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Oh, yes, even domestically. This is so ironic: Rupublicans defending high govenment spending, more government intervention in people's lives, changing the Consitution in an effort to circumvent state law and an increase in executive power.

I can see why Grey supports all of these programs. Are we seeing the return of Hamilton's "high Federalism" to our government? Jefferson and the real "Republicans" - those of 1800 - (today's Democrats) were for less government spending, an increase in power of the legislature, greater states' rights and less goverment intervention in people's lives. America may be returning to the fundamental arguments of its roots.

 

I hope so!

Though seriously:

Given that Kerry is defending yet higher spending and also defends a powerful presidency (since he'll need it against a Republican legislature), I'll assume the focus is on the two middle points -- and probably referring to the two Republican bugbears of constitutionally undoing abortion and homosexual marriage.

Several commentators have described the race as a contest between an activist conservative and a reactionary liberal. But even that's too simplistic. Take federal funding of abortion, which Kerry more-or-less supported in the second debate when he said that the gov't should support the constitutional rights of the poor -- implying, given the original question and the flow of his answer, that the gov't has a duty to pay for the poor to have abortions. And he insisted in the third debate that he would have a litmus test to make sure new Supreme Court judges would uphold Roe vs. Wade.

So conservatives are "activists" in the sense that they want to reverse the decision and go back to the way things were before free abortion was mandated on the states; and liberals are the "reactionaries" that want to preserve this relatively new interpretation of read-between-the-lines constitutional rights. Similarly with homosexual marriage -- the conservatives are "activists" trying to maintain millennia of marriage history while the liberals are "reactionaries" preserving the Court's right to rewrite the Constitution and human institutions at will.

So which side is being more intrusive into people's lives? Those that want to force people to preserve life or those that want to force others to permit life be taken? Those that want to force people to keep marriage the way it's always been, or those that want to force people to accept a watered-down redefinition? I think both sides are being intrusive, because that's the nature of gov't -- it has a responsibility to take sides, and even refusing to take a side supports one position over the other. They're just supporting different kinds of intervention and constitutional rewrites -- 'cept the rightists want to straightforwardly add new amendments while the leftists just want the power to reinterpret the past according to the imagined future without bothering with formal changes.

But this is WAAAAY off topic. It's almost midnight and I'm rambling. And it deviates from my main point: that I really wish Bush could speak French!

 

Wishful thinking, Grey. That still remains to be decided. And even if that is the case in 2004, by 2006 Dems may have the advantage in at least the Senate. Let's also consider that Senator Byrd had to get out his old, tattered copy of the Contitution, which he carries with him, and wave it at the Republican Bushies on the Senate floor in an effort to remind them that we still had one. He commented on "Meet the Press" that Shrub had less respect for the congress than Nixon did.

While I did mean to focus on those two issues - abortion and gay marriage - and we will not agree on them, I was also thinking of the Unpatriotic Act. Which books are YOU reading? More government intervention is on the way, Bush promised, with version two of the Unpatriotic Act, soon to be coming your way. Due process? What is that anyway...? IMO, it's similar to Hamilton's beloved Sedition Act, but mostly in its disregard for the Bill of Rights and its sharpening of the executive "fangs."