Oh man, this argument is flawed on so many levels it's astounding.

First and foremost, how is this supposed to affect me? What do I get out of "proving" that America isn't racist?

In theory, I guess it's supposed to increase my self-esteem or something by enabling me to take greater pride in my country. That's quaint. Let's count the ways this doesn't work.

1. My self-esteem is just fine, thank you. And even if it wasn't, it's a leap to assume that greater pride in my country would help it (though, in fact, it would).
   
2. I already take great pride in my country. And even if I didn't, it's a leap to assume that my pride would increase by "proving" that America has overcome its history of racism (though, in fact, it has). Besides, whatever gain in pride I would feel from this proof would be counteracted by the shame I feel in knowing that my countrymen want to elect a socialist soothsayer to the Presidency.
   
3. The America that I know and encounter on a daily basis is not a racist country. I interact with plenty of people every day, and all of them either harbor no racial animosity, or recognize that such an attitude is shameful in modern American culture and they do their best to conceal it. Now, I can respect a difference of opinion on this matter if your own personal experience shows otherwise, but we're not talking about you, we're talking about me.

Either way, trying to prove you're not racist by voting for a black guy because he's black is kinda self-defeating.

Are you kidding? The Religious Right hates McCain.

He's arguably an anti-Federalist conservative, not a religious/social one. He supports stem cell research. He'll sooner dismantle the U.S. Department of Education than force it to teach creationism. He opposes Federal involvement in social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, preferring to punt those issues to state legislatures and letting people define the rules of their own society on a state-by-state basis.

The website Campaign Issues 2008 offers a very good breakdown of issue stances of all 2008 candidates - and if you compare McCain's stances against those of the Religious Right's cheerleader, Mike Huckabee, you'll find there's no danger of the Religious Right's empowerment via a McCain Presidency.

These entries are supposed to be about me, not about social philosophy in the abstract. But it's not even worth getting into my opinions about religious conservatives, where they're right, where they're wrong, the recent history of religion in politics (it's changed substantially in the last 30 years), the value that the Protestant Ethic brings to America and the Christian roots of all contemporary Left-wing dogma, blah blah blah bah. The bottom line is, McCain has about as much love for Pat Buchanan as Obama has for Louis Farrakhan. So in this election, religion is pretty much a non-issue, and I won't be affected either way.

Why the fuck would we want to avoid war with these assholes? And even if we tried to avoid war, I think these guys might have a say in the matter that runs counter to our hopes.

Look, a lot of Obama supporters believe that the world is full of misunderstood people that are only violent because America keeps stopping them from fulfilling their dreams. In a way, this is true... primarily because their dreams involve killing everyone who worships differently or speaks differently or looks differently from them. I can think of no greater setback for the propagation and practice of liberal values worldwide than to reduce the credible military threat we perpetually pose to these freaks that keeps their ambitions at bay.

Now, being constantly on our guard is very expensive, financially and psychologically. As John Kerry astutely observed back in 2004, the ideal way to defend yourself against enemies is to not have any.

One potential way to reduce your number of enemies is to open discussions, address people's grievances, and build interdependence and understanding. Another, much more reliable way is to fucking kill them already. For a comparison of the relative effectiveness of these two approaches, I present western Czechoslovakia for the former and Carthage for the latter.

The problem with the peace-love-flowerpower approach is that it only works for people with legitimate grievances and a sincere desire for reconciliation. It doesn't work with medieval turd-world fucktards or totalitarian dictatorships. And while Obama supporters seem to have no problem thinking of members of the Religious Right as psychotically delusional fundamentalists who are beyond reason or empathy, for some reason they have trouble extending this perception to turban-headed suicide bombers who believe that Allah will reward them with 72 virgins in heaven for killing Jews. You write off the entire American Bible Belt as a bunch of lunatic Klansmen, yet when confronted with an actual honest-to-Allah theocracy complete with stoning of homosexuals and a different set of laws for non-Muslims, you embrace it as an exotic foreign culture that simply needs more understanding. It'd be silly if it wasn't so frustratingly consistent.

But, I promised that these arguments aren't about abstract morality but about direct impact on me personally. How do Middle Eastern wars affect the day-to-day life of an average American? The hard truth of the matter is that they don't. Iran could nuke Israel tomorrow, India can invade Pakistan, Russia can blitz through Eastern Europe, and life in the US would still continue as normal. We'd stand back and go, "Holy shit!", but it wouldn't affect the homeland.

Now, if we choose to enter the fight, then foreign wars become an enormous drain on our economy. Our taxes increase, rationing programs ensue, and our cities get shut down by mobs of hippie protesters.

So, when it comes to foreign wars, we can do one of two things to protect our domestic economy. We can either follow a policy of foreign disengagement, which means we'd let China do whatever it wants to Taiwan, Russia do whatever it wants to Europe, let Iran have its way with Israel, and so on. We don't care anymore, we decide it's too expensive to care. That's the way of George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, and Ron Paul. And that's fine, that's one way to approach the situation.

The other way, doctrinized by Teddy Roosevelt and perfected through the Cold War, is to project such immense military might, along with the credible threat of using it in defense of our allies, that we never need to use it because folks like Iran know we'll stop them and destroy them if they try to step out of line. That's Pax Americana, and it's kept the world a more or less stable place for the last 60 years.

The worst thing we can do, from the perspective of the domestic economy (i.e. my perspective), is to uphold our commitments to our allies while at the same time backing down from a stance of overwhelming military might, opting instead for a soft-power approach. That means that our enemies will be less reluctant to start wars, gambling on the possibility that maybe we won't respond — and when we do respond, it hurts us as well as them (granted, it hurts them a liiiittle more). The most effective weapon is one you never have to use, and that only works when your enemies know you have it and will use it on them. It's why muggers never attack cops.

Now, Obama's not going to go the full disengagement route. He is not Ron Paul. He's also not going to go the route of overwhelming military might, because that is far too McCain-ish and Bush-ish and has been historically shown to be far too effective. No, Obama is going to try to go the soft-power approach, attempting to hamstring the ambitions of hostile powers using international committees rather than armies. Obama's response to Russia's invasion of Georgia, for example, is the same as that of France: sending delegations to form multiparty negotiation committees to find mutually satisfactory resolutions and get buy-in from regional stakeholders.

For those of you who weren't watching, Russia's response to France was to have a very cordial, respectful discussion in which Russia ultimately agreed to an organized withdrawal. The French delegation came back to Paris announcing that they had reached a consensus and that the meeting was a success. Of course, Russia's tanks didn't actually go anywhere. This repeated about two or three times before Russia finally got bored and pulled back for cost-cutting reasons. Russia currently still maintains troops in South Ossetia and has declared it an independent nation under Russian protection. The UN issued a strongly worded condemnation.

Come to think of it, maybe this is an argument for voting for Obama. Sooner or later, Russia or China or somebody is going to respond to one of these strongly worded condemnations from the UN with a full-out public mooning on the floor of the UN. And I'd kind of like to see that happen.

Yes, and his desire to re-deploy them to Afghanistan to fight a resurgent Taliban highlights what happens when you leave a job half-done.

Obama seems to recognize this, and describes a plan that couples US troop withdrawal with "successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country." Now, why does that plan sound familiar? Oh yeah, because it's exactly the plan laid out by George W. Bush! Of course, Obama (in that same linked op-ed) hedges the impact of his statement by saying that, of course, some American troops will remain in Iraq indefinitely, to help with regional power projection and peacekeeping missions. Gosh, that sounds familiar too... Oh yeah, because it comes from John McCain!

So in actual substance, Obama's stated Iraq policy is qualitatively identical to those of Bush and McCain. The only difference is that Obama is being a total snot about it, touting it as something new and different that he thought of.

This blog is supposed to be how I personally am affected by these issues. It's not even worth going into the details of how the Iraq War impacts me as an individual, because there's no delta between a McCain Presidency and an Obama Presidency with regard to this issue. So, neeeext!

The government can't create jack shit.(*) What it can do is get out of the freakin' way and let people profit from their own innovations. That means lifting the ban on offshore drilling, lifting the moratorium on nuclear power plants, refraining from passing draconian environmental policies with dubious long-term impacts, and refraining from using tax money to subsidize approaches that have no market viability. This sounds a helluva lot more like McCain's platform than Obama's.

And when it comes to me and how I personally am affected by this, the bottom line is this:

• I'm not going to have a hydrogen car anytime in the next four to eight years, and neither are you.
• My gas prices are going to continue to trend upwards, it's just a question of how quickly and who the money ends up going to.
• My house will not be flooded away by rising oceans in four to eight years, and neither will anyone else's. And it's extremely unlikely that, if a century of CO2 emissions have fucked up the environment, that it will get any less fucked by anything the US does while India and China are industrializing.
  

So, in the end, the future of energy and the environment looks pretty much the same regardless of whether it's McCain or Obama in the White House. It's just that Obama wants me to suffer a little bit more in the short-term.

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(*) The government's lack of creative capability is worth expounding upon. "What about the Manhattan Project? What about the Apollo Program? What about the Internet?" Yes, it's true, the government can drive military projects. Lest you forget, nuclear energy, space flight, and digital computer technology all come from mid-20th century American military programs.

The reason the government funds military programs is because the government, by definition, is the only one who can experience foreseeable benefit from such programs. The potential profitability of such programs is dubious at their inception. If it were otherwise, such projects would be run by private industry consortia, with each investor trying to pour in as much money as possible in order to get the biggest piece of the pie in the end.

In other words, the formula is always this: The government wants to build something that's useful for killing people and breaking things. The government, by definition, has the exclusive privilege to go around killing people and breaking things. Therefore, nobody but the government is willing to bother paying for the construction of such a thing. So the government spends massive amounts of money on it because nobody else has any incentive to do so. Sometimes, years or decades later, a clever industrialist figures out a way to make the government's creation do something other than kill people and break things, at which point it becomes an economically beneficial invention. Usually not.

This formula simply does not fit a project such as the creation of sustainable energy programs, which are economic in nature from the outset. A solar panel or hydrogen car is not useful for killing people or breaking things. It is useful for reducing consumption of resources, assuming it can be manufactured domestically and provided to the population for low individual cost. That means is has to be a profitable, economically viable consumer product. You want to build something like that, you don't ask the government. You go ask General Motors.

And... this is... a good thing?

Look, I don't need it, don't want it, and think it would be utterly disastrous in general. I'm young and relatively fit, and besides I have health insurance.

I understand that there's some constantly fluctuating number of Americans without health insurance. Okay. They have votes too. They can vote to stick me with the bill.

The effects of socialized health care on me would be exclusively negative. I would pay more for health care (through taxes rather than through my paycheck), I would have less access to doctors, and my doctors would be less skilled. So, why exactly would I support such a measure - on pragmatic, not moral, grounds?

I am "the rich". I'm a single guy making more than $45,000/yr gross ($45K being the lowest income tax bracket at which Obama's tax increases begin). Who do you think those taxes are going to be coming from? When Obama and Biden talk about subsidizing your mortgage or helping you pay for your gas, where do you think that money's coming from? Hi. Nice to meet you.

Now, you might argue that this is actually to my benefit, that I myself end up with a better life in the long run by investing in "society at large". If that's your argument, then I should get to choose the amount and the recipients, and ultimately act on my own assessment of rate-of-return. Conservatives donate 30% more to charity than Liberals, partly because we believe that safe neighborhoods and prosperous communities grow from individuals, not from government initiatives. But taxation is not "investment". If it was, you'd be able to show me a cost/benefit analysis and get my money willingly. You wouldn't need to pry it out of my paycheck with a proverbial crowbar.

Oh, and, if you think that it's "only right" that I should pay more, not because I necessarily get anything out of it but  because we all have a moral duty to help one another... you can kindly go take your moral code and shove it up your self-righteous ass, you dogmatic piece of shit. I accept that I have no choice but to submit to the government's consensus-driven tax policy, and that they will take more from me than they take from most others. But to suggest that I should be happy about it because I'm serving some kind of Higher Good, and to argue that I should give my vote to a man who will make it worse for me in contribution to some "greater interest"? Not. Fucking. Persuasive.

Okay, let's look at how this affects me. Why me? Because it's my vote you're trying to get.

The "economy", in the abstract, affects me largely by determining my buying power (i.e. how much a movie or a gallon of milk costs). And despite all the blathering you hear from the punditry, the President really has very little direct control over any of it. The President appoints a guy to run the Federal Reserve, which has some impact on interest rates. The President has some input over budget allocation, tax policies, and international trade agreements, but his actual authority over such matters is substantially shared with Congress.

In the end, none of these possible actions directly affect my economic situation (except for taxes, which I'll get to later), and the effects that these actions will have is almost completely unknown. What effect will a 0.5% drop in prime rate have on my ability to buy a movie ticket? I don't know, you don't know, Obama and McCain don't know, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke don't know. The microeconomic effects of federal fiscal policy is pretty much an ongoing experiment-in-progress.

So the bottom line is, when it comes to the economy, the President has very few proverbial knobs to turn, he lacks the ability to turn them very far without Congress, and nobody has any real clue what any of the knobs are connected to. Do yourself a favor and avoid this line of argument in serious political discussions.

Hello!

Well, it's Presidential Election time again — that four-year cycle which Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar calls America's "seasonal tribal warfare".

And, once again, I endure ongoing ridicule and ostracism from my Democrat peers. Everywhere I go I see t-shirts and bumper stickers lauding Hope and Change, constructivist artwork depicting Barack Obama as a grandiose revolutionary leader, and coffee-shop groups buzzing about the wonders of an Obama Presidency.

And none of it makes the slightest bit of sense to me.

My friends and co-workers are generally in the same demographic as me, with equivalent levels of education, income, similar professions, similar interests, and so on. The vast majority of them are aquiver with Obama fever. Yet they can offer me no explanation for how their own lives would be any better with an Obama Presidency.

They offer me abstract statements of morality and sociopolitical philosophy, but I'm really not interested in getting someone else's morals shoved down my throat. They offer me heated emotional diatribes expressing why they are voting for Obama, but I can't trace the source of their emotions back to anything I personally can relate to. It's gotten to the point where I can't talk to most of them about it because verbal conversations tend to sort of wander off into the proverbial woods.

That's why I'm starting this blog. Maybe a written conversation can be a little bit more sensible than a verbal one.

So, I offer an open challenge to any Obama supporters reading this to convince me to vote for Obama. This involves demonstrating to me why having Obama in the Oval Office will be good for me — a 30-year-old professional, single, educated white male homeowner.

In order to do this, you have to tell me how I will be better off with Obama as our next President.

Don't give me Obama's star power or his life story. I don't care where he grew up or how great his speechwriters are. Don't tell me how awesome or wonderful you think he is — on its own, I don't find your opinion convincing just because you really, really feel it.

Don't give me his background or his relationships unless they serve as a guide to his decision-making tendencies. And even then, I only care insofar as those decisions end up affecting me.

Don't give me abstract arguments about class struggle or social justice or how Obama will help other people. That's great for them, they can vote for him as far as I'm concerned. My vote is mine, and I will use it for myself. Other people's votes are theirs. The beauty of the election process is that it allows every citizen an equal chance to fight for themselves, regardless of race or gender or income, and the best results for the country arise from the synergistic effects of everyone pursuing their own individual greatness.

Don't challenge me to convince you to vote for McCain. I don't know who you are or what you believe in, so I can't tell you whether or not McCain should be your man. The purpose of this blog is to share enough about me to give you the opportunity to change my mind.

Do make your case. I'm skeptical but open-minded. Give me something I can grok, and my vote's all yours.

If you give me an argument that convinces me to vote for Obama, I will not only cast my own vote for him, but will use it to convert other conservative friends and bloggers. What you have here is a chance to explore ways to engage in respectful, meaningful debate, with a clear objective that serves your purpose. Use it wisely.

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For starters, let me help you out and save you some time. Here's a few approaches that my Obama-loving peers have already tried with me. Note, of course, that I'm still voting for McCain.

• Obama will fix the economy, end the housing crisis, create jobs
• Obama will alleviate tax burden on "the middle class" by taxing "the rich"
• Obama will implement socialized health care
• Obama will create alternative energy programs
• Obama will bring the troops home from Iraq
• Obama will avoid war with Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc.
• Vote Obama, keep the Religious Right out of power!
• Prove that America isn't racist by electing a black man
• Everybody else wants Obama to win, so vote to be around happy people
• I'm stupid, deluded, I should be ashamed of voting Republican, and this website sucks
• I should be voting for the country, not for myself
• This website is full of nothing but strawmen and factual errors