Here are 218 reasons to not vote for Barack Obama

hipsterlibertarian: Some excerpts: In ‘04, in the Chicago Tribune, Obama said, “There’s not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush’s position at this stage.” Throughout the years, he voted for war funding once he was senator, and he defended his votes. Presumably it would be wrong to defund an immoral war. And in 2008, Obama hailed the Iraq surge — a controversial policy harshly criticized by many Democrats the year before — going so far as to tell Bill O’Reilly that the surge “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.” In December of ‘08, when he was the lame-duck president, Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi leadership, which set the timetable for withdrawal. It was almost precisely the timetable for withdrawal that Obama had proposed, within a couple months. So the official US policy, by the time Obama took office, was that the United States would withdraw the troops from the cities by June of 2009; and by the end of this year, 2011, the troops would leave Iraq entirely. That was the policy when Obama took power. He did not expedite that. And: The total number of troops fighting wars under Obama has been higher than it was under Bush except at the end of Bush’s term. At the first half of the Bush administration, which is when there were people in the streets shouting, “Bush is a war criminal” — when the Left was correct about something — there were fewer troops. There were more US fatalities in Iraq under Bush, although the total number of US fatalities in 2009 and 2010 was higher than it was in 2003, and higher than it was in 2008, the last Bush year. And: Obama is drone-attacking Pakistan. He’s expanded this war greatly. One or 2 million Pakistani refugees have had to leave the Swat Valley. It’s one of the greatest refugee crises since Rwanda. Obama’s bombed Yemen; he’s bombed Somalia; he even threatened Eritrea, this tiny little country near Ethiopia, with invasion. In a normal country, when your government says it might invade another country, people have a clue, but we’re at war so much with so many countries no one even knows any of this stuff. And: Warrantless surveillance has continued, and it’s been normalized. The TSA outrages have gotten worse. Now the Left thinks that you’re crazy if you oppose the police state, and the Right is finally realizing the federal government shouldn’t get to touch us like this. Detention without charge has continued. Habeas corpus is gutted. Obama was supposed to close Guantanamo within a year; now it looks as if they are never going to close it. And even at their best they’ll say we’ll have a “Guantanamo Lite” within the United States. But click through to read the whole article. And then ponder that this is America’s version of an electable “peace” candidate. Senior year of high school, my AP Government teacher asked me, the token libertarian, to explain to the class why libertarians vote with the Republicans most of the time. I didn’t expect the question—I was just really excited that he was discussing libertarianism at all—so I got a little frazzled and probably said something [somewhat incoherent] along the lines of, “the problems with economic policy are worse than the ones with social policy.” On one hand, there are atrocities going on in social policy that I wasn’t thinking about in my moment of shock, such as the drug war, but on the other hand, I consciously dismissed war as an issue because it’s a wash. My favourite issue that the Democrats say they stand for, which they, in fact, don’t, is peace. If they actually voted that way, my government teacher might not have even had to ask me that question, because libertarians might very well be voting Democrat as often as they vote Republican. Just one more reason I tell Democrats that I beat them in social liberalism. That, and I’m for the legalization of absolutely all drugs, including heroin. But that’s a discussion for another time.

On War, Obama Has Been Worse Than Bush