08/19/2006: I have no quarrel with the prospect of a woman President. I vote issues and visions, not parties, not race, not gender. If her agenda were compatible with my views, she would have my vote.
Unfortunately, each of the two premier women at the forefront of American politics–Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice–falls short of the glory in the issues and vision department.
Rice is a neocon, and Clinton a neocommie. Neither should be within 100 feet of the White House in any elected capacity. Come to think of it, Bush should fire Condi, but more on that later.
That’s not to say that neither Hillary nor Condi have the smarts for the job; both, in fact, would be intellectual improvements over what we have right now. Unfortunately, they are from the wrong intellectual circles.
Hillary is from the neo-Marxist, hyper-Keynesian school of economics espoused by Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine. Economically, she would take America ever closer to the central planning model that destroyed the Eastern bloc. Anyone who thinks that such a model has a chance needs to remember a few names: Stalin, Ceaucescu, Tito, Milosevic. Even the soft-socialism model of Sweden has been an economic Charlie Fox. Our foray into Big Government “compassion” has left us with $8+ trillion of debt, not including unfunded liabilities–in the form of Social Security and Medicare–that will slam GenX, GenY and beyond with monstrous tax burdens.
Condi, on the other hand, represents the epitome of Marxist conservatism, better-known as neoconservatism. It is Marxist in that it is a dialectical antithesis of Islammunism (totalitarian government with an Islamic veneer), and that it will fail for the same reason that Communism fails. It is “conservative” only in that it opposes totalitarian forms of government, that opposition being a staple of Goldwater-Reagan school of conservatism. (Sadly, that opposition to totalitarian government is undermined by the Big Government required to advance neoconservatism.)
Marx assumed that if we overthrew the bourgeois (rich and privileged) and empowered the proletariat (working class) and disregarded any religious underpinnings—relying solely on humanistic standards of morality—then we would become a peaceful, loving society in which people suddenly began to live on subsistence and give all excess to his or her fellow human. That is perhaps the greatest crock of horse manure in the last 200 years.
Neoconservatism, however, is the second greatest crock within that time span.
Neocons tend to believe that all we have to do is overthrow tyrannical dictators and totalitarian governments, make such societies democratic, and then peace will spread throughout the world like bird flu.
Even Reagan—Mr. Anti-Communist himself—didn’t fall for that Straussian line of crap.
Where Hillary Clinton would foist a whole plethora of new government programs—she would be a combination of FDR and LBJ—Condi would foist a whole new era of Western democratic expansion, led almost solely by the United States.
Where Hillary would resurrect the neo-liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, NeoCondi would be Woodrow Wilson on steroids.
Both, however, would seek to use Big Government to pursue agendas, the successes of such have yet to be realized outside of an academic publication.
The kicker: either way, their Big Government agendas would advance us closer to totalitarian government.
