Nationalism vs Patriotism

I read this article on Nationalism vs Patriotism awhile ago, and it has been rattling around in my brain ever since. Jonah Goldberg argues that the key difference between them is the distinction between simply loving our country (tribalism) vs loving the values and ideals that it represents:

"This is at the same time both entirely right and fundamentally misleading. It leaves out what the flag represents. It glides over the fact that the national anthem sanctifies the “land of the free.” Our shrines are to patriots who upheld very specific American ideals. Our statues of soldiers commemorate heroes who died for something very different from what other warriors have fought and died for millennia. Every one of them — immigrants included — took an oath to defend not just some soil but our Constitution and by extension the ideals of the Founding. Walk around any European hamlet or capital and you will find statues of men who fell in battle to protect their tribe from another tribe. That doesn’t necessarily diminish the nobility of their deaths or the glory of their valor, but it is quite simply a very different thing they were fighting for."

My husband and I were having a discussion over lunch about hypocrisy within the church, and I think that it comes down to a similar distinction-- It is dangerous to love being part of a church community (tribalism again) more than you love the values that The Church is supposed to advance in this world.

I think that this quote from the article can be applied in either case*:

"Left-wingers who fancy themselves ironically detached from patriotism and particularism and as avatars of a more sophisticated cosmopolitanism no doubt roll their eyes at such things, considering it so much schmaltz. Some might even snark that such patriotic piety is hypocritical given this or that crime — real or alleged — that America has committed. But hypocrisy is a charge every civilization opens itself to when it aims for an ideal higher and better than loyalty to tribe."

*To be clear, I do NOT believe that American ideals and Church values are identical. I just try to live within the overlap of their Venn diagram.

The United States and the Church are both made up of flawed individuals, and so we inevitably fail to live up to "American exceptionalism" or "being a good Christian." And I think it's completely OK to be critical of those failings, as long as we don't become so jaded that we succumb to the notion that those values and ideals matter less than our tribal loyalty.



Jonah Goldberg wrote a follow-up to his original article, where he rebuts some of the criticism that he received from one of his colleagues:

When Rich says, “Jonah seems to imply that other countries can’t have true patriotism because they don’t have the Declaration and our founding ideals . . . ” you should translate that as, “Rich seems to be inferring.” I have no problem conceding that patriotism exists in other countries. Americans didn’t invent the word, after all.

Let’s stipulate that patriotism means “love of country.” People all over the world love their countries. Even people who live under oppressive dictators and hate their governments will say that they love their country. Indeed, many of the greatest patriots swim against the nationalist tides in their homelands.

Let me try it a different way. I have always believed that American conservatism is inseparable from American patriotism. I said “inseparable from” not “identical to.”

Since everyone’s quoting Samuel Huntington these days, I’ll do it too. Huntington observed that conservatism is a “positional ideology.” By that he meant that there are many conservatisms because conservatives in different societies seek to conserve different things. A conservative in France in, say, 1788 seeks to conserve that rich bouillabaisse of altar and throne. A conservative in England seeks to conserve the monarchy, among other things.

...This is why I share Yuval Levin’s contention that, at its core, conservatism is gratitude.

"To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it." --Yuval Levin

A patriot in England, never mind Russia or Botswana, loves different things than a patriot in the United States. It’s something of a paradox: All patriotisms are equal in that they are all subjective, but not all patriotisms are equal when measured against certain ideals.

And that makes all the difference in the world. Lowry asserts that I think other countries can’t have patriotism because they don’t love the Founding and our principles of liberty. Not at all; rather, I think American patriotism is different because America — the object of our love — is different. As Hayek noted, America is the one place where you can be a lover of liberty and a conservative because in America conservatives seek to defend the liberal principles of the Founding.

In America there is nationalist sentiment, to be sure, but the “doctrines” of nationalism find no easy purchase here. Werner Sombart’s famous question, “Why is there no socialism in America?” has elicited many answers, but the most agreed-upon one is that America has no feudal past. America represented a sharp break with the ancient notion that polities — nations, empires, city-states, tribes, etc. — were no different than families with an unimpeachable pater familias at the helm. We celebrated and enshrined very different notions in our national DNA, which is why Alexis de Tocqueville could observe that the American was the Englishman left alone. What makes America exceptional, what makes American patriotism and conservatism different, is that the object of our love and gratitude is different. If Rich wants to define nationalism as love of country and nothing more, that’s his right. But he would be wrong.

So when Rich tries to insinuate that I don’t think William of Orange was a patriot, he’s wrong. But his patriotism was fundamentally, philosophically, and morally different than American patriotism. And, by the way, it most certainly was tribal, if one is allowed some leeway when using the term.

He also refers to American exceptionalism in another article, criticizing Trump's recent comments about the US being no different than Russia:

It’s the president’s job to help shape public rhetoric, because how we talk about our ideals determines whether we sustain or erode them. Or, as the late literary critic Wayne Booth put it, rhetoric is “the art of probing what men believe they ought to believe.” To listen to Trump, Americans should believe a number of dismaying things: our public institutions cannot be trusted; he alone can fix our problems; absent him, our best days are behind us; and, most worrisome, America’s ideals have been part of the problem, not the solution.

I don’t care if Trump thinks we’ve fallen short of ideals – of course we have, that’s why we call them ideals. What bothers me is that he often sounds like he has contempt for those ideals in the first place.

John McCain also rebuked Trump (indirectly) in his speech to the Munich Security Conference:

Make no mistake, my friends: These are dangerous times, but you should not count America out, and we should not count each other out. We must be prudent, but we cannot wring our hands and wallow in self-doubt. We must appreciate the limits of our power, but we cannot allow ourselves to question the rightness and goodness of the West. We must understand and learn from our mistakes, but we cannot be paralyzed by fear. We cannot give up on ourselves and on each other. That is the definition of decadence. And that is how world orders really do decline and fall.

This is exactly what our adversaries want. This is their goal. They have no meaningful allies, so they seek to sow dissent among us and divide us from each other. They know that their power and influence are inferior to ours, so they seek to subvert us, and erode our resolve to resist, and terrorize us into passivity. They know they have little to offer the world beyond selfishness and fear, so they seek to undermine our confidence in ourselves and our belief in our own values.

We must take our own side in this fight. We must be vigilant. We must persevere. And through it all, we must never, never cease to believe in the moral superiority of our own values—that we stand for truth against falsehood, freedom against tyranny, right against injustice, hope against despair … and that even though we will inevitably take losses and suffer setbacks, through it all, so long as people of goodwill and courage refuse to lose faith in the West, it will endure.

Big, Bad Bailouts Revisited

Another article on the bailout debate:

It is all a reminder that the biggest threat to a healthy economy is not the socialists of campaign lore. It’s C.E.O.’s. It’s politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state.

If ever the market has rendered a just verdict, it is the one rendered on G.M. and Chrysler. These companies are not innocent victims of this crisis. To read the expert literature on these companies is to read a long litany of miscalculation. Some experts mention the management blunders, some the union contracts and the legacy costs, some the years of poor car design and some the entrenched corporate cultures.

There seems to be no one who believes the companies are viable without radical change. A federal cash infusion will not infuse wisdom into management. It will not reduce labor costs. It will not attract talented new employees. As Megan McArdle of The Atlantic wittily put it, “Working for the Big Three magically combines vast corporate bureaucracy and job insecurity in one completely unattractive package.”

Generation Y is excited about this election because their votes helped put Obama into the Oval Office. On one hand, this is a great thing, because now they're no longer feeling disenfranchised by the election process. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that what they're about to experience is disillusionment.

In my opinion, it doesn't really matter who's elected as President, and it doesn't really matter who's elected to Congress. At this point, they're all equally bad. The only thing that Republicans and Democrats work together on is spending money that this country doesn't have, and Obama isn't going to be able to turn things around overnight, even assuming that he wants to. Maybe that sounds horribly jaded, but let me explain where I'm going with this.

As I've said before, "People do what you pay them to do." And our politicians aren't getting paid to represent the best interests of our country. (Well, they are, but not really.) Instead, their re-election campaigns are financed by lobbyists for special interest groups like the automotive industry, the pharmaceutical industry, tobacco companies, and teachers unions.

Now I do think that lobbyists have the potential to serve a valuable purpose. They can do research, and gather facts, and present logical arguments for new legislature. I don't have a problem with companies paying lobbyists to present their case to Congress. But I strongly object to the fact that lobbyists spend millions and millions of dollars to buy the votes of Senators and Representatives. How can politicians possibly put the best interests of America over the special interests of industries when their careers are being funded by lobbyists?

So until we have real campaign finance reform, all we're going to get is more of the same-- Our government will continue to fork over money to the industries that provide the biggest kick-backs.

Confessions of an Undecided Voter

I was one of the Undecided Voters. I went into voting booth on Tuesday still unsure about who I was going to vote for, so I skipped the first question and filled out the rest of my ballot. Then I came back to the big decision. I seriously considered voting for the Libertarian Party of Ohio. (But I didn't.)

I still don't know what I would do if someone came up to me today and said, "You are responsible for casting the deciding vote. You alone have the power to decide who becomes the next President of the United States." I'd be in trouble. I really don't know if I would decide for Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin. In fact, if I had the power to do it, I would probably go back to the old method of picking the top candidate from one party as President and picking the top candidate from the other party as Vice President. I'd actually feel pretty good about that, except that I'd have a hard time deciding which of them should be Thing One and Thing Two.

In the end, the matter was decidedly settled by many people who are clearly more decisive than I am. (Despite the fact that Time magazine just published an article about how the Cincinnati area is a Republican County, the vote went to Obama by more than 5 percentage points-- 52% to 47%.)



The point is of this blog posting is that I'm not an Undecided Voter because I haven't given it serious thought. In fact, I'm probably guilty of over-thinking the whole situation.

Here are some of the reasons for my quandary:

• I'm mostly a Republican.
  
  I believe that "Government is the least-efficient way to do just about anything," so obviously I believe in minimizing government programs and reducing taxes. I believe that our healthcare system is broken, but I don't think that socialized medicine is the best fix. I'm generally anti-abortion, although I can also see that sometimes painful decisions have to be made between the lesser of two evils. I wish that the Republican party would focus more on environmental issues and stop pandering to lobbyists for big industries, but overall, I'm much more of a Republican than a Democrat.


• The Republican Primaries
  
  Early in the primaries, I was pulling for McCain. I liked the fact that he was an advocate for immigration reform. I agreed with most of his decisions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


• The Democratic Primaries
  
  I really don't like Hillary Clinton, so I thought that the Democrats made a good choice when they (finally) picked Obama.


• The Presidential Debates
  
  When I watched the debates, I thought that Obama had more poise than McCain, and his statements were more coherent, but when I thought it over later, I agreed with more of John McCain's positions on the issues.


• Sarah Palin
  
  When they introduced her, I had doubts about her qualifications. Two years ago, Sarah Palin was mayor of a township the size of my hometown, which is actually a village, technically. But I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Then I watched the Vice Presidential debate, and I was appalled by her cutsey-ness.
  
  Ultimately, it comes down to this-- As a woman, I am offended by the fact that John McCain picked an under-qualified woman and expected us all to jump for joy over the blatent tokenism.


• The McCain Campaign
  
  I grew increasingly cynical about McCain's campaign strategy, which seemed to consist exclusively of making up pseudo-facts about Obama's voting record. I think McCain has some good ideas, but I'm baffled as to why he never took the time to explain them in a rational manner.


• The Phone Calls
  
  Because we live in a battle-ground state, we have been receiving 4-5 election-related phone calls every day for the past week. I work from home, so I was extremely annoyed by the constant distractions. By Monday, I was ready to scream, "I'M NOT VOTING FOR ANY OF YOU!!!" (But most of the calls were pre-recorded messages, so it wouldn't have done any good.)


• The Dream
  
  I participate in a tutoring program for kids from Cincinnati Public Schools. On Monday night, all of the students were really excited about the election. It's so cool to be able to tell these kids, "You can grow up to be anything you want to be, if you're willing to work to make it happen." Barak Obama is exactly the kind of role model that these kids need to see, and I'm proud to live in a country where part of Martin Luther King's dream has finally come true:
  

  I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

  
  Even if Barak Obama were to accomplish nothing else in his career, that's a truly awesome legacy.

Random Vices

Random thoughts on the Vice Presidential debate tonight:

• Isn't "a team of mavericks" an oxymoron?


• When did candidates start referring to their opponents by their first names during debates? I'm hearing a lot about "Joe believes X," "Barak voted for Y," and "John's plan is Z."


• You know that there has been a major upheaval when a Republican candidate starts talking about big, bad corporations (specifically, Banks and Oil Companies) taking advantage of average people. I really thought that was a Democratic platform...

Facts of the Debate

So I watched the Presidential Debate last night. (Mostly for lack of anything better to do.)

Debates are known for being full of facts. Unfortunately, facts aren't the same as truths. Here are some basic truths:

• All politicians have voted to raise taxes at some point or another.
(Because...)

• All politicians are in the habit of spending more than the amount of revenue coming in.
(Because...)

• The only way to get funding approved for their pet projects is to approve funding for everyone else's pet projects.


• Everyone supports the troops and wants to bring them home as soon as possible. (Definitions of ASAP vary wildly.)


• No one is especially happy with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Iran, or North Korea.

McCain claimed that he would try to eliminate wasteful spending by the government. I'm all in favor of that. Obama claimed that he would continue Bush's tax cuts for households making less than $250,000 per year. I'm all in favor of that too.

Like Obama, I think we should make changes so that more people have access to affordable health insurance, but I strongly agree with McCain that the government (aka the least effective way to do almost anything) should not be in charge of our healthcare system.

Overall, the debate included a lot of senseless bickering, accusations, and half-truths being thrown around at random, which doesn't help resolve anything. In a nutshell, the debate was exactly what I was expecting it to be.

*sigh*

I was kind of hoping for something different.

Seven Years

First off, let me just say that I don't agree with most of the things that Ann Coulter says. Ditto for Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, etc. As a general rule, I have a strong distaste for shock-jock mentality, including inflammatory news and radio programs on both sides of the political divide.

That being said, I have to admit that Ann Coulter's column for 9/11, BUSH 7, TERRORISTS 0, raises some pretty good points:

As many have pointed out, the reason elected officials tend to neglect infrastructure projects, like reinforcing levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis, is that there's no glory when a bridge doesn't collapse. There are no round-the-clock news specials when the levees hold. You can't even name an overpass retrofitting project after yourself -- it just looks too silly. But everyone's taxes go up to pay for the reinforcements.

Preventing another terrorist attack is like that. There is no media coverage when another 9/11 doesn't happen. We can thank God that President George Bush didn't care about doing the safe thing for himself; he cared about keeping Americans safe. And he has, for seven years.

If Bush's only concern were about his approval ratings, like a certain impeached president I could name, he would not have fought for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. He would not have resisted the howling ninnies demanding that we withdraw from Iraq, year after year. By liberals' own standard, Bush's war on terrorism has been a smashing, unimaginable success.

...

The ferocity of the left's attacks on Bush even scared many of his conservative allies into turning on him over the war in Iraq.

George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.

That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again--

I respect politicians who are willing to take a stand on an issue because they firmly believe that it's the right thing to do, even though I may disagree completely with their opinions.

I believe that both Obama and McCain meet this criteria. I may not agree with either of them on every issue, but I do believe that they're both trying to act in the long-term best interests of our country. (And the reason why I have never had any respect for either of the Clintons is because they constantly pursue only their own short-term self-interests.)

So given the fact that I actually respect both of the Presidential candidates, I just wish that they would campaign based on a constructive dialog about real issues. It would be nice to see candidates demonstrate this kind of dignity all the time, and not just on momentous occasions.

Obama is not a celebutant, and owning a CrackBerry isn't a prerequisite for being a good president. That's just silliness. Why can't they see that these kinds of snide attacks are demeaning to both the attacker and the attackee?

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

I've been teaching a class at UC for 8 weeks now, but I'm still not officially an employee yet. I thought things moved slowly in big companies, but university bureaucracy takes it to a whole new level. Hopefully, I'll eventually get paid for all the time and effort I've put into this class-- I've certainly enjoyed the intellectual challenge, but not enough to do it for free.

Since the Adjunct Instructor position makes me a public employee of the state of Ohio, I had to fill out a Declaration of Material Assistance Form to ensure that I'm not a terrorist. The DMA form references the Department of Homeland Security's list of official terrorist organizations as designated by the U.S. Department of State.

OBVIOUSLY, I am not a terrorist. I am not a member of any terrorist organizations, and I would not knowingly give material aid to any terrorist organizations. Duh.

I find it surreal to think that our federal and state governments have developed a two-page form to seriously ask the following questions:

For each question, indicate either “yes,” or “no” in the space provided. Responses must be truthful to the best of your knowledge.
1. Are you a member of an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
2. Have you used any position of prominence you have with any country to persuade others to support an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
3. Have you knowingly solicited funds or other things of value for an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
4. Have you solicited any individual for membership in an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
5. Have you committed an act that you know, or reasonably should have known, affords "material support or resources" to an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List? Yes No
6. Have you hired or compensated a person you knew to be a member of an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List, or a person you knew to be engaged in planning, assisting, or carrying out an act of terrorism? Yes No

Who in their right mind would answer "YES"?!? Correction: Who in any state of mind would say YES to one of those questions?

Oh, wait, here's the kicker:

I hereby certify that the answers I have made to all of the questions on this declaration are true to the best of my knowledge. I understand that if this declaration is not completed in its entirety, it will not be processed and I will be automatically disqualified. I understand that I am responsible for the correctness of this declaration. I understand that failure to disclose the provision of material assistance to an organization identified on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List, or knowingly making false statements regarding material assistance to such an organization is a felony of the fifth degree. I understand that any answer of “yes” to any question, or the failure to answer “no” to any question on this declaration shall serve as a disclosure that material assistance to an organization identified on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion List has been provided by myself or my organization. If I am signing this on behalf of a company, business or organization, I hereby acknowledge that I have the authority to make this certification on behalf of the company, business or organization referenced above.

"I guess I have to be completely honest, because I'm providing my signature at the bottom of the form." Everyone knows that terrorists prize their personal integrity enough to disclose their secret plans for destroying Western Civilization.

Unfortunately, my sense of mischieviousness is just enough to tempt me to check one of the "Yes" boxes, because I'm curious to see what would happen. Can you imagine the conversation with the government agents assigned to the case? "Which terrorist group did you provide with material support or resources? What kind of material support did you provide?" "Oh, I'm not telling you that. You'll have to figure that out on your own." (Fortunately, my senses of rationality and self-preservation are powerful enough to overwhelm my sense of mischieviousness and kick its butt.)

I shouldn't even joke about this sort of thing, least of all on a website. The government will probably be monitoring everything I write from now on, tapping my phone lines, and doing background checks to determine if any of my acquaintances are suspected terrorists.

(For the record, just in case any government agents ARE reading this, the whole "BP Refinery" thing was a JOKE. Besides which, my only involvement was reading the email sent from K.E. to A.N. Yes, I served as a personal reference for each of them when they applied for Top Secret security clearance, but I've already explained the whole situation to two different NSA agents, so it's time to let it go already.)

Seriously, I'd like to know what group of people sat in a room together and decided that this form was a good idea. How many hours have been wasted creating it, revising it, publishing it, training people on it, distributing it to all state-controlled Human Resource departments, getting employees and organizations to fill it out, and filing it away??? And who's really intent on destroying Western Civilization?

Vote!

Forget Billary vs. Obama vs. McCain vs. Huckabee... The best candidate is clearly Dave Barry.

Lunacy & Conspiracy

So the question is: How on Earth did a raving lunatic wind up in charge of an entire country? (Show of hands: Who thinks it's a good idea to change a country's time zone by 30 minutes with only a week's advance notice? I don't see any supporters...)

A few weeks ago at my church, I met a woman from Venezuela. She loves her country, but she doesn't believe that she'll ever be able to go back there, because Chavez is dangerous, and the destruction and chaos that he is creating will probably last for decades. I have to admit that I had a little trouble understanding her heavily-accented English, so I'm a little sketchy on all of the details, but apparently, she believes that the reason that Chavez is still in power is because he gives huge "donations" to Jimmy Carter's charity, which co-incidentally is also responsible for certifying the election results in Venezuela.

According to the Hugo Chavez article in Wikipedia, the Carter Center continues to validate all election results, despite recurring evidence of fraud:

• General elections were held on July 30, 2000. Chávez's coalition garnered two-thirds of seats in the National Assembly while Chávez was reelected with 60% of the votes. The Carter Center monitored the election; their report stated that, due to lack of transparency, Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE; "National Electoral Council") partiality, and political pressure from the Chávez government that resulted in early elections, it was unable to validate the official CNE results. However, they concluded that the presidential election legitimately expressed the will of the people.


• Finally, after opposition leaders submitted to the CNE a valid petition with 2,436,830 signatures that requested a presidential recall referendum, a recall referendum was announced on June 8, 2004 by the CNE. Chávez and his political allies responded to this by mobilising supporters to encourage rejection of the recall with a "no" vote.
  
  The recall vote itself was held on August 15, 2004. A record number of voters turned out to defeat the recall attempt with a 59% "no" vote. The election was overseen by the Carter Center and the Organization of American States, and was certified by them as fair and open. European Union observers did not attend, saying too many restrictions had been placed on their participation by the government.
  
  Other critics, including economists Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Roberto Rigobon of MIT, called the results fraudulent, alleging there were "very clear trails of fraud in the statistical record" and alleged electronic voting machines had been reconfigured to allow results to be altered remotely. In response, the Carter Center consulted with Professor Jonathan Taylor, an independent statistician from Stanford University and Professor Aviel Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who both initially concluded that the actual results are within the predicted range and do not of themselves prove fraud. Subsequently, however, the Carter Center admitted Taylor had "found a mistake in one of the models of his analysis which lowered the predicted number of tied machines, but which still found the actual result to lie within statistical possibility."
  
  The opposition also cited an exit poll which implied the actual results were the opposite of those reported. "Massive fraud" was alleged and the conclusions of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter were questioned.


• Chávez again won the OAS and Carter Center certification of the national election on December 3, 2006 with 63 percent of the vote, beating his closest challenger Manuel Rosales who conceded his loss on December 4, 2006. After his victory, Chávez promised a more radical turn towards socialism.

Here are some other interesting quotes from the Wikipedia article on the Carter Center, criticizing its involvement in the Venezuela elections:

• Carter's "continued international work certifying election results has provided essential political cover to anti-democratic forces in the region. Indeed, it might be said that over the past four years, Jimmy Carter has been the most visible and arguably most influential U.S. leader in Latin America."


• "The [Hugo Chávez] regime delayed and obstructed the recall referendum process at every turn. Once the regime was forced to submit to such a referendum, moreover, it used a fraud-filled voting process to ensure victory. The government did everything—including granting citizenship to half a million illegal aliens in a crude vote-buying scheme and 'migrating' existing voters away from their local election office—to fix the results in its favor. The outcome was then affirmed and legitimated by ex-President Jimmy Carter’s near-unconditional support."


• "Jimmy Carter ignored pleas from the opposition and publicly endorsed the results, despite the fact that the government reneged on its agreement to carry out an audit of the results. Carter’s actions not only gave the Venezuelan regime the legitimacy it craved, but also destroyed the public’s confidence in the voting process and in the effectiveness of international observers."

So I guess the reason why Chavez is still creating havoc in Venezuela all comes back home to roost. I'm not much into conspiracy theories, but I'm certainly not going to donate any more money to the Carter Center. It's a shame that a noble charity that could potentially help thousands (if not millions) of people from around the world would stoop to participating in such a blatent corruption.

(The woman from church also alleged that the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton have accepted "campaign contributions" from Chavez, but I'm not sure how to determine if that's true or not. I wasn't planning to donate any money to them anyway!)

State of Social Security

Could someone give me a GOOD explanation for why personal accounts are a bad idea? Several years ago, when I graduated from school and starting working full-time, my grandmother said to me, "You need to start saving money, because Social Security won't be enough for your retirement." And I laughed out loud. I told her, "Grandma, I don't plan on ever getting any money from Social Security."

I would like to point out that I don't know anyone from my age group (aka Generation X) who seriously thinks that we'll get back the money that they take out of our paychecks every month for Social Security. My husband and I just consider it a type of income tax, not a part of our plans for retirement.

So if Bush wants to put a PORTION of the money that I'm paying and put it into an account in my name, I can't see why I'm supposed to be upset by that. As it is now, ALL of the money that I'm paying will go to other people. (Does anyone seriously want to claim that's not true?) I know that Bush's plans for renovating Social Security go beyond just the personal accounts, but it's the idea of privatization that seems to be drawing the greatest fire, and I haven't heard any rational arguments for why it's a such bad idea. (And no, claiming that it's a bad idea just because Bush is the one pushing for it is NOT a rational argument.)

For people my age, I think it would be great to get SOME sort of guaranteed return. Younger people should see even more of an advantage to this, since they will benefit more (through the magic of compound interest) from starting even earlier. (And how many other opportunities do people under the age of 25 have to start saving for retirement? Most people that age don't have 401k or IRA accounts.) I'm not sure why the AARP is so upset by the idea, since Bush has already stated, on several occasions, that people who are already at retirement age would continue to receive the benefits that they have been promised.

So is it the people in the 40-50 age bracket that feel threatened by this proposed change? Obviously, they'll still be able to draw out of the existing pool, plus they'll have access to some of the money that the government will be collecting from my age group and the people younger than us. (And I'm OK with that. Since I've essentially already written off the entire Social Security system, I'd be pretty silly to argue about what happens to the remainder of the money that doesn't go into my personal account now.) If they believe that the pool isn't enough for them, isn't that just a stronger argument that it certainly won't be enough for people coming along later?