The Coming Spectre

The coming election offers two fairly conservative candidates with hawkish foreign policies, Romney and Obama, two democratic socialists with strong libertarian leanings, Stein and Anderson, a libertarian, Johnson, and a religious, extremely conservative, authoritarian Constitutionalist, Goode. Sadly, of these five only two have any chance of winning.

Obama's foreign policy seems to have largely been inherited from Bush, and then expanded into new, more odious directions. Obama's innovations on Bush's breathtaking imperalism include, but are not limited to, presidential kill lists, attacking funerals with drone strikes and escalating the US involvement in Yemen. Because Romeny and Obama agree so much, they have to find useless things to criticze each other about. Obama mocked Romeny about his complaints regarding the size of the Navy, recalling the universal derision Romeny received earlier in the year when he stated that Russia was America's number one geo-political foe.

Romney has meanwhile repeated the bizarre claim that Obama has "apoligized" for America abroad. A curious thing to clam about an imperalist president who has granted himself the ability to murder enemies of the state at will. Romeny also claims we need to increase defense spending. Given the comically over-sized defense budget, this is akin to a morbidly obese man with hypertension and type 2 diabetes proudly making a New Year's resolution to go to twice as many all-you-can eat buffets next year. Whichever President we have for next year, expect American imperalism abroad to continue without reservation or shame.

The policy differences on domestic matters are perhaps a little wider, but still pretty minor. Obama has been pretty conservative in continuing existing policies, except for the health insurance tax/mandate in the PPACA law, a federal version of Romney's plan as Massachusetts governor. Romney goes back and forth on whether he'll change the law, or which parts he would change.

At most we can expect some minor modifcations to either tax code or health care regulations, dependent entirely on who wins the Senate and House races. The most greivous domestic policy since Indian removal, the War on Drugs, will likely be unaffected by who wins the election, as well the Patriot Act and similar programs to spy on and imprison the population. Income inequality will continue to grow and corporations will still receive huge benefits from the government in a myriad of ways.

To me, the real choice is between Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson or Gary Johnson. If a person really wanted to vote for someone with terrible ideas, I would recommend Virgil Goode over either Obama or Romney.