a few million innocent people killed in the last 8 years and isn't pursuing a relentless blueprint to create a police state (not yet, anyway).

Tax Shelters, not Bomb Shelters

So yeah, give me the centrist-left guy - all I have to worry about are dealing with more taxes. That I can handle (there are always ways to deal with taxation).

What I don't want is to worry about having to build a goddamn bomb shelter for my 2 year old daughter.