Adumbration

There is nothing quite like an election to make me feel disenfranchised, a point of view perhaps understandable to others who are persuaded to support third party candidates for President of the United States.  This year I expect will be no different, but I will still go doggedly to the polls (or the mailbox to post my ballot), knowing that I have made the right choice to express my preference for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, with VP candidate James Gray.

For the issues of the election, comparing Gary Johnson with either Mitt Romney or the incumbent Barack Obama quickly shows Johnson to offer significantly better policy stances across the spectrum, but I will focus on what seemed responsible for Barack Obama winning his first term in 2008 - war, the military, and foreign policy.

Bush II and the neo-con wing of the Republican party managed to once more bring us to war in the Middle East, but the Democratic branch of the war party went willingly along, and it was only after a period longer than the duration of World War 2 that the D's fielded a candidate who capitalized on growing public dismay. But once elected, Obama adopted the same policies promulgated by his predecessor, and shows no sign of letting up.  Romney, on the other hand, doesn't even make a pretense to altering US foreign policy in the region, continuing to kowtow to Israel and threaten Iran.

United States meddling in the region has a long history, with a significant watershed being the installation of the Shah in Iran, and the propping up of other dictators, picking up on the imperial policies of the previously dominant British.  The rational policy would be to get out and leave them alone to sort out their own differences, but instead we continue to choose sides.

And at what cost?  Of course there are the direct costs imposed on US service men and women, some of whom die tragically, or are mutilated, or return to the States with trauma that adversely affects their professional and personal relationships for the remainder of their lives.  Then there are the far larger number of native people in those lands who suffer similar fate, and who don't share the benefit of what modern medical treatments are available to Americans. 

Then there are the financial costs of maintaining our own empire - a trillion dollars a year, all the associated resources and time, going not into improving our material well being, but simple destruction.  I would venture to say there are better ways to spend our time and energy, but you would not know it by listening to Romney and Obama; their plan is to keep it going with no end in sight, with differences in tiny percentages at the margins. And all that spending at a time of ever increasing public debt, reaching par with GDP and approximating that of countries that are going through some ugly bankruptcies.

And finally is the continued erosion of our own civil liberties, such as through warrantless searches every time we cross an airport, spying on our telecommunication, even to the point of killing US citizens without due process.

And to what effect?  The risk of dying on the highway exceed that from violent criminals, let alone terrorist attacks.  But even worse, those foreign threats arise explicitly as a consequence of our meddling in foreign lands, so the whole scheme purportedly aimed at making us safer is actually doing the reverse.

These are the most important issues in the election, and are reason enough to support Gary Johnson for President.