The War, The Election, and Me, Part 1

So, I was chatting with a friend of mine, Mick, and posting to his blog and I mentioned that I’d have a lot to say about “The War.”  So, Mick, this is for you.  I’ll try to keep it to the point so it doesn’t get too long.

President Bush said in his second inaugaral speech “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”  For a long time I agreed with that.  I still do to a point, but I no longer believe it applies to the US policing the world with our military. It seems that in the last 100 years, we’ve done more harm than good getting involved in conflicts that do not affect us directly.

I don’t believe President Bush is evil. I believe he was given information that certain people in Washington wanted him to see and made a bad decision with that information.  I believe that Saddam Hussein was evil and his removal will (in the long run) be good for the world.  I don’t know that we should’ve done it, but we did, it’s in the past.  I do believe Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon and he already had various biological weapons.

I don’t believe that pulling out of Iraq immediately is a good idea.  We need to finish the job properly now that we’ve stepped in it.  We need to turn provinces over to the Iraqis (we just turned over the Anbar province to the Iraqis and the media is hardly reporting it) as appropriate. We can’t just destabilize a country by removing their leadership and leave.  We need to clean up the mess we made.

Now, on to the media.  I do belive the media is to blame for the anti-war sentiment. People have apparently forgotten what it takes to win.  Sacrifice (even to death–I lost a friend over there) and time and the media sensationalizes this for their own gain.

Now, all that being said, we need to quit interfering in other countries militarily.  We need to quit sending troops to every conflict and every squabble and let some of these other countries stand up for themselves.  We need to stop fighting wars we cannot afford (the government’s debt is out of control at this point).

It’s just too bad that we don’t have a viable Presidential candidate that feels that way.  Obama talks a good game, but on “bringing our troops home” he’s only riding the coattails of the media’s anti-war propoganda.  He has no substance and will tax our economy into the crapper, advance socialism in this country, and raise the level of spending while weakening our national defense and Constitutional rights. McCain says he’s a maverick and will lower our taxes across the board, but without cutting government spending (what President really has in the last 30 years), how is he going to pay for that? Both candidates are beholden to the same special interest groups and both candidates want to eschew the Constitution for their own reasons.

That’s enough for now.  In part 2, I’ll explain why I’m voting for the “lesser of two evils” and who that is…