Post #1

I believe that American policies should be guided by what is best in the national (American) interest. All too often, we are told by the "experts" that America should do this or that because it is our obligation to the world, because poor people in Africa need our aid, because as the "leader of the free world" we ought to do nation building, and so on. I strongly disagree with these experts.

I believe in the merits of substance over form, so while I may often not state my ideas in the most elegant fashion, I will certainly try my best to state what our policies should be.

I believe America needs higher taxes on the wealthy, lower taxes on the middle class, more nuclear power plants, more friends (allies), fewer enemies, and fewer wars. We also need more separation of church and state, better parenting, and fewer immigrants.

President George W. Bush's ill-conceived war on Iraq, and occupation of Iraq, was a major mistake. Iraq was never a threat to the United States. (I also believe we should never have had the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, the first Gulf War by George H. W. Bush, or the Clinton military campaign in Kosovo.) Since the Iraq war was a mistake, we should withdraw from Iraq immediately.

The "experts" say that if we withdraw from Iraq immediately, then all hell will break loose in the Middle East . Well, no one knows what will happen there if we withdraw immediately. But we can be certain that fewer Americans will die for a nation which hates us, and we will save a lot of money that can be better spent strengthening America and making us independent of Middle East oil. (We need less hubris in "knowing" what the future holds. Let's face it: no one has a crystal ball which tells them what will happen tomorrow or on any day in the future.)

I am always astounded how the "experts" can repeat the same myth over and over, and before you know it, all the media repeat the same mantra, namely, if we "cut and run" from Iraq then X, Y and Z will happen there. These are the same experts and media hawks who told us that Iraq would be a cakewalk.

We cannot try to undo all of Bush's mistakes overnight. And like it or not, most of the world will hate us for a long time. However, with the right policies, time is on our side, and eventually America will be liked and respected again.

In future posts I plan to expand on all of these thoughts and introduce new ones. For today, I want to close by imagining how America could have been immeasureably stronger (and less hated) had Bush spent all those Iraq dollars on building nuclear power plants around the country. By now, we would have had millions of electric-powered automobiles and we would have been exporting our own oil, not importing hundreds of billions of dollars of oil from the Middle East.