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The wars in which the United States is currently engaged in ... are harming U.S. national and economic security, degrading the standing of the United States in the world community, fueling hatred abroad for Americans and undermining the rule of law.
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That's quite a mouthful of unsupported assertion you got going on there, Brian. And while I would agree with some of it [because I know the subject well enough to comprehend the academic support of it], I won't agree with most of it ... because it's composed of grade-A hooey.
Deficit-spending compromises
economic security, and the US is currently engaged in deficit spending to beat the band. And yes, defense spending is a formidable piece of that. You can have whatever opinion you want of defense spending, but I'd remind you that of the ten biggest pieces of current US deficit spending, 'defense' is the only one that is authorized by the Constitution. As a libertarian ... excuse me, you are a
Libertarian, aren't you? ... you should probably make special note of that fact. I can understand when democrats and republicans refuse to acknowledge what is and is not in the Constitution; their political philosophies depend on Constitutional ignorance. I find it offensive, though, when a libertarian - capitalized or lower-case - is ignorant of it.
Now, whether the ways in which the US is spending its defense budget is
wise is, again, another topic. And quite a number of good arguments can be made that we aren't. Even if one holds the position, as I do, that one purpose of our military is to kick the butts of our enemies on
their turf before they get to ours, you can still argue that we aren't doing that properly. But the leap from "unwise defense policies" to "compromising national security" is a long one, and unsupported. It remains an axiomatic declaration, equal and opposite in intellectual vigor to the jingoistic nonsense uttered by hyper-militarists who never met a war they didn't like.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right ... we've got battling preachers spouting doctrinaire shinola all around. It reduces national security to not attack everyone who looks crosseyed at us, it reduces national security to attack anyone at all ... neither of you are credible, and both of you are simply feuling the current political paradigm that proposes a false dichotomy between two opposing polemics. And for a third-party aspirant to feed into the either-or binary solution set ... suicide, bub. Libertarians get 2-tenths of a percent of the vote to begin with. Are you deliberately trying to marginalize us further?
Knock it off.
Here's an idea: if you've got quibbles with US military policy [and there's more than enough to quibble about], state them rationally, not reflexively, not ideologically, not superficially. Put distance between the Libertarian position and the idiot liberals.
Superficial reduction sums up fairly well the hair-shirted self-loathing sentiment about America in the 'world community'. Can we please stop using the mincing and limp
world community? Please? I'm asking nicely.
The world is full of *** holes and *** heels who want to do nothing more than push other people around. Are we among them? sometimes, yes. But if we were to stop being like that it would be a unilateral action. Others won't stop. There have been times in our history where we have gone out of our way to withdraw from foreign intrigues. Others didn't stop. In fact, a few of those times we got ourselves thoroughly blind-sided and humiliated because of it.
The world is not populated by people who simply need a hug and a little "understanding" to make them stop being *** heels. And many of the biggest *** heels among them view the group-hug-harmonist attitude as weak and cowardly and use it as an excuse to sucker-punch. There are more cultural mindsets than are dreamed of in your petty and childish worldview, Horatio. Vacuously believing that the rest of the world hates us because we're bossy displays a huge naivete about how the world works - and one that belies US presidential ambition, frankly.
International politics is not a basket of rainbows just waiting to be set free but for the self-interest of
Big Bad United States; it's a bubbling cauldron of 187 individual national self-interests in various combinations of cooperation and contention, and the US is no more contentious than the average. Drop the mewling. In the words of Doctor Cox of
Scrubs fame: "People are bastard-coated bastards." Pretending otherwise is nationally suicidal.
And all law - domestic and international - supports what we've been doing about it. Like any sufficiently large or vague body of law, IntLaw "can be interpretted" any number of ways ... and it has been. Other nations may choose to grouse about the US being bossy; more power to them. But any claims of "violating IntLaw" are neck-deep in nonsense.
Ditto your later weep-n-whine about "unconstitutional" wars. I am getting rather tired of reminding Libertarians that the
only consideration for a philosophically sound Libertarian political policy is that it follows the US Constitution. For better or worse, the Constitution has been read by those who have the authority to enforce it as declaring that Congress's "declare war" part does not interfere with the President's "commander in chief" part. You can make a decent argument that it
should, but courts have ruled 100%, and for over 200 years, that it
doesn't. You aren't getting around that.
And as a final side-note: I personally abhor the phrase "rule of law". Not because it's an inherently bad thing, but because I'm a libertarian. You are apparently a
Libertarian - more full of ideology than practicum. In either case, though, whether capitalized or not, we should always remember that "rule of law" is the first excuse of the tyrant when commiting his tyranny. Libertarians believe [or should] in "rule of liberty". Rule of Liberty
requires rule of law but acknowledges that there are constraints on what the law is allowed to do: government is limited.
I urge you to urge your candidate to rethink his facile position on foreign affairs and be an actual libertarian instead.
And I urge you, as his nominal "press secretary", to learn how to properly quote someone you're citing.
Thank you
