First, Greece was in an uproar over government subsidies and entitlements. For the past seven days, France has also been rocked by nonstop violence caused by a slight change in government-controlled economic programs. The French have announced plans to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, inciting rioting mobs to cut fuel lines and block access to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, forcing passengers to abandon cars and taxis and walk with their luggage and causing flights to be cancelled.
Looters have attacked Parisian suburbs, setting fire to cars. Reports that the nation’s gasoline stations are running out of fuel led the French president to warn the unions instigating the assaults that law and order will be maintained by any necessary means. I suspect the riots, which are apparently supported by most of the people, will get worse, and spread to other welfare state nations, including the United States. I would not be surprised by a catastrophic economic shutdown.
Political shutdown, or gridlock, is the best one can expect from this year’s mid-term elections in America. I agree with Leonard Peikoff that, since Obama is rapidly destroying America, it is best to “vote for the Republicans in order to have the time to defeat them” and stop them from imposing a religious dictatorship.
I think it will be important to watch Indiana and Ohio, in particular, as indicators of the American public’s current political views, and any Republican victory, mandate or trend, such as taking control of both houses of Congress, as I think is possible, is foremost a repudiation of the first two years of the dreadful Obama administration and the equally atrocious Democratic-controlled Congress, which have seized banking, medicine, and automotive industries.
What to watch for on election night? A GOP landslide across the country, with possible exceptions in the Tea Party movement, whose worst candidates are advocates of government-controlled religion.
In Alaska, GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller, who may have links to conservative militias, may lose to former GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, running as an independent. In Kentucky, Christian libertarian Rand Paul, running for the Senate as a Republican, is fending off a last-minute surge by a Democratic opponent who’s claiming to be more religious than the anti-abortion doctor. In Nevada, Christian GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle has a slight edge over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, best known for ushering in Obama’s socialized medicine in violation of the law and against the will of the people, in spite of her being a loon. In New York, Republican Christian Carl Paladino, who wants to ban abortion, denounces homosexuality, and threatened a reporter, will probably lose the governor’s race to Mario Cuomo’s son, Andrew. In Delaware, the season’s most incompetent candidate, a woman named Christine O’Donnell, who represents a new low in U.S. politics, is likely to lose the Senate race as a Republican, though she may go down as a Christian martyr like her grizzly mother bear patron, loser, quitter and opportunist Sarah Palin.
The upshot of this year’s crop of kooky Christian candidates is that, while they may lose and set the Tea Party movement back on track as a grass-roots campaign for secular capitalism, they have already dominated the debate and offer an alarmingly anti-intellectual preview of what comes after the election: new, more, and bolder, increasingly religious political surges, movements, and candidates who present themselves as the alternative to today’s welfare state nihilism.
