Ok. We lost. And McCain did lose graciously - he always was gracious (unlike the opponent).
The world is not going to end suddenly...however, the USA will realise at some point in the future that it elected (and the
media in particular) a disgraceful man to be president in the face of danger. The USA has just buried its head in the sand, and
to Israelis I would say - hit Iran in the next two to three months - that's how long you have to increase your chances of
survival.
The unconstitutional and illegal tactics of the Democrats will become institutionalised as the Consitution will be
subverted. To what ends? To whichever ends the left of the Democrat party decide.
On the plus side. These next four years will give real leftwingers like myself and the conservative movement in the USA to
put in some real coordinating thought on how to regroup and win the next election, so we can undo the damage that will have
been wrought by the "messiah".
It seems to me that one of the reasons that the Republicans never developed a coherent domestic message was that they never had
one. Low taxes were a good idea, are a good idea but not as much as reforming the tax code to promote the benefits of work. The
US tax code has been a mess for the last twenty years and Obama's Democrats are not going to tackle it - too much like hard
work.
The Republicans should be starting to work out a manifesto that provides a realistic and plausible small government platform to
counter the Big Government excesses of an Obama presidency.
At the same time, healthcare is going to be an issue. I wrote a post on my blog months ago about this and the failings of the
conservatives to really tackle why healthcare is a Democrat issue. To revisit the argument, healthcare in the US is
semi-nationalised and semi-privatised; in Britain, we have mostly nationalised healthcare and it remains one of the
institutions of which the British remain most proud, even when outraged by stupid decisions such as trying to punish people for
using private healthcare alongside the NHS. Those are excesses but excesses which have no root in the spirit of the NHS, that
the nation cares for all its subjects.
If the Republicans are bold, they can come up with a small government version of the NHS for the USA. I would propose
something like this: the federal government provides a basic healthcare voucher which consumers can use to shop around for the
best healthcare deal. In return for the abolition of corporation tax on healthcare providers, the government and the healthcare
providers agree on a basic regulatory framework of consumer rights, a set of standardised insurance plans into which consumers
must buy and an agreed limiting of drug prices based on a compromise between market and R&D costs and affordability for
consumers. This would act in the same manner, I believe, as the regulatory framework the British government uses for energy,
telephony etc in Britain where the companies then compete on price and service within a framework that guarentees a competative
market.
The USA, not matter what the liberal left shriek, is not as poor anywere as Britain was in 1945. For the Republican party, I
think this would create a great deal of affection towards them from the working class Democrat voters and combined with a real
reforming assault on Medicare, Medicaid, the pensions system, public education and the tax system, would give them a mantle of
"real" reformers - the party of "competence", rather than the Democrats who would be the party of "conscience" but
"incompetence". If you want your country to be run well - vote Republican. If you want your country to cater to special
interest and minority groups in the name of "fairness", vote Democrat but don't be shocked at the waste and corruption.
Returning to the present. So Obama thinks that Bush administration policy was too aggressive towards Russia? Inconsistent
would be a fair analysis but too aggressive? This means he's still talking and in his victory speech about appeasement.
What was that saying about leopards?
