Someone like Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul can remain relatively pure in their ideology, because they have little power

This is exactly my point. I’m sorry I didn’t make myself clear enough. Government power must be limited. Drastically. Much more drastically than we currently limit it today, in order to ensure that what you state does not occur!

If only someone had written a document 200 some-odd years ago that described in detail the limited powers that a government should have, that we could use to restrict the nearly unlimited power that the current government seems to think that it yeilds… Gosh, wouldn’t life just be grand?

Oh, and I’m sure someone will come on here to tell me that the interstate commerce clause justifies everything the govenrment is doing – it was not intended to be a blank check to government power. The word “regulating” is used in the clause, not “dictating”. Look it up.

I suspect it’s usually associated with a desire to do good things, to see things run competently, to see bad things ended, etc.

You and I have a different definition of what is wrong and evil, then. In my opinion, any desire to use power to do that which you consider to be “good things” at the expense of others who might not see those things as “good”, is evil. For instance, some see a total ban on abortion as “doing good” and would use their powers of force and coercion granted them by their position of power to force others, who may not agree, to conform to their views. A more simple example – Obama wants high speed rail. I don’t. He has the power to force me to pay for it whether i want to or not. He sees that as a “good thing.” I call it tyranny.

Any desire to gain the power to “run things competently” at the expense of others who may not see the things being run as necessary, right functions of government by legislative fiat denies others the ability to “run things competently” by market-based logic by their own will and their own desire. Prime example – Obamacare could be run totally competently and I would still think it to be wrong. Yet, those in power will force me, by coercion and threat of violence if I do not choose to conform, into using it whether I choose to or not.

Any desire to gain the power “see bad things ended” at the expense of others who may not see those things as bad (gay marriage, the war on drugs, prostitution, gambling – shall I go on?) denies others the ability to continue doing these things that others see as bad but they see as totally acceptable is evil.

Therefore, the desire to be in power equates directly with the desire to bend other people to your political will, and that equates to evil, whether your intentions are good or evil or whatever.

The desire for power is simply the desire to use force and coercion to bend others to your will. I call that tyranny. Thank goodness that the tyranny of our elected officials is tempered somewhat by the election process, but they are still tyrants, nonetheless.

#46 | Radley Balko | March 31st, 2011 at 2:38 pm

Can’t you wait until the woman can speak for herself? Pure, unadulterated filfth, Radley. I thought more highly of you. You have lost a fan.

I think maybe you need to read the post again.

Actually, I think it is a perfect illustration of your point… Not only is Giffords beyond reproach, or even comment, even her supporters are beyond the reach of any commentary.

I always think that changes in views based on things like this are weird. Did the possibility that a crazy person could shoot anyone at any time never occur to them before?

Want to pass hysterical gun control legislation? Who better to propose it?

‘How dare you cite the constitution when I’ve been shot in the head!’

Not all aneurysms cause cognitive problems, my youngest son suffered one four years ago and tho he had a minor personality change (he angers more easily but is not violent in anger), his cognitive functions are as good as ever.

As for Giffords, she was pro-gun rights before, but so was Brady, and he’s not at all pro-gun rights now. Perhaps she won’t be, either.

“The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver, is incorrect,” said Jerome O. Herlihy, a Delaware Superior Court judge who was chief deputy attorney general and worked with crash investigators in 1972.

The voters deserve competent representation.

Back in 2006, ND Senator Tim Johnson suffered bleeding in the brain caused by cerebral arteriovenous malformation. He received brain surgery, was hospitalized for 3 months, and in rehab for 3 more. He’s still not all there.

VP and former Senator Joe Biden the college plagerizer wasn’t the brightest bulb BEFORE he suffered his massive brain aneurysm. Two actually.

Maybe that’s why he convincingly repeats the sob story over and over that the truck driver who Biden’s wife mistakenly pulled her family car in front of “drank his lunch”.

The truck driver was never charged with drunk driving……… Mrs. Biden just pulled in front of a truck on a busy road…..DOA. Biden milked her mistake for every tear drop and vote it was worth, and then some.

Given that is the Arizona GOP who will pick the opposing candidate, I would say that the odds are about 100:1 that he will BE an ass as well as ignorant as a pile of rocks, so I am less sympathetic to your point. Should they find someone who did not recently crawl out from under a rock spouting Tea-bagger talking points, get back to me and I’ll re-assess.

Sure, she’d probably win some sympathy votes, but the reason Dems are talking about her running isn’t because she got shot but because she already expressed interest, because she could actually win, and because they think she’d make a damn fine senator. It’s more insulting to her to suggest that she couldn’t run because she got shot than to consider the possibility that she still might go for it and to make plans for it.

Yes, it essentially comes down to the users and beneficiaries (or at least people who think they are beneficiaries) of state violence being horrified that someone would dare retaliate. Although this still doesn’t quite explain all the attention Gifford gets relative to the shooting victims who actually, you know, died. There really is some idea, at least among Team Red and especially Team Blue types, that politicians (at least on their side) are just more important than the rest of us.

His opponent Mr. McCaskill and son then decided to take-off their private plane for a campaign event in very marginal weather.

Pilots call it “Get Home-itis”. Father and son augered in. Sympathy ensued.

Ashcroft ended up losing to a dead man. McCaskill’s wife was appointed to fill the seat won by a dead man.

To notice problems is not to have an obligation to fix the problem, or no doctor would ever be allowed to diagnose an incurable illness.

However, the broad thread of libertarian political thought recognizes these problems with the way power is achieved and used, and proposes having less concentrated power, both by simply eliminating some of it (“Congress shall make no law….”) and by setting up multiple mutually-competing centers of power (courts, states, feds, private property owners, private media), so that it is more difficult for anyone to amass huge amounts of power and use it freely. You can basically go along with this thread of thought, without being a libertarian. I don’t quite fit the definition, for example, though I am deeply skeptical of concentrated power, especially in the hands of governments, and especially in executive branch parts of government (which are optimized for concentrating power in the hands of a small number of people in order to ensure that quick action can be taken at need).

How that state violence gets used is, however, determined by relatively violence-free processes like elections, trials, and requests for assistance by legitimate property owners. This is very different from the situation in a country where the power to decide how the resources of the state are to be used is itself determined by violence–say, by a military coup, or a campaign of assassinations and terror, or by jailing or disappearing all the opposition to the current ruling party. There are examples of all three of those things happening in other countries, and overwhelmingly, those aren’t places we’d like the US to become more like.

There’s plenty wrong with the system we have now, but adding in seizing control by violence and threats to the list of ways to get to power seems remarkably unlikely to make the country a better place.