I returned from Chicago today and checked the mail. You guessed it- an irritating direct mail piece "from Obama", addressed to me.
I put "from Obama" in quotes, because the letter says, "Barack Obama" on the envelope's return space, and on the letterhead, but the back of the envelope has a return for the Democratic National Committee.
This mailing confirms another thing that irritates me. The conventions of the Ds & Rs are not what they were. They're press conferences. Coronations. Yawn.
The letter reads:
"As Democrats, you and I are united by the great traditions of our party, and bound by its longstanding commitment to social and economic justice for all of our citizens."
This is just as presumptuous and offensive as the McCain letter. I am a well-advertised Libertarian partisan. I just cannot think well of someone so sloppy that they would put their name on a letter as ill-informed as this. If you cannot be trusted to be in charge of an organization that acts on your behalf to get a basic fact or two correct, what can you be trusted with?
Beyond that, my break with the Democratic Party in 1995 occurred in large part because of my profound disagreement on the terms social justice, and economic justice. At the core of it, I do not believe it just to take the earnings of one person and give them to someone who has not earned them. It is a basic injustice, and a perversion of the meaning of the word justice. I simply cannot have anything to do with such bullshit merchants.
I could be a Democrat, if indeed the party was true to its' traditions- its' Jeffersonian traditions. Honor this quote, if you honor Democratic traditions:
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government.
-Thomas Jefferson
Alas. Beyond this mailing, I then noticed Obama's tax plan, via Harvard economist Greg Mankiw's blog. In a nutshell, almost everyone will be paying more in taxes under Obama.
That's not a change I can believe in. So, I'm down on Obama right now, at least until I notice McCain again.
