Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
Government debt is a vulnerability of the modern State as well. Government fiscal crises helped provoke both the American and French Revolution in the past, for just two prominent examples, and the looming fiscal burden of social insurance in all the western democracies has today become apparent to nearly all.
Current holdings of government debt are too widely disbursed, however, to define a class or even net tax beneficiaries. Of course, strictly speaking, to the extent that you own Treasury securities, your returns come from taxation. But a large segment of the U.S. population does so indirectly through such modern financial innovations as money market mutual funds, and then only as part of much larger portfolio that includes many other assets, some of which also benefit from taxation yet many of which are hurt by it.
Consider some numbers: The gross debt of the U.S. Treasury in mid-2003 stood at over $6.5 trillion. But about $3 trillion of that was held by the social security and medicare trust funds, thus representing one government program (temporarily) running a surplus that was transferred into other government programs. The Federal Reserve held about $650 billion and foreign investors and central banks more than one-third of the remainder. That left about $2 trillion spread among depository institutions, mutual funds, insurance companies, state and local governments, pension funds, trust funds, corporate and noncorporate businesses, and private investors.
Nor have the returns on government debt been all that exorbitant. Indeed, prior to the reduction of inflation in the 1980s, holders of long-term Treasuries earned negative real rates of return, turning them into net losers with respect to those holdings. For the U.S. government, this"revenue" from the inflationary erosion of the real value of the debt far exceeded by a large margin the direct seigniorage from printing money. The fact that individual and institutional holders of government debt finally caught on, putting an inflationary premium on government debt, is one of the main ways financial markets disciplined the U.S. government into reducing inflation.
None of this belies the tremendous importance of debt as a mechanism through which the State plunders the economy. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads:"Invest in Your Own Destruction, Buy Government Bonds." The one consistent libertarian position with respect to these securities that can be financed only with future taxes, in my opinion, is immediate and total repudiation (just as the abolitionists advocated immediate and uncompensated emancipation of all slaves).
David T. Beito
I couldn't resist noting that today is the birthday of Warren G. Harding, the man who released Woodrow Wilson's political prisoners, cut taxes and spending, and signed one of the most significant arms limitation agreements in world history.
Bush and Kerry can't hold a candle to that platform.
Gene Healy
Roderick T. Long
FERRIS: Are you going to be as impractical as that?While I hear a lot about"undecided voters" on the news, I don't personally know anybody who is undecided between Bush and Kerry. I do, however, know quite a few people who are undecided between Kerry and Badnarik. I certainly can't blame anybody who ends up choosing Kerry as a means to unseating the most dangerous president of my lifetime. But as the last grains of pre-electoral sand are running out, I think it's worth explaining once more why I'm voting for Badnarik rather than Kerry.
REARDEN: The evaluation of an action as"practical," Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
FERRIS: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else?
REARDEN: That is what I am doing right now.
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Two recent posts (see here and here) from Robert Bidinotto offer a convenient foil. Bidinotto argues that those who support Michael Badnarik (or, as Bidinotto mistakenly calls him,"John" Badnarik) are forgetting that"the 'perfect' is the enemy of the 'good'." (Whenever anybody invokes that phrase, some compromise of principle always seems to be in the offing.)
Bidonotto aims to be making a case for Bush over Badnarik, rather than for Kerry over Badnarik. That’s because Bidinotto assumes, first, that a Bush victory would promote libertarian values better than would a Kerry victory, and second, that a vote for Badnarik"is a de facto vote for Kerry." I think the first assumption is clearly false; if we look at results rather than rhetoric, Bush comes out as objectively far more anti-liberty than Kerry. I'm not sure the second is true either; certainly I would vote for Kerry over Bush if I had to choose between the two, and this is likewise true of most of the Badnarik supporters I know -- so it's not obvious that most Badnarik votes would otherwise have gone to Bush. (It's true, though, that Badnarik, bless him, is specifically targeting Republican voters in an attempt to hurt Bush.)
But Bidinotto's argument is worth addressing apart from these two assumptions. For if his argument, with those assumptions, makes a case for supporting Bush over Badnarik, then the same argument, without those assumptions, makes a case for supporting Kerry over Badnarik. Thus Bidinotto's argument counts, objectively, as an argument on behalf of Kerry; those of us who plan to vote Libertarian tomorrow thus need a reply to Bidinotto's argument in order to justify voting for Badnarik rather than Kerry.
Bidinotto's argument, briefly, is this: When faced with a choice between voting for a lesser evil (whether you think that's Bush or Kerry) who can win, or endangering that candidate's chances by voting for a principled libertarian (which describes Badnarik, whatever his personal eccentricities) who cannot win, Bidinotto thinks that the principled choice is to vote for the lesser evil, whereas to risk hurting the lesser-evil candidate by supporting the one who can't win is moral fanaticism. For Bidinotto,"the difference between a man of principle and a fanatic .... comes down to whether you primarily view moral principles as means to your ends (values), or whether you primarily view moral principles as ends in themselves." Badnarik supporters, he suggests, are moral fanatics who" cast purely symbolic votes for Principle," thereby expressing their"moral commitment to the platonic Ideal" -- but insofar as this choice helps to get the worse of the two viable candidates elected, it counts as"an objective sell-out of our lives, our security and all we hold dear, for the sake of a subjective feeling of smug self-righteousness." Those who hold principles, not as ends in themselves, but as means to achieving values in real life as far as possible, will vote for the least bad viable candidate.
This argument doesn't sway me, for two reasons. First, as an Aristotelean I cannot accept Bidinotto's dichotomy between principles as means and principles as ends. And I'm surprised that Bidinotto accepts it; for he himself has previously argued (see his article Survive or Flourish? A Reconciliation) that principles adopted as means to maintaining our lives become constitutive parts of the kind of life we aim to maintain. Hence on Bidinotto's own neo-Aristotelean view, the principled person cannot regard her principles merely as strategies for advancing some independently specifiable mode of life, but must regard adherence to those principles as part of the mode of life to be advanced. (The quotation from Rand at the top of this post arguably expresses the same idea; Bidinotto is in effect condemning Badnarik supporters as impractical, and the proper reply is Rearden's: that depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.)
Second, even if one were to adopt a purely strategic attitude toward one's principles, Bidinotto's conclusion still does not follow. The strategic point of acting on principle is to think long-range, rather than sacrificing significant longterm gain for the sake of some slight but immediate advantage. As I wrote in a piece titled Thinking Beyond the Next Election: A Strategy for Victory:
In playing chess, a sure way to lose is to spend your first few moves capturing as many of the opponent's pieces as possible. It’s much more important to let those juicy-looking pieces go than to allow them to distract you from your main mission of building a strong presence at the center of the board.Bidinotto considers this sort of argument, but only to dismiss it by asking:"Does anyone believe that Ross Perot had any enduring impact on the major parties, or on ensuing debates about economic policy? And will anyone be talking about Ralph Nader's views two weeks from now?"
I think the same lesson applies in politics. In crafting our strategy we need to plan several elections ahead, not just one. ... If we plan ahead only as far as the next election, then it's absolutely true that a vote for a candidate who loses is an ineffective vote.
But if we think ahead four years, or eight years, or twelve years, then a vote can do more than just elect a candidate. A vote can help to build a vote total which, even if it is a losing vote total, can, if it's big enough, draw more attention and support to the losing candidate and his party or cause.
This has two beneficial effects: First, it increases the good guys' chance of winning in the future. Second, it forces the major candidates to move in our direction in order to avoid precisely that.
Well, who cares what anybody is talking about two weeks from now? That’s short-term thinking again. What matters is what gets talked about four years from now; 2000 could be dismissed as a fluke, but if Nader makes the Democrats lose two presidential races in a row, I find it hard to believe that they won't scramble their hardest to win back Nader voters in 2008. Indeed, fear of Nader may already have influenced the Democratic nomination process by making more conservative candidates like Lieberman, Gephardt, and Clarke too risky. (As for Perot, he sacrificed much of the influence he could have had through his own erratic behaviour, and through not running a second time.)
There is historical precedent for the strategy I favour. As David Friedman points out in his book The Machinery of Freedom:
I believe the answer is that we should learn from our enemies; we should imitate the strategy of the Socialist party of 60 years ago. Its presidential vote never reached a million, but it may have been the most successful political party in American history. It never gained control of anything larger than the city of Milwaukee but it succeeded in enacting into law virtually every economic proposal in its 1928 platform -- a list of radical proposals ranging from minimum wages to social security.And it did this precisely by forcing the Democrats to move leftward in order to keep voters away from the Socialists. No doubt there were, in every election year, left-wingers who told the Socialists"This election is too important! You must support the Democratic candidate to prevent the even-less-socialistic Republican from getting in." If the Socialists had listened, their influence would have been zero; there would have been nowhere for socialistically inclined voters to go, and so the Democratic Party would have gone on taking such voters' support for granted and never thrown them so much as a bone.
My argument is not intended as a criticism of those who think, not unreasonably, that the Prince President is so egregiously horrific that this election really is a case where preventing his re-election immediately is worth the setback to any longterm LP strategy (especially if they have doubts about the LP's longterm viability anyway). These are trade-offs that each individual must judge for herself. (I would note, however, that those who do not live in a swing state still have no good reason to vote for a major-party candidate.) It's also not intended as a criticism of those who are so disgusted with the electoral process that they prefer not to vote at all. While I don't buy the argument that voting is inherently immoral (see my counter-argument here), nor the argument that voting is pointless unless a single vote is likely to determine the outcome (I believe in an imperfect duty to contribute to public goods, so the fact that something would be good if lots of people did it is a reason, albeit a defeasible one, to do it), there is nothing inherently obligatory about voting (since the duty to contribute to public goods is imperfect, we can pick and choose which public goods we contribute to -- which is also why I'm not a vegetarian, but that's another story) and the whole process is pretty distasteful. My argument aims merely to explain my reasons for supporting Badnarik, and to show that Bidinotto's arguments against those reasons do not succeed. (And Bidinotto should be relieved that I'm not persuaded by his arguments, since if I were, I would be voting for Kerry.)
One final topic: Bidinotto also condemns the Libertarian Party for promoting"a philosophical package-deal that links free-market economics with absolutely [loathsome], Leftist positions on other vital issues, such as criminal justice and foreign policy -- positions which the L. P. now insists are integral aspects of 'libertarianism.'" I won't take the time now to defend those particular positions (I've defended the anti-punishment position here and here, and the military non-interventionist position passim), but I do want to make two points.
First, there is nothing specifically"Leftist" (in Bidinotto’s sense) about these positions, which were being defended by libertarians and classical liberals long before being borrowed (and mangled) by statist socialists. William Graham Sumner, for example, analysed the connection between imperialism and plutocracy in such articles as"War" and"The Conquest of the United States by Spain"; does Bidinotto think Sumner was a"Leftist"? (For that matter, as Chris Sciabarra reminds us, Ayn Rand adopted an anti-interventionist position with regard to Korea, Vietnam, and both World Wars. Was she a"Leftist"?)
Second, the LP does not enforce any"party line" with regard to these positions. They may be in the LP Platform (actually the anti-punishment position isn't, strictly speaking), but Libertarian candidates have never been, and are not now, bound by the Platform; Badnarik's own running mate, for example, is (regrettably) a pro-interventionist and a supporter of the"war on terror."
Keith Halderman
However, that is not my only reason for voting Libertarian. I am also going to do it because I will enjoy it so much. My distaste for both Bush and Kerry is quite intense. Bush is the worst president of my lifetime. However, when you take the time to really look at the Senator’s record, along with the people he has surrounded himself with, it becomes apparent that there is great potential for truly evil policies during a Kerry administration. To my mind, it is a crap shoot as to which one would do the most harm, which one would take us furthest in the direction of a totalitarian society.
Therefore, I wish to do something to both of them and the worst thing you can do to a politician is to vote for someone else. Besides, what better way to say to those two jerks; “Hey I am not buying into your lies and I know that neither one of cares one bit about me or anything else other your own grasps for power.” Even though, with the help a totally irresponsible media, they managed to fool most of the people in this country into thinking there were only two bad choices, I will know that they did not get me and that will feel good.
There is also another reason to vote for Badnarik and that is because he, his campaign, and the party have earned it. They managed to get on the ballot in 49 states, not an easy feat. They ran an articulate campaign which found its way into new places . If you do not believe me check out these quotes from Badnarik on comedian Doug Stanhope’s website about half way down the homepage. They did a number of things that should have gotten major attention from the media, including getting the nomination in the first place. It is not their fault that the term “news” is obsolete. Does anyone believe that the coverage on Monday, which will almost totally ignore the largely unknown Badnarik, is going to tell us anything new about Bush and Kerry? We will already have heard it ad nauseum. So, if you vote Badnarik you won’t just be hurting Bush and Kerry you will be sticking it to Dan Rather and Bill O’Reilly too. That is also a pleasant thought.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
I have read with great interest the case for Libertarian candidate Badnarik by both Roderick Long (thanks for the plug, too!) and Keith Halderman, and the case for John Kerry by Arthur Silber, and I respect all these perspectives, especially because we are all similarly critical of the current political trends.
For the first time in my life, however, I'm profoundly unenthused and/or fully disgusted by the choices. I have voted for major party candidates in previous elections, and am not opposed to it in principle. And I have also voted for the Libertarian Party candidates, at times, just to register my protest, but the Two-Party system is so entrenched that the prospect of even a symbolic third-party challenge is virtually nil. In any event, after reading Bill Bradford's take on the LP convention and Badnarik, I just get the shivers seeing so many libertarians acting like politicians.
I must confess that my mind shifts among various levels of perversity: A part of me feels that George Bush deserves to be re-elected, only because his administration, more than any other current crop of politicians, ought to stick around and be held fully accountable for the disastrous policies they've instituted, though clearly we will all be paying the price for that. Another part of me feels that if Bush wins (as I predicted back in May 2004), it better be by a slim margin, and not anything approaching a"mandate." Lord help us.
On the other hand, if Kerry wins, I am not at all hopeful. U.S. policies in Iraq have now been institutionalized. Kerry gives no indication that he will change anything fundamentally, except, perhaps, his views, depending on which way the political wind blows. Granted, under these circumstances, it might be better to have somebody who is willing to change in the face of changing circumstances. But Kerry may be in the process of changing into a Neocon Newbie; in the end, he might also be positively Nixonian in his approach to the war, as I have argued.
Still, if current trends continue, Bush might very well lose this race. I've joked about pundits who fall back on soothsaying to predict the winner, but with the Red Sox winning for the first time in 86 years, and with the Redskins losing their last home game before the Election (a Redskins win/loss correlates with an incumbent's win/loss in every Presidential election since 1936), soothsaying is about as accurate at predicting a winner as is informed analysis.
Here in New York, of course, a Blue State by Definition that Kerry will Carry, my vote won't count one way or the other. I will go into the voting booth, vote defensively on a few local races and on various bond issues, and proudly walk out without having cast a single vote for President. As the old adage goes: It only encourages them.
David T. Beito
Roderick Long and Keith Halderman have summarized some of the reasons for voting Libertarian but let me give the one I prefer to emphasize. In my view, it is important to keep the Libertarian party alive to fight again in four years. In a small way, my vote can help do this. Perhaps next time, the LP will try to recruit a better known candidate such as Penn Jillette (now that would have been wonderful!), Drew Carey, or Kurt Russell. Unfortunately, it didn't do this so I will cast my vote for the keeping alive the remnant. The term remnant was first used in a similar context by the great libertarian Albert Jay Nock.
Somehow it is appropriate that today is the birthday of William Graham Sumner (mentioned below by Roderick). He too faced an impossible election choice in 1900 between two candidates he abhored. As in 2004, the question of imperialism was a central issue in the campaign. In the end, Sumner voted for an uncommitted slate of electors who represented the nearly defunct classical liberal National Party rather than voting for McKinley or Bryan.
Charles W. Nuckolls
MacArthur, whatever his faults, articulated a clear policy and found the Acheson model of"limited war" odious. No politician since MacArthur -- not even Reagan -- was so clear, at least not until Bush. The problem is that Bush won't say so. He pretends, or used to, that the war in Iraq was really about weapons or terrorism or whatever. What it's actually about is the battle for the Middle East, that is, the strategic reallignment of forces throughout the region.
If the general were still alive, he'd no doubt fire off a letter to the press and irritate the heck out of everyone. He was direct. And it got him into trouble. I am not sure I agree with SCAP about Korea, but I do give him credit for articulating a clear vision. My hunch is that Bush has a similiar vision. It's just that he won't tell anyone about it.
tex mac
A military assault is the wrong way to end the insurgency in Fallujah, and a bloodbath is exactly what Saddam Hussein followers and foreign fighters want, Iraq’s Interim President Ghazi al-Yawer said.Now, as the razing of Fallujah awaits whatever mysterious combination of events and opinions that will begin it, I'll quote extensively from this very important post by Rahul Mahajan:
“I absolutely disagree with those who believe a military attack is necessary,” al-Yawer said in a newspaper interview during a visit to Kuwait.
“The way the coalition is managing the crisis is wrong. It is as if someone shot his horse in the head to kill a fly that landed on it. The fly flies away and the horse dies.”
A recent study in the Lancet concluded that, as of September, at least 100,000 Iraqis had been liberated from life as a consequence of the American liberation. I was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint a word picture for you of what such an assault means.
Fallujah is dry and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an agricultural area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been known for years as a particularly devout city; people call it the City of a Thousand Mosques. In the mid-90’s, when Saddam wanted his name to be added to the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused.
U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; for the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics. The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, from bombing and the threat of more bombing. Noncombatants and families with sick people, the elderly, and children were leaving in droves. After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave – except for what they called “military age males,” men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war; conversely, if you assume that every military age male is an enemy, that’s a pretty good sign that you are in the wrong country, and that, in fact, your war is on the people, not on their oppressors.
The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to treat patients had to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they could carry, and set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the one I stayed at had been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had four beds, and no operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a soft-drink vending machine. Another clinic, I’m told, had been an auto repair shop. This closing of the hospital, which was not an isolated incident, also violates the Geneva Convention.
In Fallujah, you were rarely free of the sound of artillery booming in the background, punctuated by the smaller, higher-pitched note of the mujaheddin’s hand-held mortars. After even a few minutes of it, you have to stop paying attention to it – and yet, of course, you never quite stop. Even today, when I hear the roar of thunder, I’m often transported instantly to April 10 and the dusty streets of Fallujah.
In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were “military-age males.” I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save him.
One thing that snipers were very discriminating about – every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn’t the mujaheddin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded (which, of course, Mr. Bush courageously protected us from) and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by the U.S. military.
The best estimates are that roughly 1000 people were killed directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to ¾ were noncombatants.
But the damage goes far beyond that. You read all the time about the bombing of so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential areas in Fallujah, but the reports don’t tell you what that means. You read about precision strikes, and it’s true that America’s GPS-guided bombs are very accurate – when they’re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85% of the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they hit within 10 meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters; every single bomb shakes the whole neighborhood, breaking windows and smashing crockery. A town under bombardment is a town in constant fear.
You read the reports about X killed and Y wounded. And you should remember those numbers. But you should also remember that those numbers lie – in a war zone, everyone is wounded.
Finally, on this topic. The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to “win,” the U.S. military will have to pull out all the stops and indeed, as John Kerry would say, stop at nothing. Even within horror and terror, there are degrees, and we – and the people of Fallujah – ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time; but our government won’t listen to it; aside from the resistance, all the people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to avert or mitigate the horror will be us, the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that we didn’t meet in April and we didn’t meet in August when Najaf was similarly attacked; will we meet it this time?
Nicholas von Hoffman (Guest Blogger)
During and immediately after an election, such sabotage is met with genuine anger but as time passes and the election recedes the felonies begin to be seen as colorful acts of derring-do. We are ambivalent about theft; it is never approved of but sometimes admired. If baseball is our national pastime, then isn’t it interesting how large a part cheating plays in the game? Not only do they “steal” bases but they “steal” signs, they cork their bats, they conceal strange substances to make the pitched ball do untoward ziggy-zaggies. The amused tolerance and even pride exhibited by baseball fans also shows up in the reactions to cheating in elections – but only after the event has gone into the history books. The alleged stealing of the 1960 Presidential election by Illinois Democrats is spoken about in very different language than it was 40 years ago.
This year the Republicans are accusing the Democrats of fraudulently registering thousands of voters in Ohio and Florida, two must-win states. Registering phoney names and voting phoney names are two different things. It was done in the past, particularly in late 19th century Indiana, then an important swing state, by bringing in what were called “mattress voters.” They got that name because squads of itinerant workers, rummies, hobos and such were imported from out of state just shortly before election day and housed upstairs above the saloons where they slept on floors covered with mattresses. The “mattress vote,” as it was called in that bygone era, required a vast amount of party organization, none of which exists any more, so how, if the Democrats have registered thousands of non-existent persons, are they going to vote them?
In recent times the standard Republican tactic has not been to bring in illegal voters but to try to knock out legal Democratic ones, usually by kicking them off the registration lists or, later, challenging them at the polls, a ploy which holds up lines, makes people wait and forces many, especially those who have to go to work or look after children, to give up the idea of casting a ballot. For such maneuvers the modern Democrats seem to have few answers except bringing in the lawyers, but you can’t win the lawyer game against Republicans. With their money and connections they can outlawyer the D’s two to one. If that doesn’t work, they can fix the judge. If today were like earlier eras, Democratic campaign workers would buy a bunch of disposable, non-traceable cell phones and distribute them to carefully selected partisans who would call in bomb scares and false fire alarms to disrupt the voting in heavily Republican precincts. You stop our vote, we stop yours.
The modern Democrat doesn’t do things like that. He or she is more inclined to find a microphone and complain it is “unfair.” Unfair is the most used word in the Democratic political lexicon, even though it simply irritates most people to hear it. Let us hope that on Tuesday and beyond Democrats will not react to Republican shenanigans by shouting “Unfair!” If Democrats want to protect their votes and their rights, they should hit the streets in very large numbers to demonstrate near the polling places and election commission offices where the Republicans do their mischief. The crowds should chant, shout, scream, generally misbehave and absolutely refuse to go away. Intimidation must be met with counter-intimidation, threat with threat, force with force. One of the things that has happened to the Democrats these past years as they have become the sissy soft party of empathy is that the Republicans no longer fear them. In politics, where there is no fear, there is no respect.
So to the barricades, ladies and gentlemen, and don’t mind your manners.
