Convince Me

I had some fun yesterday, kicking over the anthill that is the Obama cult, and my, how the little critters are still furious about it. This is one reason I can’t be a Democrat; the people in that party appear for the most part to be driven only by emotion. Sure, it makes sense to care about the issues and your candidate of choice, but there really should be rational, logical reasons for your positions. And frankly, the Left seems to hate the very idea of defending its positions with logic and evidence. Take Global Warming, for instance. I agree that we humans must be responsible for the materials we use, and to be accountable for the effect our actions have on other people and living things. But accepting radical demands simply because they are couched in the ‘we can’t wait to prove our case’ arguments of Global Warming advocates is not rational, especially when there is reason to suspect hidden agenda and ulterior motives. Global Warming is an unproven theory, to say nothing of the claims that man’s actions cause it or can stop it. The Kyoto Treaty stands out as a particularly deceitful and hypocritical example of the thinking, punishing the US while excusing, even rewarding third-world nations and places like China, whose actions are – using the logic of the Left - far more contributory to pollution and Global Warming. A reasonable person could well wonder why we should even be concerned with Carbon Dioxide, known to be beneficial to most plants and inert to humans except in levels on concentration impossible to find in Nature, especially when we could and to my mind should focus on real pollution from particulates and known carcinogens. And that is merely one of the more obvious examples.

Economics is another arena where Leftist demands run into brick walls of Reality. Take the recent hike in the minimum wage, an artificial creation of Congress which does nothing to increase the economy’s effectiveness, but is merely another mechanism for wealth redistribution. The money to pay for the increased minimum comes from the businesses which pay employees, businesses which for the most part are sole proprietorships or small partnerships, that is businesses already running on tight margins which cannot afford to have their expenses increased simply because Congress wanted to do so. So they did what they had to do, they cut positions to make ends meet and this raised the unemployment rate. This is the same logic that adding a half-dollar tax on your gas would be a good idea, but if you look on the side of the pump the next time you fill up, you will see that the government thought that was a great idea, as well. The Left does not understand Economics, and certainly never considers the law of unintended consequences.

This brings us back to the Left’s poster boy for President; a guy whose experience is so thin that he barely got started in his first year as a Senator before he started running for President. A guy who boasted about his superior judgment, but who has had to admit that he did not really understand the character and nature of some of his closest associates. His mentor, Jeremiah Wright, has been exposed as an America-hating racist, yet Obama called this man his mentor and his closest advisor for years. Obama was a close acquaintance of Billy Ayers, even declared his candidacy from Ayer’s house, but now it turns out that Ayers was not only a member of the infamous ‘Weatherman’ terrorist group in the 1960s, he still holds the same values he did then. We find that Obama made deals with his fund-raiser Antoin Rezko, at least before Mr. Rezko got himself indicted and convicted for fraud and corruption. The list goes on much further, but you get the idea … Obama’s associates were and are as dirty as those we once saw surrounding Richard Nixon. Different party, but the same game.

So, convince me guys. What is the rational argument for electing Obama? What empirical support can you point to, that shows he can do the job and is fit for it?

Is there anything inside that expensive suit but a con man?