Gary Johnson for President

[BaalChatzaf]

53 minutes ago, Jonathan said:

We've balanced budgets and built roads!

Muh roads!

J

what is "muh"????

[Jonathan]

13 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

what is "muh"????

"Muh" is slang for "my," as in the "Muh Roads!" (My Roads!) meme, which mocks the mindset of people fearfully opposing freedom due to lacking the ability to imagine who will build the roads under a libertarian form of government, which is a mindset similar to old Soviets being afraid of freedom due to being incapable of believing that they would have access to food and clothing if the government were no longer in charge of farming and haberdashery, etc.

Here's a sample article on the Muh Roads! meme:

http://www.altarandthrone.com/why-muh-roads-is-the-smartest-counter-argument-ever/

And a typical appropriated cartoon:

J

[Jonathan]

 

 

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

This speaks for itself is and gets funny as hell.

I like Gary a lot (but I'm still supporting Trump.  )

Michael

[william.scherk]

On 7/1/2016 at 7:41 AM, Jonathan said:

I love roads. I love especially city roads, big roads and small, and the way that roads are divvied up in a hierarchy, and have historical underpinnings in most urban places. I love in a small way the urbanist term 'desire path.' 

There are ad-hoc consortiums that build roads every day. The technical necessities are in hand in every region of the world. Road-building is basic to almost every form of economic development (add the sea roads and the rail and air roads).

Every big project these days requires,  as always, big bucks to give to the (locally-contingent) consortium for the services and product.. Here at home the budget is coming together for a new crossing of the mighty Fraser.  Who pays? 

The interesting question for me and the libertarian imponderables is not who builds the roads, but subsidiary questions. Who will build the roads is easy: the consortia. Who will pay and how  is predictable based on prior practice. Who planned it, what constraints and vision led to its building? --  fun questions. Who owns the road, the bridge, the tunnel, the street, the highway, the sea lanes are other questions of interest. 

How, for example, do metropolitan regions plan and build ring-road freeways in the 21st century? Who owns them? How would it be different under a libertarian dispensation?

I live in a city that is experiencing among the highest growth rate in the metropolis. New roads are platted every day, and various stages in the process move on up.  Who builds them is contingent on who plans them, and what is planned is contingent on municipal rules and regulations above and beyond  road/sewer engineering etc codes. There is a dialectic of plan and popular approval, public hearings and recorded votes, open-book lobbying and mandated revisions of the city plans (ordered by the provincial government: ie, this city must plan for growth in all sectors, industrial included). On down to the neighbourhood level, all constrained by another law/plan designed to conserve agricultural land.

I don't expect libertarian-inflected city plans or continental transportation plans -- or any detail whatsoever.   It is far too early, as Ayn Rand might say.  A revolution in thought and practice is necessary -- the libertarian moment must come first, I mean.  Then, in a new dispensation, the planning of transportation networks, nodes, the ordering and management of  hierarchies of use and future 'need,' all this will find its libertarian level by virtue of a very long process. The Old Ways will need changing at each level and at each use and each 'ownership.'  

 

This is a great disestablishment of previously reigning legal regimes.  To return ownership from the 'public' to 'the people' in a directly individual kind may not be possible, except in a corporate sense:  the urge to build a road (port, bridge, etc) is a kind of combinatoric, it has individual factors and 'motives' but is most often measured in the aggregate. So, aggregates of individuals could own something called a road or way or right-of-way, but the right to use it and its connectors would depend on an individual 'buy-in' of management along the nodes -- even if the buys are managed privately at every level, from neighbourhood to collector on up to the superhighways and hyperloops of the future. 

So I see a city or town 'privatizing' its roads as utilities, handing off planning, construction and maintenance to a Corp whose stakeholders are its user group.  The rest should work like magic, even if the City and its official governance dissolves.

More seriously, how long will it take to disestablish the notion and practice of public roads and ways?  I guess it depends on the locality and how the cost is tolled.  At present there is a constitutional order that gives responsibility to maintain the pubic way to geographic-political entities in a hierarchy.  This old order will need to be negotiated away, clause by clause, throughout the hierarchies of use. In this way, questions that the memes above serve to deflect are still pretty interesting.  Details of the process of transition would be cool.  

Will a libertarian regime have done away with 'public' roadways?  I think not.  I think infrastructure planning will need to be supervised by the 'client' in either case, with as much democracy and reason as possible.

Who will build the bike-lanes? Who will finance, plan and build the subways and the new sectors they serve? Etc.  The best my naive understanding can suggest is a similar publicly-supervised set of consortia and public interests as today, of similar wills and similar sources of monies. City roads will exist, as will state and federal roads and rights-of-way. Controlled-access interstate roads could be re-tolled the length and breadth of the Union, and city-urban sectors could be tolled-by-use and tolled-by-time. The economic inefficiencies of piecemeal development may be better managed with a hierarchical contract scheme, or with a price on every foot of 'public' byway, be it sidewalk or bridge to nowhere.

In this mood, I love the dumb questions. 

Edited July 13, 2016 by william.scherk
Spelking, grrrammar.

[SteveWolfer]

1 hour ago, william.scherk said:

sea roads and the rail and air roads

Here is a fun thought I had one day.  I was reading about the outstanding safety record of Google's self-driving cars.  And all of the strange things they had to program for - like bad drivers, dogs or balls coming into the road, road work, etc.  I was reading how their cars have already reached a level of competence such that switching to them would reduce overall traffic accidents.  (Pay attention Tesla, the concept is good, your application may be lacking).

Any way, I realized that the 1950s sci-fi prediction of flying cars, which was supposed to have become a reality by now, did NOT depend upon advances in the technology of having a car take to the air, nor even to the issues of where they would all land.  The problem was the driver/pilots.  There was no way to get John Doe to competent pilot license status in that kind of environment - clearly not somewhere like Manhattan or Rome or Bangkok.

But self-driving/flying cars would work.  The rules of altitude, restricted zones, computerized use of radar and transponders... all a piece of cake to program for with modern GPS.  Technology did have to advance, but in ways we would not have imagined back then.  Back then we didn't know of GPS satellites, or the software capable of driving a car.

Like a friend of mine once said, until you have lived with a particular technology for a while, you have no idea how it will end up being used. 

 

[SteveWolfer]

5 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I like Gary a lot

I would pick Johnson in nanosecond over anyone else.  But, I can't put into words how disgusted I am with his failure to even try to project the gravitas, the presidential demeanor, that it would take to make voters feel just a tiny bit safe with him as a choice.  It is like he is a clown who happens to hold all the right principles, and has a really good record as a two term governor, but he is a fucking clown.

 

It isn't that I hate clowns.  Someone with a sense of humor and a light touch would be charming and it would play well.  But not a clown.  I am disgusted because with the extremely low favorability polling of the two major candidates, and the severe lack of trust in either of them, this was the FIRST TIME a serious Libertarian candidate actually could have won the presidency, and he has thrown it away by not perceiving that being a clown killed that chance.

[jts]

On the subject of roads, which is one of many similar questions:   The general question is: how would a free market solve problem X, whatever X might be. The advocate of free market might be able to come up with a solution or not. If not, then the asker of the question takes the free market advocate's failure to come up with a solution as evidence that a free market would not solve problem X. The error in this reasoning is so obvious that I am surprised that it needs to be pointed out.

What is a free market? Whatever else a free market is, a free market is a multitude of minds, some very intelligent, some of them geniuses, in an environment where genius flourishes, where the full energy of human creativity is unleashed. These creative minds are working together in synergy. Synergy means the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And they are working thru time, each generation building on the achievements of the previous generation. That is what a free market is.

That being what a free market is, I would need to be extremely conceited to think that if I can't solve problem X then a free market can't solve problem X. And if the asker of the question (how would a free market solve problem X) thinks that my failure to solve problem X implies that a free market can't solve problem X, then he must think extremely highly of me.

I do not believe that any one mind, even a supergenius, can equal a multitude of geniuses working together in synergy thru time. I am not knocking the supergenius; I am exalting and extolling the free market.

Perhaps that is why someone said: I do not waste my time inventing utopias.

 

[SteveWolfer]

3 hours ago, jts said:

the question takes the free market advocate's failure to come up with a solution as evidence that a free market would not solve problem X

Very well said jts.

[Brant Gaede]

You can (and should) use some specifics to illustrate the free market case, but specifics aren't an argument and if you argue as if they were you will always lose even if the other fellow is intellectually a moron. You won't find rationality in a mosh pit and you won't find your opponent outside one.

In 1976 Nathaniel Branden attended a meeting in a private home in Manhattan to discuss something of some importance with about 15-20 people. (I forget the subject.) Some Jewish fellow kept interrupting by saying "The answer [to the problem] is socialism!" That's all he said and he was emphatic. Nathaniel declined to argue the point. He merely continued with his presentation. (I still have no idea why some many intelligent Jews are fixated on supposed virtues of socialism (Israel is full of them), but they have intellectualized themselves into a dead end. Similarly one can't argue against socialism by pointing out its failures for those are only illustrations. You need to abstract into and about the morality of it all because all examples make room for exceptions, real or contrived.)

--Brant

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Get a load of this (from The Daily Caller):

EXCLUSIVE: Gary Johnson Says The Threat Of Radical Islam Is ‘Overblown’

That's awesome, Gary.

You knocked it out of the park.

Keep on truckin'...

 

Michael

 

[Guyau]

.

But if that headline (must you scream-font?) is bad for for the Libertarian vote, then that's good for your candidate, Michael. Rejoice. Well, actually, no. The polls of Clinton v. Trump v. Johnson when compared with polls for Clinton v. Trump are showing very consistently that the differential in Clinton v. Trump remains the same when the Libertarian is added to the options. He pulls them both down equally. So, at least not to worry for your interest.

Although, you might be also interested in whether the perceived threat of radical Islam to America is overblown (blowing levels in this context being about perceived level of threat) in comparison to the blowing level on other threats. Well, you know what I think is the greatest threat, and it's boring to most voters, so it's way underblown. And any threat blown higher than that one---deficit spending and the national debt---is overblown. (Don't worry, I'm not so unsubtle as to seriously think this is an "also interested" in your post.)

[SteveWolfer]

29 minutes ago, Guyau said:

deficit spending and the national debt

I'd rate deficit spending and the national debt as a higher threat than anything else... except maybe for the their cause, the political/economic idiocy in the country that let them become like that.  I'd also put the regulatory state way up there as a threat since it is now rated a greater burden on businesses than taxation.  And it falls far heavier on small businesses than large (small businesses are not just the main source of employment in the country, but they are the seed crop for the next generation of major businesses.  Add those things all up and they spell a near certain death to our nation - one that will come sooner and more likely than any other threat.

(However, those who don't rank Islamic terrorism very high - maybe Johnson - are making a mistake of not grasping these two factors:  an exponential increase in fighters and terror events, coupled with the likely adoption of ever higher levels of technology applied to killing.)

[Jon Letendre]

Also the mistake of not grasping that terror is used because it can work. Obama has recently assured that there is no existential threat. This Ignores that terror can push a nation to abandon things it should not. Especially a divided, lost, unconfident nation.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, Guyau said:

But if that headline (must you scream-font?) is bad for for the Libertarian vote...

Stephen,

I almost always put headlines I link to in bold and larger font. Look up the last 50 times or so if you get the urge to check it out. That formatting screams at you right now from inside your perception, not from me doing anything different than I normally do.

But to point, who said that headline is bad for the Libertarian vote? I have no opinion about the Libertarian vote. OK... I do have an opinion... I don't think it's relevant to this election. (Maybe a little, but I doubt it.)

As for Gary Johnson, I like him. I've said that before.

In this case, though, he looks out at the world, sees Radical Islamic terrorism in all kinds of civilized places the world over, including the USA, meaning the shooting, bombing and mowing down of civilians, and the chopping off of heads, the throwing gays off buildings, the drowning of people in cages, the literal enslavement of women for sex, etc. over in the controlled territory, and says that threat is "overblown."

And he wants to be taken seriously? 

If that isn't living in a bubble, I don't know what is. What can you say to someone who suddenly comes out with some clueless thing like that all of a sudden? Are you going to argue with him? Hell no. There's a problem to fix and it's getting worse.

So you say he's awesome and for him to keep on truckin'.

Michael

[SteveWolfer]

6 minutes ago, Jon Letendre said:

Also the mistake of not grasping that terror is used because it can work. Obama has recently assured that there is no existential threat. This Ignores that terror can push a nation to abandon things it should not.

I agree.  And it takes over the media and our political focus and it taints the way we feel about life, and part of what we lose isn't visible.... it is what we would have been doing instead.  It steals from our ability to feel higher levels of benevolence towards our fellow man.  It is a far uglier and more costly thing that first glance would reveal.

[SteveWolfer]

On ‎7‎/‎1‎/‎2016 at 7:24 AM, Jonathan said:

people fearfully opposing freedom due to lacking the ability to imagine who will build the roads under a libertarian form of government

As everyone here knows, we already have some private roads (e.g., gated communities, and private toll roads).  Even some of the freeways owned by governments are being turned into partial money makers with pay-for fast lanes (that's not privatizing, but rather stealing a private technique to increase government revenues while pretending that it isn't hypocrisy to convert the Diamond Lanes to pay-for go-fast lanes). 

But every now and then I let my mind wander to what could be done with a simple residential street.  I imagine that while building a subdivision, or laying out a new road of any kind, that a huge trench would be dug.  Then roofed over, strongly, leaving a large tunnel below and the road above.  This would allow pipes and electrical conduit and cables to carry water, trash, sewage, electricity, and internet signals where the wires and pipes could be maintained without tearing up the roads or interrupting any traffic.  Trash pickup and mail delivery could be underground.  And all of the service providers could be paying rent to the street owner for this and it would cost them less than other ways of doing this.  The space above the road, up about 30 feet above, would be a good place for overhead mass transit like the Sky-Train in Bangkok.  All private. And the thing is, that far more innovations and uses and improvement would start to appear as soon as it was underway.  (When the personal computer came out, they were trying hard to find reasons for it... "You can keep a list of record albums on it!  And your wife can store her recipes there!"  And now look at where we are with the PC).

[Guyau]

.

Michael, I was aware that you use scream-font for headlines in your posts regularly. It is screaming, whatever the post. The word "screaming" for it was taught to us back in the 90's at our place by Tim Shell, a longtime associate of Jimmy Wales. Walter and I had gotten a computer, and Tim was showing us the internet and how the text communications looked in those days. We didn't have font-size choices in those days, as I recall, but he cautioned us on how exclamation points and all-caps come off in the electronic-screen text presentation then current. He told us they were seen as bad etiquette. He told us it was called "screaming." We laughed; it did look like screaming. We avoid it, although I do have a rare use for it just now. I'm having the first piece from a peach pie I made yesterday from scratch, and it is SO GOOD.

PS - I do not care for Gary Johnson, for the clown-element noted by Steve the other day. Like Romney, I wish the pair on the Libertarian ticket were reversed. But it remains a happy season due to the many citizens learning of the ideas of libertarianism for the first time (including our friends who are from here and who support Trump). They had never heard of or anyway didn't recall the name Libertarian. Visiting us in our home, they asked who I was voting for, then what is Libertarian (sincerely, not by way of dismissing because not winning---they aren't that sort of people) and we got the simple first-brush ideas before them. These folks are pretty much Democratic voting for Trump this one shot. We don't try to change each others political views or choices. We just enjoy getting to know each other better, learning more about each other, and what's out there.

[Guyau]

.

We don’t have the full transcript of the Daily Caller interview with Johnson. We know the "out-of-blue" Michael mentioned of Johnson in their “report” of the interview, but nothing concerning context in the interview itself. (Rather like Rand’s essay “From the Horse’s Mouth,” but then it’s not the horse’s mouth, Kant’s text, but a scholar’s reporting what the horse said, that she invokes.)

Sorry if this sort of sensitivity to accuracy-in-context vs. spin is boring. Different pleasures for different folks.

We do have the full transcript of a couple of other interviews of Johnson at that same period of time and touching on that same issue. Here is one by Glenn Thrush.

Thrush: So back to the foreign policy thing. You hear both Hillary and Trump talk about the threat that ISIS poses—

Johnson: No question.

Thrush: --an existential threat. How do you do that, cutting 20 percent of the federal defense budget, and how would you go after ISIS? Would you go after ISIS?

Johnson: Well, first of all, involve Congress. We’ve got treaties with 69 countries in the world, would defend their borders, that were congressionally authorized treaties. . . . Our decisions with regard to the military are executive and they’re the military [decisions]. Involve Congress. Let’s get an open debate and discussion and declaration of war, if that’s the way that we want to treat ISIS.

But how about [having] a skeptic at the table? Skeptics—Bill Weld and myself—we’re planning to do this as a partnership. . . .

Thrush: . . . But I interrupted you. You were talking about sort of skeptics at the table. Would you—

Johnson: With skeptics at the table, [about] boots on the ground, dropping bombs.

Thrush: Would you order--;

Johnson: Flying drones.

Thrush: --would you, for instance, if you had reasonable intel—would you have done the bin Laden raid?

Johnson: Yes. That was our goal. That was our goal from day one. Get bin Laden. . . . You attack the United States, we’re going to attack back, . . .

Thrush: . . . and you do believe ISIS is an existential threat to the country [USA]?

Johnson: Right, but how is it best—how is it best dealt with? . . . .

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

3 hours ago, Guyau said:

Michael, I was aware that you use scream-font for headlines in your posts regularly. It is screaming, whatever the post. The word "screaming" for it was taught to us back in the 90's at our place by Tim Shell, a longtime associate of Jimmy Wales. Walter and I had gotten a computer, and Tim was showing us the internet and how the text communications looked in those days. We didn't have font-size choices in those days, as I recall, but he cautioned us on how exclamation points and all-caps come off in the electronic-screen text presentation then current. He told us they were seen as bad etiquette. He told us it was called "screaming." We laughed; it did look like screaming. We avoid it, although I do have a rare use for it just now. I'm having the first piece from a peach pie I made yesterday from scratch, and it is SO GOOD.

Stephen,

In other words, you think the New York Times screams by posting headlines in bold and a larger font? That book covers scream when posting book titles in bold and a larger font? That news sites scream when they post headlines in bold and a larger font? That academic papers in peer reviewed periodicals scream when they post article headlines in bold and a larger font? And you think my posts scream when I quote headlines formatted with similar emphasis in this mix?

That's a lot of screaming in your world. I hope you find some serenity...

 

I agree that your body text example works for emphasis and is not screaming. It is certainly not a headline. But even as body text, I can't imagine it as screaming, even if I try. The inner picture I get of the peach pie enthusiast is body language as emphasis, a look of delight and maybe an unwritten "mmmm mmm mmmmm." A change in voice volume is the furthest thing from my mind. In fact, I can't imagine someone sincerely screaming in my face about a slice of peach pie that pleased him. That would make me crack up.

Let me go further. The all caps evaluation of the peach pie in your example makes me think of this:

 

I'll grant you, I do feel screaming if a person writes: YOU ARE WRONG YOU FUCKING IDIOT! I would object to that. But notice there is a context: this example is body text, not headline (although that message would be offensive as a headline, too), and the substance is personal and aggressive. It is a message that would normally be screamed.

We already have enough problems nowadays with PC language causing resentment left and right. Apropos, this PC stuff is one of the reasons Trump is being elected. People hate being presumed evil by default because of the way they express themselves in normal speech.

An occasional all caps word or even a sentence for emphasis is fine with me. Barbara used all caps in her criticisms of my writing as a quick way to differentiate it from my text. I never thought of that as screaming. However, an entire article or long passage in all caps or huge font on a forum like OL would be horrible and might be seen as screaming, but even then, if the substance were not rhetorical and impassioned, I would see it as goofy, not screaming. As your very example shows, not all textual emphasis is screaming. 

Your mileage may vary, but in my value system, we don't need Politically Correct formatting on a forum. It's just not a good idea. Especially not of headlines. And then there's this. The poor newspaper industry is struggling as it is without being hamstrung by not allowing them to emphasize their headlines with formatting and font size. 

 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

btw - Here is the exact quote from The Daily Caller interview with Gary Johnson:

Quote

The former governor told TheDC that radical Islam is an “overblown” threat.

“You can argue we’re at war with ISIS, I’ll concede that,” Johnson said. He added, “Do I have issue with wiping out ISIS? If it involves boots on the ground, if it involves dropping bombs, if it involves flying drones, I think that all those methods have the unintended consequence of making things worse not better.”

I might be wrong, but that doesn't look like out of context spin.

If you don't fight a war with boots on the ground, dropping bombs, and flying drones, how do you fight a war against a violent murderous enemy and win? It sounds like Johnson doesn't want to fight the war at all. And if, according to him, deploying those military options makes things worse with ISIS, not better, it's reasonable to assume he thinks the radical Islam threat is overblown.

I see spin in the tone of the DC article, but, going by the above excerpt, I don't believe they distorted Johnson's meaning.

Michael

[anthony]

57 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

btw - Here is the exact quote from the Daily Caller interview with Gary Johnson:

I might be wrong, but that doesn't look like out of context spin.

If you don't fight a war with boots on the ground, dropping bombs, and flying drones, how do you fight a war against a violent murderous enemy and win? It sounds like Johnson doesn't want to fight the war at all. And if, according to him, deploying those military options makes things worse with ISIS, not better, it's reasonable to assume he thinks the radical Islam threat is overblown.

I see spin in the tone of the DC article, but, going by the above excerpt, I don't believe they distorted Johnson's meaning.

Michael

Michael, it was always all about recognising the true nature of the beast, from the beginning. ISIS made itself plain from those days (nearly two years ago, when I was maintaining on OL that an alliance of all Nato members, equally, must go in soon, and "eradicate" the 'young snake' while still exposed, growing and spreading). Isis were openly seeking, hell, advertising, a (suicidal) confrontation with the West, and were denied it. Nevertheless, the conflict would always have been brought home to 'us', whatever 'we' did or did not do. In the mean time, emboldened by lack of resolve and weak responses, many more have flocked to that death cult and the wholesale slaughter and disruption of civilian lives over there, has largely gone uncondemned and played down. Concern for "unintended consequences" seems to have overtaken principles - and true causality - and ultimately left the West with a greater and more prolonged battle, with Isis' final paroxysms of planned, or 'inspired lone wolf' attacks not over yet, by any means. Only now, after Nice, do the Eurocrats promise extended actions. That wasted time and wasted life has to make us all livid.

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

btw - Here is the exact quote from The Daily Caller interview with Gary Johnson:

I might be wrong, but that doesn't look like out of context spin.

If you don't fight a war with boots on the ground, dropping bombs, and flying drones, how do you fight a war against a violent murderous enemy and win? It sounds like Johnson doesn't want to fight the war at all. And if, according to him, deploying those military options makes things worse with ISIS, not better, it's reasonable to assume he thinks the radical Islam threat is overblown.

I see spin in the tone of the DC article, but, going by the above excerpt, I don't believe they distorted Johnson's meaning.

Michael

How do you fight such a war withOUT boots on the ground.  Easy: nukes,  poison gas and chemicals and (note this)  a cold blooded   lack of concern for collateral damage.   Hit 'em hard,  hit 'em first.  As Nathan Bedford Forest (one of the few true military geniuses of the Civil War)  said:  Get their firstest with the mostest. 

[merjet]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Stephen,

In other words, you think the New York Times screams by posting headlines in bold and a larger font? That book covers scream when posting book titles in bold and a larger font? That news sites scream when they post headlines in bold and a larger font? That academic papers in peer reviewed periodicals scream when they post article headlines in bold and a larger font? And you think my posts scream when I quote headlines formatted with similar emphasis in this mix?

That's a lot of screaming in your world. I hope you find some serenity...

 

 

Attention grabbing comes in degrees.

EXCLUSIVE: Gary Johnson Says The Threat Of Radical Islam Is ‘Overblown’  (MSK)

EXCLUSIVE: Gary Johnson Says The Threat Of Radical Islam Is ‘Overblown’  (MSK’s link).

Quieter examples:

EXCLUSIVE: Gary Johnson Says The Threat Of Radical Islam Is ‘Overblown’ 

EXCLUSIVE: Gary Johnson Says The Threat Of Radical Islam Is ‘Overblown’

EXCLUSIVE: Gary Johnson Says The Threat Of Radical Islam Is ‘Overblown’

[SteveWolfer]

3 hours ago, Guyau said:

Let’s get an open debate and discussion and declaration of war, if that’s the way that we want to treat ISIS.

That's a quote from Gary Johnson in the Thrush interview.  It just struck me strangely.  First, I like that he recognizes that Congress must declare war, and by implication, that congress is representative, but what is strange is that he hasn't given an indication of his opinion... he would be the nation's leader.  What would he say to sway the people and congress to get the vote he believed was best.  Does he believe we should have a declaration of war or not?

And if they gave him a declaration of war, how would he carry it out?  And where are his enthusiasms?

Here is what I too often see.  We have the extreme of the Neo-con who really wants war, in my mind, everywhere.  They want to impose "democracy" and operate on the thin rational that it would be in our national security.  My gut tells me that they have some sort of emotional drive that neither they nor I want to look closely at.  The other extreme is the libertarian who, in serving the non-aggression principle, forgets that the government exists to protect us from attacks.  They seem to be overcompensating for our current and past excesses in interventionism.  It would be nice to say that there was a middle ground somewhere among the existing political representative, where neither of those extremes appeared, but that's not the case.  The 'middle' position seems to be ignoring (or at most) moaning about unnecessary interventions going on now, while being unwilling to use the military where there are real threats that being left to grow and fester.