Tag: reason

Nick Gillespie on Obama’s Vision Deficit.

This entire rant by Nick Gillespie of Reason Hit & Run is a thing of beauty… but, alas, full of rough language. This paragraph is relatively repeatable in polite company (H/T Instapundit):

And now this morning, Obama was on the tube again, yapping about traffic jams. What the hell is going on here? The president of the freaking United States is talking about traffic jams? Then again, in grammar school we did all learn that part of George Washinton’s Farewell Address where he warned against entangling alliances and the dread menace of highway jughandles and traffic circles. That Obama’s big solution is, ta-da!, “high-speed rail” is simply one more sign that he is simply not serious about anything other than paying off 19th and 20th century legacy special interests. I look forward to tomorrow’s press conference, when Obama trains his laser-beam brain on the question of whether Razzles is a candy or a gum.

…although there’s certainly more in there*. Nick’s in full-fledged rant mode, and while he’s obviously primed mostly to go off on the President he’s not sparing of his libertarian colleagues, particularly the ones that decided that a Illinois Democrat was a compelling libertarian alternative to an Arizona Republican in this election. Which was, really, very silly. I’m sorry to say that, but it’s true. Putting Obama in the White House meant that this guy doesn’t have a veto pen looming over him. Putting Obama in the White House meant further empowering a political party that doesn’t care if your dishes are clean. Putting Obama in the White House means that we’re about to get the organic food industry gutted in the name of regulation. And putting Obama in the White House means this happened:

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Continue reading Nick Gillespie on Obama’s Vision Deficit.

Apparently David Weigel likes the kiss of the lash.

And him a former Reason writer, too. Well, none fervent as a convert.

What? Where does it say in the rules that I can’t get to do armchair psychoanalysis, too? Admittedly I’m going for ‘sardonic’ rather than ‘grumpily resentful,’ but that’s just a personal taste sort of thing.

See also The Liberty Papers.

Moe Lane

PS: Weigel does get one point back for using the word ‘cosplay,’ even if he wrote it in between wiping the sweat off of his brow. I’m not an unreasonable man.

Crossposted to RedState.

Reason TV: ‘Barack W. Bush.’

If only.

While the foreign affairs part of this video is largely true, I have to disagree with it on two key points:

First off, the Obama administration has not “stopped torture.” They’ve started it back up again, only they’re going to be handing the job over to countries, in an essentially deniable fashion.  And go read up on counter-terror operations conducted by, say, the French if you think that restricting rendition to Western European nations will prevent that from happening.  Hint to the naive: the rest of the world is significantly nastier than we are.  That’s why many of your ancestors moved here in the first place.  And why almost none of them moved back.

Second, Obama doesn’t really have to try too hard to placate his antiwar base: they’re actually fairly indifferent to this issue, given the way that they’re barely exercised about Obama doing much the same thing as his predecessor.  He does have to work a little to make his policies look sufficiently different enough from Bush’s, though – which provides a reasonably similar result, which is why I guess that Reason came to that conclusion.

Moe Lane

PS: I’ll believe that Gitmo’s getting closed down when I see it actually happening.

Crossposted to RedState.