Hey Daustins,

(1) Where’s my false dichotomy?

(2) Whether capitalism, strictly speaking, is the best system ever found for spreading wealth around is subject to legitimate debate, as I’m sure you know.

(3) I didn’t blame Bush, I said that his policies failed massively. This is to say that the country became worse in nearly every way during his presidency. But your straw man has some relevance. Bush was a tolerable war time president, but the war he concocted is significantly responsible for our current debt and our significant loss of leadership over the hearts and minds of the world. And regardless of whether the democrats are PARTLY responsible for the collapse (encouraging bad lending was bad, but it’s the leveraging of the investment banks that made this more than a backache), it nevertheless appears that deregulation doesn’t work in the real world as well as it does in the ideal one.

(4) Yes, Obama has a thin record. Bush Jr. had a positively bad record. Bush Sr. had a good record. That doesn’t make Obama good, but his’s books, schooling, ambition, 3 campaigns (he was a state rep. first, remember), and focused intelligence in interview and debate should certainly count for something. The only serious argument that he didn’t write the books attributed to him (which seems like an intentionally slanderous claim, investigated with that conclusion in mind), is that his writings and his speeches have different styles. Gee, who’d have ever thought? Would you suppose that Marcus Aurelius spoke publicly in the same style as he wrote in the Meditations? Since the Greeks, we’ve known well that written and spoken language are different forms, best suited to different practices. So drop the spurious doubting.

Overall, I’m not sure how you’re managing to