Because of this compulsive need I have to share my thoughts on things, I tend to write a lot. I also tend to delete much of what I write because it felt good to get it out onto a screen, but no one actually needs to read it. Every so often I type a response to someone’s Facebook post, decide the world will be just fine and dandy without my contribution to the discussion, and then hit Enter instead of Delete by accident.
Hilarity rarely ensues when that happens.
The internet is not short of celebrations today. It’s also not short on eschatological rantings, which should not be surprising. The internet does not need me whooping and hollering, and I need to be packing for my big move anyway (more on that later, I’m sure.) Fortunately, I frequent the blogs of people who seem to manage their time better than I do, at least judging my their published output.
Ken at Popehat, who you should be following if you are not already, offered his post-election thoughts Wednesday morning. I do not agree with everything Ken has to say there, but he hit the nail on the head for me in a section entitled “I’m not happy Obama won.” I’m borrowing the section that hit home for me, or at least that expresses the ambivalence I feel on certain issues:
Romney might have been somewhat more belligerent on the international stage than Obama, though their foreign policy differences seemed to be mostly matters of degree and recrimination for Obama’s mishandling of Benghazi. Romney would surely have continued the ruinous War on Drugs, the steady one-way ratchet of the insipid “tough on crime” mindset, the post-9/11 security state, and the unprincipled asterisk grafted onto the Constitution that is the open-ended War on Terror. My chief concern is that because Obama — a Democrat widely (but inaccurately) classified as a liberal — is doing those things, they will become even more firmly entrenched and normalized.
Guantanamo. Drone attacks. Surveillance. Bradley Manning. The list of matters where I diverge sharply with the Obama administration may not be extensively long, but it goes to the very heart of some pretty fundamental concepts of government checks and balances, not to mention big abstract nouns like liberty. These issues never came up during the election because, at least in that context, the two candidates barely differed at all. I cannot commiserate with Obama’s opponents on the right on any of these issues because these are the issues that make him look like a Republican.
I might also argue that his economic policies are really just Republican Lite, and that anyone who thinks he’s some sort of Marxist is either ignorant of actual Marxism, delusional, or a shameless liar, but it’s late and I’m tired. We have four more years to try vainly to explain that Obama cannot be a socialist and a fascist at the same time, or that he is neither at any rate.
