No-Brainer ’08: The Issues

It’s election time again in America: over the next year or so, millions of Americans will get to stay at home, secure in the knowledge that since only a handful of states actually get a meaningful vote and that getting more of said votes than the other guy doesn’t always mean you win the election, they’re not damaging the democratic process by doing so. However, if they were to vote, they’d need to decide who for, so let’s have a look at the options. 2decide.com have helpfully published a table of what the different candidates believe about different issues. (I’m largely assuming this table to be accurate. You may like to check it before deciding who you want to be your President, but I’ve not found an error myself.) This is useful because it includes many issues so thoroughly black-and-white that you would actually have to be fucking stupid to get them wrong – thus identifying the fucking stupid candidates. For example, one issue on the list is “torture”. Does the candidate support or oppose torture? Most oppose it, but the following support it: Giuliani, Hunter, Romney (our own Specifically Mormon Crackpot of the Year) and Tancredo (with Cox and ‘Fred’ silent on the issue). The same four candidates, and nobody else, also support wiretapping. Or take a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages. That’s such a ludicrous idea that only the fucking stupid candidates could support it. This idea is backed by Cox, Hunter, Romney, Tancredo (who has since withdrawn to support Romney) and Huckabee. (To be fair though, they might not be stupid; they might just be total bastards.)

Mike Huckabee, as an aside, is completely mad. I wouldn’t like to base such an accusation on a table of information that I’ve not checked, so here is the equivalent list of issues, alongside his position on them, straight from his own website. You’ll notice that not only does he support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage for no stated reason, he also says ‘My faith is my life - it defines me. My faith doesn’t influence my decisions, it drives them,’ (I think we’ve found that elusive reason). That’s not exactly gripping tightly to the separation of church and state, is it? One person who has apparently failed to find Huckabee’s website is New York Times columnist, blonde-haired religious zealot and fictional creation of Philip Pullman, Mrs. (Ann) Coulter, who says in her latest column that ‘all [she wants] for Christmas is for Christians to listen to what Mike Huckabee says, rather than what the media say about him,’ although the column came out on December 26th, so Santa was unlikely to help. My Christmas wish also involves Mick Huckabee, although mine also involves running shoes, a hungry velociraptor, and fifteen seconds’ head start. Coluter’s column is very poorly written ’” it reads like a MySpace blog. For some reason this qualifies her to write books with names like ‘If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans’. This is a very childish way of looking at complex issues, but it’s one worth keeping in mind as we’ll come back to it later.

Coulter is annoyed at Huckabee for supporting the Supreme Court’s decision that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional. The case was one where police stormed into a house after receiving a (made up) report of a “weapons disturbance” inside, found two men having sex in the bedroom, and arrested them for sodomy. The ruling was that the Fourteenth Amendment says that people’s privacy may not be invaded without due process and most bans on certain consensual sex acts did exactly that. (The Declaration of Independence says “that [all men] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Setting aside the dodgy religious implications, it’s hard to imagine how banning a sizeable fraction of the population from having sex can be justified without repealing that document and thereby submitting to British rule.) We’re going to see a lot of the Fourteenth Amendment today.

Another issue on 2decide’s table is the Kyoto Protocol. Anybody who opposes such a thing places the US economy above the long-term survival of mankind. So let’s see who’s fucking stupid enough to oppose the future of the species. Turns out, it’s Hunter, McCain (best known for singing “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Anne and then laughing), Paul, Romney, Tancredo and Cox. Alas, I can’t do an aside about Cox because he has yet to express an opinion about anything, beyond vague statements that for the most part nobody could disagree with. (Last time I checked that site it was a 500-error, which is even harder to argue with.) Even 2decide’s table has nothing much on him. Instead, therefore, I shall briefly discuss Hunter.

Duncan Hunter’s website also has a list of issues and a synopsis of his position on them. Duncan Hunter is fucking stupid. Let’s have a look at this paragraph from the page I just linked:

Right to Life Amendment

I would amend the U.S. Constitution and provide blanket protection to all unborn children from the moment of conception by prohibiting any state or federal law that denies the personhood of the unborn. Likewise, I have also introduced the Right to Life Act, which would legally define ‘personhood’ as the moment of conception and, therefore, guarantee all constitutional rights and protections, including life, to the unborn without utilizing a constitutional amendment.

It shows impressive dedication to the cause that he would protect these rights both with and without an amendment to the constitution, although I don’t think he’s thought either through properly. Under his system, a single fertilised egg cell would be a person with the full gamut of constitutional rights. This would presumably include the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees all persons “the equal protection of the laws”. This is a problem because roughly half of all such fertilised eggs fail to survive to term, with or without constitutional protection. It seems to me that putting a Person in a situation where they have a 50% chance of death is criminal negligence at best, and therefore for every child born there’s a perfectly lovely couple who would have to be arrested for the manslaughter of some other child (although they wouldn’t call it that over there). Duncan Hunter has two sons, so it seems likely that he and his wife would be guilty of allowing at least one child to die inside his wife’s harsh, harsh uterus. Probably two. A double-murderer doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you’d want running your country (unless you’re Ann Coulter). In any case, and I say this as someone with no legal expertise beyond having seen every episode of Murder One (featuring everyone’s second-favourite bald lawyer called Ted), you can’t actually alter the meaning of words in a legally binding document retrospectively. I don’t think it works that way. That would be ridiculous.

The whole “Are Embryos People” question is summarised in two issues on the table: stem cells and “Roe V Wade”, a Supreme Court decision where the Fourteenth Amendment was used to strike down laws protecting foetuses before they become “viable” (i.e., before they can survive outside the mother: a tricky thing to define as medical technology allows this earlier and earlier, but an earnest attempt to say ‘before they’re people’ in a way that can be legally determined). Personally, I think that anything without a passably developed brain can’t feel anything or think anything and has no rights, and protecting things that have the potential to become people leads to stupid things like anti-contraception movements and bans on stem-cell research, which both cause large amounts of otherwise preventable pain, death and misery. The following candidates disagree: Cox, Huckabee, Hunter, McCain, Paul, Romney, Tancredo and “Fred”.

Another issue on the list that isn’t so black and white as torture or gay rights is Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality refers to the idea that ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to take money from websites in return for serving that website faster than the rest of the web. It’s a very American idea: they do so love to imagine that capitalism will solve all the world’s problems if we just leave it alone long enough. And ISPs obviously support this idea, because they like paid getting money for things they’re doing anyway. They say that with a neutral network, they run up large expenses delivering traffic for busy websites, but then, delivering that traffic is what their customers pay them to do, and they run at a profit, so it’s hard to imagine that we should pity them much, especially since it costs them the same amount to do 100 requests to a buys site as 1 request to 100 small ones. On the other hand, a neutral net is a very good thing for small businesses and free speech. Net Neutrality isn’t a fundamental right like sodomy or still having some polar ice in two hundred years, but it’s a force for good which I would hate to see destroyed. It is also the source of this rather insane opinion from Ted Stevens:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff’”

Apparently Ted Stevens’ staff work in a Mitchell and Webb sketch.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. ... The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time. They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Much like Hunter’s stance on abortion, this is a position that can only be held by someone who either doesn’t understand the relevant science or technology, or is just plain fucking stupid. The following candidates also oppose Net Neutrality, although perhaps for less preposterous reasons: Giuliani, Hunter, McCain, Paul and Tancredo.

Every single politician I’ve mentioned in this entry so far have two things in common. First, they are, with the possible exception of “Fred” who appears to have no position on anything much, all fucking stupid enough to get at least one major black-and-white issue dead wrong. Second, they are all Republicans. In fact, they are, between them, all of the Republican candidates for the Presidency.

So we see that America runs a strange system of ‘democracy’ where two parties, the Democrats and the Fucking Stupid Party (remember Coulter’s book title), each draw up a list of candidates, then they’re whittled down to one Democrat and one Fucking Stupid Person, who must then face off in an election. Notable Democrats include both Clintons, JFK and The West Wing character Jed Bartlet. Notable Republicans include both Bushes, Nixon and Bedtime for Bonzo star Ronald Reagan. Republicans describe themselves as “conservative”, a word which appears to mean “Christian to the point where we’ll damn wall push it onto everyone, determined that nothing is immoral if it might stop a terrorist, and gullible*”. They describe Democrats as “liberal” as if this is a bad thing. Republicans’ rampant religiosity causes other problems, too. Here is a panel of Republicans admitting to not believing in evolution, including Huckabee (who talks about it further here) and Tancredo. The current president, also a Republican, also fails to understand the difference between science and idiocy. The Republican Party essentially take their positions based not on evidence or reason, but on xenophobia and the Bible. In my opinion, that doesn’t count as “thinking”.

Essentially, if the American education system worked at all, the election would be a hollow sham, a mere formality required by law to get the President into office, while the real decision would have been made when the Democrats made their nomination. The Republican nomination race would be an amusing diversion.

The truly terrifying part of all of this is that the Fucking Stupid Party routinely win elections. There’s a chance, a small chance but a chance, the that next president could be Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee.

…It’s easiest just not to think about it.

*Conservapedia currently lists on the front page “a rottweiler tragically killed an infant in England. [3] Had that been a gun, there would be liberal demands for more gun control. Yet there are no liberal calls for “rottweiler control”!”. This is wholly false: there were many calls for “rottweiler control” and we already had a Dangerous Dogs Act. It should be noted that while many articles on Conservapedia are placed there by Fucking Stupid People, others are written by sane people who have assumed the site is an elaborate parody, which shockingly it isn’t. The site’s moderators seem unable to tell the difference. To be fair to them, many people who call themselves “conservatives” hate the site too. I think it’s more the case that all crazy people are conservatives than all conservatives are crazy. But all the ones running for president are.