On the Difference Between Democrats and Republicans
Please subscribeI’ve found that, when scanning the op-ed page of a newspaper, the title is the first thing I respond to. If the title is interesting, then I will read the first sentence of each paragraph of the piece. From that I can decide how deeply into the article I want to go — and usually it isn’t very far. Often, I get bored or the writer blows his/her credibility.
Anyway, this morning I saw two op-eds on the back page of the Baton Rouge Advocate: “Global answer to poverty” by Robert J. Samuelson and “Obama wrong about negotiating with evil” by Cal Thomas.
In Samuelson’s piece, he says this (in the lead sentence of the third paragraph):
The solution to being poor is getting rich.
Well, alrighty then. He goes on to say that economic growth (e.g., strong trade, political & economic stability, high savings and investment rates, market allocation of resources) is what moves a people up the scale from poverty to self-sufficiency.
OK, well and good. Nothing startling here. Of course, he touches on the difficulty in persuading some people that material comfort in this world is actually a good thing and not counter to cultural norms that preach about the world to come. You get the picture.
Cal Thomas, on the other hand, attempts to define Obama this way (also in the lead sentence of his third paragraph):
Obama thinks he can negotiate with evil and transform evil into something else.
He complains that Obama’s only foreign policy strategy seems to be diplomacy with, not the defeat of, evil. He suggests that a President Obama would negotiate with terrorist killers instead of crushing them.
This is the school of thought that leads to the imposition of democracy (translation: laissez-faire capitalism) at the end of a gun barrel. And we’ve seen how well that works. Thomas shrugs off Iraq, saying the problems were there before Iraq and will be there afterwards.
Seems to me that if you can grow a generation of children in certain places that see this world for what it is (instead of hoping to live in the world to come) then you are closer to a solution to our problems than if you simply kill them off.
It would seem to me that old-school Republicans would “get” that. You know — trade, economic development, building a customer base that is eager to consume your products instead of killing you because they believe you defame God’s laws.
I know Democrats are moving in that direction. Why not Republicans, too?
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“Obama thinks he can negotiate with evil and transform evil into something else.”
For a minute I thought he might mean “conservatives”. Nah.