| | Bill Dwyer wrote:
"Do ARI Objectivists ever have disagreements that do not involve charges of moral turpitude?"
Amen to that.
Just as you've noted that Ed Hudgins did, I also clobbered the GOP in the Fall issue of The New Individualist. They absolutely deserve to lose this election, for all the reasons cited by others.
But do we deserve the Nancy Pelosi alternative?
And -- as some here have noted -- if the safety and security of the nation from the Islamist threat is priority #1, does anyone think for a moment that the Democrats will make us safer? These are the people who gutted the military after the end of the Cold War, who have ignored and gutted our intelligence agencies since Jimmy Carter, and who stopped the CIA from getting bin Laden throughout the '90s. As for this latter point, here's Michael Scheurer, the CIA agent who led the hunt for bin Laden under Clinton:
I would refer you to the 9/11 Commission report of Gov. Kean. In that report, the 9/11 commissioners detail eight to ten chances that the CIA provided to policy makers to either capture or use the U.S. military to kill Osama bin Laden by the middle of 1999. None of those opportunities were taken. I think there's a widespread feeling among agency employees that it's inaccurate at least to attribute an intelligence failure to the agency when the men and women who risk their lives to collect information provided policy makers with information that could have led to the elimination of bin Laden more than two years before 9/11.
By "policy makers" Scheurer means the Clintonistas.
The position of Peikoff and his allies on this election is logically incoherent, given their past clear statements that the war against radical Islam is THE biggest and most important crisis of our civilization. That being the case, everything else -- profligate federal spending, interference with stem cell research, President Bush's religious inclinations, etc. -- have to take a back seat. Putting the party of Cut and Run in charge of the government would be a complete national security disaster. If you think PC policies in the military and Homeland Security are bad now, just you wait.
The Peikoff complaint against voting in a way to foster long-term philosophical chaos actually applies much, much more appropriately against supporting the Libertarian Party. There is a disaster for Objectivists: a Party that -- historically and repeatedly -- has associated the case for human liberty with such things as moral relativism, anarchism, foreign-policy paralysis, gutting of our national defenses and intelligence services, undermining our criminal justice system, and on and on. In the post-9/11 period, no Democrat would dare go as far towards self-sacrificial insanity as the Libertarians have sometimes done in their hostility to anti-terrorist intelligence agencies such as the CIA and FBI.
The fact that the L.P. has shifted its positions on these issues repeatedly over the years tells me that it is philosophically incoherent. "Liberty" means whatever unintelligible and inconsistent mess the latest faction in charge happens to believe.
Besides all this, a vote for the L.P., which can't possibly get elected, simply abdicates the responsibility of electoral choice to those who are voting for the only viable alternatives: Democrat or Republican candidates.
"Protest votes" are inane, because nobody actually reads in minority party votes any coherent or lasting messages. Elections aren't philosophical discussion forums. They are practical methods of filling elective offices with actual candidates. Given that none of the party alternatives are completely positive, therefore, for anyone concerned with his life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, his strategy in the voting booth should be self-interested and practical. These days, that means: damage control.
Vote for the candidate least likely to do long-range harm, on those issues that pose the greatest and most immediate threats.
In some cases, that may mean getting rid of a particularly dangerous Republican. I think social-conservative Republicans like Rick Santorum pose grave long-term dangers to the GOP's philosophical direction. Others, like Arlen Specter and similar liberals, have paralyzed the GOP from doing good things. These people ought to be culled from the Party at the ballot box.
But generally, anyone who can look at the Islamist threat and want to do anything but decide his ballot choices on that issue deserves a mental examination.
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