The Unofficial But Kind of Official US Pawliticks Thread

[Jack Sawyer]

Everybody and their mom seems to agree with Gary Johnson's positions on pretty much everything yet I never hear anyone talkin about him. Why is he such an open secret, and why was I led to believe that the race was just between Obama and Romney?

[wufwugy]

Everybody and their mom seems to agree with Gary Johnson's positions on pretty much everything yet I never hear anyone talkin about him. Why is he such an open secret, and why was I led to believe that the race was just between Obama and Romney?

Because he tries to play for the Republicans and Libertarians. The former doesn't want him because he's not a neocon warmongerer propagandist, the latter doesn't help him because it's not a major party and doesn't have an organized enough base (and never will)

The Democrats would accept him and his ideas if he was also able to mold some of them to more realistic terms. Libertarians are still stuck in the mold of believing ideals = reality. So they have zero tolerance policies on things like taxes without caring for the details

Gary has some fantastic ideas, namely about the drug war, but other ideas that need to be reworked, namely his flat tax proposal. His tax proposal may be better than what the neocons propose, but libertarians have yet to realize that what they really want out of a 'flat tax' is a flat burden, not a flat rate. A flat rate is actually a regressive tax (and a huge one at that). They confuse themselves by equivocating rate with burden in their rhetoric. They need to honestly reexamine their ideas then realize that the party they agree with on just about anything (in real world terms) is the Democrats. They also need to realize that there is a deep aristocratic and socially destructive streak in their party and ideology. It's not a coincidence that David Koch was once the Libertarian Party's VP candidate