The Fox and the Hen House

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Once upon a time there was a fox. The fox was placed in charge of the hen house. The fox’s job was to regulate all the activity of the hen house. However, the fox was wily and was opposed to regulation. Therefore, he ate all the hens. However, this did not satisfy the fox. So, the fox invited all his friends to a meeting. When all his friends were gathered he said, “We need to guard all the hen houses in the land. If we do this we can happily eat hens forever. I propose that we buy up all the hen houses in the land. I also propose that we borrow the money to buy all the hen houses and the factory that makes money. If we do this we can make more money to borrow to buy more hen houses. We can also buy all authority in the land so we can place ourselves in charge of the hen houses. However, since we are smart we will make sure we do not eat all the hens. We must maintain a healthy population of hens. The hens must think all is well so they will be fat and juicy. We will make the hens pay taxes – their first born, while we will convince the hens that since we are the job creators we will not have to pay any taxes. However, since the hens must eat to live we will put them to work in the fields to grow grains. We will build factories to process the grain into seed. We will pay them very little but don’t worry fellow fox friends we will make them pay for their food. Between the taxes and the food, we will get all our invested money back. We will tell them this is capitalism. If we get too many working hens and we do not have enough work for them and we can’t eat them all, we will just let the excess hens die off thinking that they are lazy and do not deserve the things that working hens get. We will create wars so we can make them think we will protect them. We will make them think that the governing authority is evil and, even though we are the governing authority, we will make them think that we will protect them from the governing authority. If there are any smart chickens among them making problems we will make the majority of the hens believe that these free ranging chickens are secretly foxes in chickens clothes. We will make the hens think that we are on the side of their god, the great rooster in the sky. We will side with all their social issues like their belief that there should not be a chicken in every pot. We will make sure there are many hens for one rooster. We will make sure that we interpret the original intent of the constitution of all chickens to make sure it allows for all our ravenous goals. In the land of the chicken the fox will be king. My fellow foxes we are elite and deserve to eat dumb chickens forever.” All the foxes cheered the wily fox for his cunning and wisdom and proceeded to eat chickens for the rest of their lives and all the foxes lived happily ever after.

The End

Footnote To – Language: Animism and Illusion

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“…transcendence as the erasure of the other”

I realize this last phrase resists the notion that Levinas has of transcendence. Levinas wants to reconstitute metaphysics. He wants to re-think transcendence along the lines of Descartes’ idea of infinity. It is as if he wants to find the authenticity of metaphysics. For Levinas, metaphysics was always the thinking of the other. “The metaphysical desire tends towards something else entirely, toward the absolute other.” (Totality and Infinity, page 33, paperback) I understand his intentions here but I have always had some reservations concerning Levinas and metaphysics.

Metaphysics comes to post-modernity as historical, a canon. It has certainly taken radical turns from the Greeks, to Neo-Platonism, to Augustine, to Descartes, to Hegel, to Nietzsche and post-modernism. All these and others that have touched Metaphysics have moved it towards post-modernity. We, as historical beings have received this history in many ways that are pre-cognitive in Heidegger’s terms. Worldhood is certainly forged through the furnace of Metaphysics.

Post-modernity has looked upon metaphysics suspiciously as ‘logocentrism’, the canonical reading of power, the evil genius of Nietzsche’s Christianity and the alienation of labor. Levinas, as an anarchist communist understood these difficulties and yet was able to see beyond the barriers of historical narrative. In validating metaphysics as the residue of radical alterity he also takes up the historical burden placed upon metaphysics.

Certainly the reflections of metaphysics as power and the end of metaphysics want us to hear the all too human refrain of transcendence, the lack of anything that Levinas would want to hold to as radical alterity. To some extent this burden of metaphysics has been handed over to us. For some God still stands as the heir of metaphysics. However, the stand is defensive. Any Christian today will take up the cross of mistrust and suspicion. True, this also happened at the beginning of Christianity but starting with Roman Christendom onwards through the 19th century Christians were mainstream for much of the West and heresy or worse was reserved for the few that questioned its supremacy. The metaphysics of Christianity had been thought by a majority as the ‘science’ of the Dark and Middle Ages. Its truth was absolutely certain and informed culture.

The death of God that Nietzsche discussed and the end of metaphysics is not something imputed to it but something observed from it. Its power has been reduced to ‘personal relationship with Jesus’ as opposed to state religion. It no longer divines truth; science has taken its place. This does mean that Christians are not still under the spell of Christianity but it does point to their need to defend God over and against science. The post-modern who would be Christian is on guard, reclusive from the state. Evolution and global warming are denied. ‘Life’ is not taken in a biological sense but in a metaphysical sense as in the anti-abortionists who call themselves ‘pro-life’. This defensive stance would have been foreign to the average peasant in the dark ages. At the end of metaphysics we understand the darkness of God, the horrific violence of God, the human subjugation of God. Even Christians that would defend God from these assaults feel like they must defend the ‘true’ God from the weight of these accusations.

Even with all this Levinas peered deeply into metaphysics and saw the other. He felt the wonder of what metaphysics had always aimed at, the infinity that made metaphysics possible. However, as post-modern don’t we carry the ‘sameness’, the totalizing, the appeal to origin (arche’), the sin of presence, the effacement of radical alterity in our horizons that is said in the essence of metaphysics? The ‘saying’ that is otherwise than being is a still small voice but fraught with historical noise.

For us science has become the surrogate of metaphysics. It has taken careful steps to avoid the pitfalls of metaphysics. However, in so doing it has asked us to lower our horizons, our expectations. We are asked to relegate the questions of metaphysics to the junk pile of history. All the while, science has carried the banner of truth it has also left a gaping hole where metaphysics once stood. We, who live in the aftermath of this clash, even if not Christian, feel the crush of meaning, the cry of existentialism, the gasp of godlessness. The reduction to mere human has replaced the metaphysical drama of the titans, the gods and the eternal stakes that surround us. Here in this smallness we live and move and have our being.

Levinas wants to bring value again to metaphysics as what he gleams to be its kernel, the other. The other here does not mean to ‘set man on the throne’ or some such nonsense. At the same time that Levinas reconstitutes metaphysics as the radical alterity of the face of the other he also want to dethrone ‘man’ as a product of sameness, totality, tyranny. ‘Man’ as taken into metaphysics is understood, devalued and leveled off. Man is ‘enframed’ as standing reserve, thought in the manner of things, reduced to one among many of what is already known. ‘Man’ already marks the loss of human being. Levinas in thinking of the other wants to lose that ‘plastic cast’ of the face of the other. He wants to re-think the other as what can never enter into the light of being but casts off rays as history and language. Instead of a phenomenology of what shows itself he finds an absolute refusal to show, to be taken up in thought – except as retreat, as a darkness not shown in light. Paul Valery along with Hegel might say. “…but in order to render the light, you need a somber moiety of shade.” Levinas would content that as there is a real difference in ‘shade’ and death there is a real difference in ‘closedness’ and the face of the other. This difference is more than one of kind, it is not temporally commensurate, it is dia-chrony, a time not mine – not one kind among other kinds – but an-archical, without origin. This reminds us of the chaos of Hesiod but without the neutrality – the he or she that faces me. In this, Levinas wants to situate the history of metaphysics.

However, from post-modernity can we reconstitute metaphysics radically? Can we purge it of its madness and set it on an ‘other’ setting. Can we find another start from the Greeks? There are many starts in the Greeks. Do we have the choice to lay aside metaphysics? -Probably not. As the snake in Zarathustra don’t we need to bite of the head to grow another tail? The snake is mortally wounded but eternal recurrence has made sublime in-ways as trace, as radical alterity, tangential but not neutral, an-archical but not nothing, dia-chronos but not a-temporal. The eternal God of metaphysics has been dethroned but the spirit doggedly remains. I am not sure we can re-constitute metaphysics but we must. We face a recent turn towards heterogeny. Can we ignore science, the new unconscious, the m-verse, the God-particle? Has science surpassed the ‘mere’ of correctness and mathematical projects? Can we ignore difference, the trace, the spoiling of opposites, the deposition of dualities – the middle way of Greek thought – the kairos the interrupts chrony? Post-modernism thinks difference as before opposition, as before thesis/antithesis/aufhebung. This difference does not ‘lift up’ or sublate. This difference does not transform or transport. This difference cannot reduce to neutrality and the light and darkness that produce it. This anachronism is laid upon us reluctantly by the corpse of metaphysics that we are. Transcendence as the erasure of the other nonetheless preserves the other in its erasure – in this we bear our post-modernity.

Chaos

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Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning, tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be.

First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all (the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean.

Hesiod, “Theogony”

From:

Drew A. Hyland;John Panteleimon Manoussakis. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 9). Kindle Edition.

Language: Animism and Illusion

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When Nietzsche writes of ‘going under’ he does not refer to some sort of Buddhist extinction, sunyata. He refers to Zarathustra’s descent. From the coldest of heights Zarathustra, drawn by compassion, over-rich with pity, descends into mortality, the all too human. From beyond good and evil and nursed from the nausea of eternal recurrence of the same, Zarathustra goes under with the weight of gravity.

In “The Gaze of Orpheus” Maurice Blanchot’s essay “The Narrative Voice” tells us,

“What Kafka teaches us – even if this expression cannot directly be attributed to him – is that storytelling brings the neuter into play. Narration governed by the neuter is kept in the custody of the “he”, the third person that is neither the third person, nor the simple cloak of impersonality. The “he” of narration in which the neuter speaks is not content to take the place usually occupied by the subject, whether the latter is a stated or implied “I” or whether it is the event as it takes place in its impersonal signification. The narrative “he” dismisses all subjects, just as it removes every transitive action or every objective possibility. It does this in two forms:

1) the speech of the tale always let us feel that what is being told is not being told by anyone: it speaks in the neuter;
2) in the neuter space of the tale, the bearers of speech, the subjects of the action- who used to take the place of characters – fall into relationship of non-identification with themselves: something happens to them, something they cannot recapture except by relinquishing their power to say “I” and what happens to them has always happened already: they can only account for it indirectly, as self-forgetfulness, the forgetfulness that introduces them into the present without memory that is the present of narrating speech.” (page 140, paperback)

What Saussure tells us is that language referentially turns in on itself. Language can only refer to itself; semantic is nothing other than syntax. What is present in language is pure signification. Signifiers do not signify ‘things’; signifiers only signify other signifiers. Presence, as one signifier among many, is the rustle of il ya (there is), the neutrality of a-temporality, Platonic recollection without forgetfulness. Perhaps this could be thought as the physics of eternal reoccurrence; the sub-atomic particles the never rest, never die, only exist and not-exist, be and not-be without temporal reference: perhaps a neo-Kierkegaardian kenosis, the new genesis of God and man, the absurd paradox that incites the passion of dread. From these cold and desolate heights that only the noble can endure we only have one choice – to go under.

To act as if action has meaning is a Beginning. To separate the firmament from the void, to “become like one of us”, marks retreat from no-thingness and fall towards density. The God-particle gives mass to emptiness, writes from noise; the appropriating event. The precipice from which we stare into the void and blink is façade and truth – all the while the void stares back. The “he” or “she” of narrative which only masks the unbearable lightness of neutrality and the choice – the choice that must act to choose forgetfulness for Truth, put other before dialectical process. The ‘uber’ of going under is simultaneously animism and illusion, Being and beings, death as the impossible depths of life and transcendence as the erasure of the other*.

*see https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2012/01/05/footnote-to-language-animism-and-illusion/

Going Home Again By DAVID BROOKS

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My comments regarding the New York Times story…

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/going-home-again.html

The story about Rod’s sister is certainly a painful tragedy. Emmanuel Levinas, a French philosopher, was a concentration camp survivor. He thought of the other as an absolute singularity and the death of the other as an unrecoverable loss. I am a Dreher also from Louisiana and have experienced this pain with the long painful loss of two older brothers. My brothers were lost in the Vietnam War. They both returned but left their young spirits in the jungle. They suffered intensely and were never the same after they returned. One recently died. He told me he woke up many nights with the Vietnamese women and children he had to shoot from his helicopter standing around his bed even after he was fully awake. The enemy shot at their helicopters with the women and children surrounding them. The other has been almost totally a hermit since he returned. Since Vietnam, he has never been ‘normal’ in any since of the word. While they were not counted as part of the body bag count they and our family’s life was never the same after they returned from Vietnam. Rod’s sister tragically died from cancer. Cancer strikes the victims loved ones as well but as helplessness. We each die inside when our loved one dies and cancer only reminds us of our absolute finitude and vulnerability. War is a human act. War can be prevented in many cases. When our loved ones are victims of war we feel pain and helplessness but we also feel anger. When our politicians start wars that are clearly not a matter of absolute and imminent necessity for survival or by mistake, this error may be abstract to most Americans but to those of us that directly experienced the resulting pain, we are angered by the glibness of such abstractions and everyone that made such tragedies possible from voters to political decision makers. Rod and I are on opposite sides of the political spectrum but pain is universal for mortals. We will carry our tragic losses every day for the rest of our lives but PLEASE folks do not think of war as one political issue among others, it is horrible tragedy that we can prevent – If you are grateful to our veterans please take our pain to the voting booth.

What is a “Postmodern Conservative”?

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There used to be a conservative website, some of its content is still around, called “The Postmodern Conservative”. I read a little content from this site as I am a little intrigued how one could maintain the conjecture of a ‘postmodern conservative’. On the surface, this is an oxymoron. Perhaps it is intended ironically. It is tantamount to thinking of Nietzsche’s nihilism and Christianity together in positive terms. Postmodern thinking seeks to overturn constructionism and its resulting epistemological result, structuralism. Postmoderism cannot be thought as a coherent, autonomous and positive philosophy. It is a symbiotic philosophy. It preys on structure and narrative. It is a methodology that deconstructs structure based on the specific structure’s own content, its counter narratives that contradict and undermine its canonical determinations. No philosophical system of thought is immune from the oxidizing effect of its most ardent iron. Deconstruction is the tool of the nihilist. In light of this, how would a ‘conservative’ postmodernists be thought except as ironically?

Their claim is further confused in their assertion that a ‘conservative’ postmodernist is more coherent that a ‘liberal’ postmodernist. This is like thinking that a Lucifer is more Christ-like than an Antichrist. What would one ‘conserve’ as a postmodernist? Why would the content of their conservation be immune from their own devices? How could a postmodern recommend ‘conservative’ content over ‘liberal’ content? Haven’t we established a canon, a ‘logocentrism’, by maintaining conservatism? If the thought is one of a sort of Darwinian mind-beating as opposed to the more conventional chest-beating in the belief that survival of the fittest is established, these folks should re-read Derrida’s essay on “Force and Signification” in “Writing and Difference”. Derrida writes, “To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by gaining it.” 1) If the structure of ‘conservatism’ is meaningful and is to be recommended over ‘liberalism’ then, for deconstruction, its meaning is lost at the same time that it is achieved.

If, on the other hand, ‘conservatism’ here is meant to designate brute force, mystification of raw power, then power becomes that text that Derrida writes of when he states, “To say that force is the origin of the phenomenon is to say nothing” 2) He goes on to state that Hegel clearly demonstrates that force is a tautology. Force can only assert itself. Force and language amount to the same thing, the same identity. Nothing new or different is added in thinking either word. To rejoin this notion to conservatism is reminiscent of Ayn Rand and her elitist dogma; a tautology of power makes right, history IS the narrative of the conqueror. Without regard to any moral or ethical disjoins, this assertion merely redundantly marks itself. Its only claim is to force or the structuralism that it establishes. To deconstruct its specific narrative is the task of postmodernism. To deconstruct deconstructionism is to revert to constructionism and thus re-establish (or never have de-established) its myopic insistence, its force. In other words, it is to say nothing using a lot of words. While this trend has certainly not been alien to philosophy it seems to rise to the level of infinite nonsense in the thought of a “Postmodern Conservative”.

 
1) Writing and Difference, Force and Signification, page 26 (paperback)
2) Ibid, page 26 (bottom)

Bloggers Get Ready for 2012 – Dealing with the Radical Right

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I am always amazed at right-wing efforts to revise history to fit their canonical wish for purity. The most absurd attempt I can think of is “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” by Jonah Goldberg. According to Goldberg, Democrats should feel right at home in their local KKK meeting. Don’t you love all those bleeding heart, white supremacists? They are so touch feely and came out in huge numbers for Obama. In this parallel universe it is easy to feel revulsion from the collision of our universe and their fantasy land.

I must admit I am fascinated as to how these folks can reach these conclusions with both oars in the water. I have exposed the Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini myths elsewhere

(https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2010/01/03/fascism-is-liberal-and-squares-are-circles/)

with lots of data and direct quotes from these guys showing their love for nationalism and their violent hatred for socialists and liberals. Every serious historical scholar I have found has nothing but absolute disdain for Goldberg and his illusions. Most average folks shake their head when they hear such nonsense. However, as in any unfalsifiable claim, they have an explanation for rejection of their wackiness, it is the liberal press, scholars associated with communist universities, antichrist-secular-God-haters and so on that have deluded average folks and revised history. Their version is the sanctified version and you are either in their church or not, holy or profane.

I have also found this pathology on the sanctified version of Southern history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and how the Republicans were the saviors of Southern blacks and the Democrats were the racist bigots that opposed Civil Rights. This is a prized list these folks love to pass around:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-gop/1499184/posts

Here is their entry for 1964…

June 9, 1964 Republicans condemn 14-hour filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act by U.S. Senator and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd (D-WV), who still serves in the Senate
June 10, 1964 Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) criticizes Democrat filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act, calls on Democrats to stop opposing racial equality
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced and approved by a staggering majority of Republicans in the Senate. The Act was opposed by most southern Democrat senators, several of whom were proud segregationists—one of them being Al Gore Sr. Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on Illinois Senator Everett Dirkson, the Republican leader from Illinois, to get the Act passed.
June 20, 1964 The Chicago Defender, renowned African-American newspaper, praises Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) for leading passage of 1964 Civil Rights Act

There is nothing here about that guy LBJ, he was the lowly Democratic president at the time that signed the bill. I have responded to this topic elsewhere:

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/03/29/the-democrats-filibustered-the-civil-rights-act-of-1964-and-performed-southern-lynching/

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2009/12/15/of-all-the-varieties-of-virtues-liberalism-is-the-most-beloved-aristotle/ (this has the actual vote counts fro the bill)

If you notice there is a distinct difference in the way I approach this topic and Goldberg and the Republican white-washed list approaches the topic.

I think it is great that Republicans starting with Lincoln were against slavery and for Civil Rights.

I know there was post Civil Rights Democrats that were racists in the South. It is only logical that a Southern Democrat would hate the party that won the war and killed them in large numbers. Of course, there were Northern Democrats that equally hated slavery and supported Civil Rights. I am willing to give credit where the historical record demonstrates credit is due.

I also know, being from the South that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 turned white Southerners against the party that sided with them in the Civil War. The real issue for white Southerners was not Republican or Democrat but white and black. When busing started in the South white, Democratic Southerners became white Republican Southerners. Initially, they voted for the Dixiecrats and retained their party affiliation in the Democratic Party. Eventually, they started voting Republican and were DINOs (Democrats in Name Only). In the eighties and nineties they changed party affiliation.

Today, in Louisiana the clan groups are in northern Louisiana where the WASPs are dominate. Most of the north is Republican. In the south where the Cajuns live, it is typically Catholic and Democrat. I used to debate David Duke on the LSU campus. He and his Nazis always came dressed in Nazi uniforms and expressed only violent hatred for the left. He actually won a seat in the House of Representatives as a Republican. Only a crazy idiot would tell you that KKK’ers are Democrats. They make no bones about what party they vote for (if they haven’t been convicted of a felony of course). Much of the blogging you will find on the internet about those liberal fascists comes from white supremacists and many times from prisons. The internet is a perfect media to peddle their goods.

The revisionist right is fond of claiming Republicans voted more for Civil Rights than Democrats. On the surface, percentage wise (the Republicans were in the minority) this is true but as the data shows in the link above, the actual votes fell along the Mason-Dixon line. Southern Democrats and Republicans voted against it. Northern Democrats and Republicans voted for it. Note that Southern Republicans voted unanimously against it and Democrats were mixed.

Here is the point. Whenever a zealot tells you about history there are ‘tells’ (i.e., poker) that will inform you when they are revising history to suit their needs. They want to convince you that they are keepers of the truth and everyone else is trying to deceive you. It is pure manipulation. Here are the tells:

1) Everything they did was historically correct.
2) Everything the opposition did was historically incorrect (otherwise called political correctness).
3) They use “proofs” a-temporally. In other words, for all time they were politically correct and for all time the opposition was politically incorrect.

These techniques were raised to a fine art by the Nazis. The bottom line is that to get to the truth you need an open mind and a resolve to work. The real data is typically out there with these kinds of issues but it is not easy to find. Include references in your proofs. Go with reputable sources. If you use Wikipedia you must check the references.

If you know of demographic data by region from the sixties to the present for party affiliation please let me know. I have checked Pew, Gallop, The Census Bureau and others but no luck yet. I know I can dig election data out of the Congressional and Presidential official government records and that may be what I need to do. I am not interested in books about the era only hard data.

When zealots try to sell you on their truth they are insulting you. They think you are too stupid to check their ‘facts’. I think of it as part of my civic duty to check the data if I do not have it handy and get back to them whenever I can about my findings. I never insult them personally but I am often the brunt of personal insults. If you return their rude insults you lost the argument so don’t give them that pleasure; that is what they want. The political stalemate in our country will not be solved on either side by war but by rationality. The majority of folks will learn and make wise political decisions while the zealots will always have their church. If they get violent we pay our taxes to law enforcement to deal with them.

Here is an interesting quote from Newt:

“Johnson shattered his party, Gingrich went on to say, because he had “grotesquely overreached” in four areas: mismanagement of the economy, the failure in Vietnam, the cultural divisions that emerged in part over Vietnam and later civil rights initiatives. Johnson’s mistake on civil rights, he said, was not in signing major legislation but in later getting ahead of the country by supporting school busing and failing to take a firmer stance against racial violence in the cities.”

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/03/gingrich-like-lbj-obama-risks.html

Some other interesting links:

http://www.tagalogshortstories.com/civil_rights_act_of_1964/encyclopedia.htm

http://100days.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/how-kennedy-won-the-house-and-lost-the-south/

Fantasy and Lies OR Reality and Facts

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It is odd that Republicans how found religion on the debt after the Bush administration ran the debt up 85% while President Obama’s administration has only run it up 41%.

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2011/12/08/all-you-need-to-know-about-politics/

Let’s not even think about discretionary and non-discretionary parts of the budget.

In any case, I think most of us can agree debt is important.

I guess the next thing in line after debt for Republicans would be quality of life or as they would have it, the misery index.

For me, the next thing would be life or the lack of it, death. For Iraq and Afghanistan, 7,648 of our children have been killed.

http://icasualties.org/

Bush started these absurd wars. I know from personal experience with two older brothers that wars create misery and death. Additionally, the cost of both wars is estimated at $1,284,743,552,321.

http://costofwar.com/en/

http://nationalpriorities.org/en/blog/2011/08/16/How-Safe-Are-You/

The cost of the wars, make the national debt look insignificant. I am not a Ron Paul supporter but I like his stand on foreign engagement. He is the only Republican candidate that is not itching for another war. If you really care about the debt, misery and/or body count you should vote to re-elect President Obama.

What Republicans Want…

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Mitt recently stated, “The president says he wants to transform America, I don’t want to transform America into something else. I want to restore it”

Mitt Romney along with Sarah Palin is fond of mocking President Obama for his promise of “hope and change”. So, what is the alternative to hope and change? Is it hopelessness and changelessness?

Or

Let’s see, restore it to…

…the Bush administration

Bush started two wars and bankrupted the economy. President Bush increased the national debt more than twice as much as President Obama. During his administration unemployment went up 90% more than during the Obama administration.

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2011/12/08/all-you-need-to-know-about-politics/

…prior to Medicare and Medicaid?

“Before Medicare, only 51% of people aged 65 and older had health care coverage, and nearly 30% lived below the federal poverty level.”

http://www.usgovernmentbenefits.org/hd/index.php?t=define+medicare

…before women had the right to vote and blacks and gays were hung for entertainment?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

…before Social Security?

“the best estimates show that the elderly poverty rate in 1935 was probably somewhere in the range of 70 to 90 percent.”

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/aug/17/eddie-bernice-johnson/texas-congresswoman-eddie-bernice-johnson-says-soc/

…before the civil war

Slavery

…from the beginning

In 1800, the mean life span in the United States was about a quarter century

In 1900 the mean was about 50 years

http://www.longevity.ca/info_life_expectancy.htm

Do you REALLY want to go there?

The Republicans are painting a fantasy picture for voters that need to believe fantasies of the past – it NEVER happened. The fact is that we have progressed from a dark past albeit in a bumpy and messy way. It is absolute insanity to want to go back to the way it really was. There was no earlier, greater time than now for the United States. Yes, a few things may have been better but don’t let them fool you, things are better now than they have ever been for folks.

So, here is the question, do you want to transform our future or restore our past?