Stav Blackmane Interview: Part 2, This Is A Long One

(For Part 1, click here).

Now for the grand event.  Stav answers your questions.  Unfortunately we couldn't get to them all, between NP and IMAO we received about 30ish and as you can tell. Stav has nothing to hide.  That guy has no problem telling you how he feels.  I think this is one reason why I'm going to write him in.


Mundane68: On Gun Control: Should all Americans be manditorially armed with .4x caliber handguns or would you allow smaller caliber guns for girly hands?

Stav Blackmane Interview: Part 1

So now to let the cat out of the bag, last Friday I was away from the NP office to attend a Stav Blackmane rally.  It was held in the official birthplace of the Republican Party, Jackson, Michigan (Wikipedia that America) with a few hundred people in attendance.  I was granted a few minutes with him and this is the result: Part 1.

For those of you asking questions of Mr. Blackmane yours will be posted tomorrow.

Q&A with Stav Blackmane

Nuking Politics

NP: Why do you seem to still be trying to position yourself as a "real" candidate - the whole "dark horse" thing - rather than as a running gag

SB: It is necessary… It is required that I position myself as a real candidate for two main reasons.  1) I want my ideas, my positions on various issues, to have as great an impact as they can, which won't happen if I'm just running a joke campaign.  There is considerable historical precedent supporting this, by the way, and even candidates who have no chance of winning in a particular election - or even grabbing the nomination - can force changes to the party's platform if their supporters are numerous enough or vocal enough to demand that their concerns be addressed.

2) If I had won the nomination, I would have been a ferocious campaigner, relentlessly hammering the President, his cabinet, his friends, his sock-puppets in Congress, and his sycophants and stenographers in the media, all the way up to my victory speech on election night, and beyond.

NP: What makes you think you're qualified to hold the Office of the Presidency

SB: The basics.  I'm a decent guy.  I'm a natural leader. I'm very conservative. I truly love our country, our culture, and especially our Constitution.  I'm sick and tired of the media-driven "celebrity president" phenomena, but since that's something I have to deal with, I'll say that although we do NOT need the president to supposedly be the "smartest man in America", and although I'm not a genius, I am at least reasonably bright although not to the degree that I'm enamored with my own glow.  I have no criminal past (because, thank God, we don't include traffic tickets when making such claims), and I'm not in this "just to line my own pockets".  Nobody owns me. I'm not beholden to anyone other than my own supporters, and to them all I owe is that I be true to how I represent myself, which is easy because what you hear from me are my honest views. I will not hesitate to respond with overwhelming military force in situations where that is required, while at the same time I need to make it clear to America that I will not recklessly expend our nation's blood and treasure in situations where victory can be found by other means. And I do mean "victory" here, which - rest assured - means that "appeasement" is completely off the table.

NP: If you lose, do you have any further political aspirations?

SB: Certainly! But my plans will largely be determined by whom I lose TO. I may run again for President - starting earlier in the election cycle of course - or I may run for Governor of Texas. But also, you can pursue "political aspirations" in other ways as well, by which I mean if I can shoehorn my way into a worthwhile position within a Romney administration, I may stomp down that path.  I'm defining "worthwhile position" here, by the way, as "one which enables me to have a noticeable impact", as opposed to targeting a specific salary level.  I'd take an unpaid adviser's role if it guaranteed access to the President's ears.

NP: Where do you see our country headed?

SB: At the moment? Off a cliff and then plummeting towards a black hole, fiscally, regulation-wise, morally, take your pick.  But I also see a great many of the passengers in this participatory representational democracy waking up, yelling warnings, demanding that the brakes be applied, that somebody please veer in another direction, etc. "The End" is not now although it is darn near nigh.

This next election is crucial, and not just for us but for the entire world. And strangely it seems the entire world is pulling in the wrong direction.  That's probably largely because it has been filtered through our media, but in truth the "corrective" measures being passed by foreign governments largely, heck almost exclusively, compound the problems we're all facing.

*********

Part 2 with your questions...

Stav Teaser

Hey so I have that interview with Stav Blackmane coming up this week.  I'm just putting the finishing touches on editing. I sent him this email the other day because I forgot a few questions, to my surprise he got back to me quickly.  I hope that means we're besties now.

I did think you could use a tease.  We talked about a lot of stuff...

NP: Someone said to me the other day:  “You didn't answer that ‘what would you say to Obama if you had five minutes with him’ question in your last interview. What would you say if you had to debate him on stage?”

SB: That’s a good question, and although while the answer I’m going to give you is true, I feel obligated to let you know that I came up with most of this response several years ago when, for a time, it looked likely that I was going to have to debate Al Sharpton.  That actually fell through and never happened, but again, what I thought then is still applicable now.

If I was on stage with Obama, I’d say:

To be honest, I do have a problem with you, but it’s not really YOU, it’s me.  It is *my* problem, and something I’ve been dealing with for a long, long time.  And in fact while it is still not about YOU specifically, I’ve got to admit that I have a problem with your people. 

Now let me stop right there and clarify that this isn't a racist thing.  Terms like “your people” or “you people” have long been interpreted as racist catch-phrases, perhaps often correctly, but that’s not how I’m using it. I’m not referring to you being black, or mixed, or any other ethnicity.  I don’t care about that.  And it may come as a surprise to my conservative brethren that I’m also not referring to Liberals or Marxists as “your people” either.  THAT concern is a grown-up one, and although I despise and abhor Marxism, that stance comes easy to me.  No, what I’m referring to is something primal, something either instinctive or if not instinctive then no less a reflexive reaction for having been learned. 

And it’s not your fault. This goes all the way back to my early childhood. In fact let me emphasize how non-racist this is by admitting that due to this issue when I was a small child I used to keep one of my toys locked in the bottom of a filing cabinet, and never played with it. And it was white, not that that mattered.

Also, it turns out that this is a fairly common affliction; for example author Steven King, after a fashion, once wrote about “it”, and even one of your ardent supporters has created a poster based on this very theme…

The truth is it’s not your race, it’s not that you’re a Marxist, it’s really not about you at all.

It’s *my* problem. It’s just…

It's just that I've had a life-long, deep-seated aversion to evil clowns! 


UPDATE:
Link to Part 1
Link to Part 2

Nuking Politics Needs Your Help: Stav Blackmane Edition

I am hoping to meet with Stav Blackmane sometime in the near future, most likely in Livonia or Grand Rapids Michigan (his travel schedule will determine when and where, and apparently parts of late September and most of October are still a bit fluid), but in the meantime he’s agreed to let me “interview” him, per se, via email. I’m sure there will be a bit of “back and forth”, and that I’m going to have to collate the exchange into something coherent, but I want to hit him up front with a good set of questions that will hopefully be so much better than the session he had with  Keln, he and I become BFF’s.

I also told him that I was going to solicit questions from our readers, which is what I want to do here. Blackmane’s only request along those lines is that we “not throw him softballs, unless they’re funny”. I’m guessing “briefs or boxers” would be out of bounds (I don’t know, and I really don’t want to know, well I kinda do), but a good setup line would probably be OK. However, I would prefer the questions be serious and difficult.

So here’s your chance to get in on the interview. I’ll be choosing which questions to forward, but the man can obviously read so it is a safe bet he’ll see anything submitted as comments, and I’m thinking there’s an even bet he may end up addressing questions that aren’t on my “selected” list. Time will tell.

Although I reserve the right to “revise and extend my own remarks”, here’s how I currently plan to start off:

#1     You obviously didn’t win the Republican nomination, and most people have never even heard of you, so why do you seem to still be trying to position yourself as a “real” candidate – the whole “dark horse” thing – rather than as a running gag along the lines that people like Steven Colbert and, I think, Dave Barry have done in the past? (My apologies to Dave Barry if I’m misremembering. But my bigger apologies for the show based on his writing in the early 90’s)

#2     What makes you think you’re qualified to hold the Office of the Presidency, should a truly major miracle happen – given that as of today you do not appear on any state’s ballot as far as my research has been able to determine – and you somehow end up winning?

#3     Assuming that something a little less miraculous happens this November, and either Obama or Romney ends up being elected, do you have any further political aspirations?

#4      Where do you see our country headed? (My follow-up questions will of course be determined by his answer.)

#5      ?  This is the part where you come in, this question mark represents your question.

Come on, Nukers! Fire your best, smokin’-fast hardballs into the comments, and we’ll see what happens.  Ask the sort of questions you’ve always wanted the press to ask, but they JUST NEVER DO.  I’ll let this cook for a few days and see what there is to draw from (don’t let me down!), and if this Blackmane person really wants to be a politician, and claims to not be simply giving lip service to the “a different kind of politician” catchphrase, let’s make him really EARN the position, whatever that one day might be.

And remember – he asked for it!

UPDATE:
Link to teaser of Part 1
Link to Part 1
Link to Part 2

How We Should Respond

Got this from Stav Blackmane in response to the embassy attacks in Egypt and Libya:

 “How We Should Respond”

Swing a mighty sword,
And defend America!
She’s worth any cost!
…
“That’s our embassy!”
Angry men of steel reply,
“Welcome to our wrath!
…
Who stands against us?
Who can face our answer of
Ten thousand Marines?
…
Cairo shakes at night
We will not go overboard…
The glow is just heat.
…
Swing the sword around!
Defending America…
Man, those were the days!

It's Time To Go Old Shcool

You know, I was kind of thinking about Stav Blackmane today. What an interesting guy. And people keep asking me "Who is Stav Blackmane?". I know, there isn't much about him on the internet, other than a few profiles and pictures. Not much at all, and honestly, I don't know too much more than you guys do. I've talked to him, but other than that, I don't know a lot about him.

But he's got a lot of people's attention all of a sudden. Why? The things he says. And the way he says it...if he would agree to a video or even audio, you would know what I mean. The way he says it, you know he is saying exactly what he believes.

The problem with a Stav Blackmane, besides the name Stav (what is that? Scandinavian or something?) is that he says exactly what people like you and I think. He speaks in simplistic terms. And in the world of politics, simplistic means "commoner". In the world of politics, everything is "nuanced" or, "complex", or "not as simple as that".

But Blackmane still resonates. Why? Simplicity. We, the People, understand the role of government and the freedoms we are promised because the U.S. Constitution was written in such simplistic terms. Each right we have was expressed in a few sentences. They weren't nuanced. It doesn't actually take a constitutional law professor to understand them. They were written in a way that the common man could understand them, out of necessity, to get the document to pass, and eventually to get the Bill of Rights to pass (mostly to get Rhode Island to ratify the thing...to which state we owe a debt of gratitude).

What it takes a constitutional law professor to interpret is how lawyers, politicians, and judges over the years have skewed and all but re-written such a simple document. The document itself is easily understood by the lowest of the low, if they be literate.

So it is a combination of lawyers and politicians, really, that have made nonsense of such simple sense over the years.

And Blackmane is the antithesis of this. He speaks his mind, clearly and concisely. He sticks to those self-evident truths, and does not deviate from them. He looks at the role of government as it was meant to be by those very articles we call the Constitution.

But if he had won the primary, if he was in Romney's place now, and said what he said, which simply amounts to truth, how he would be lambasted by the media and politicians alike!

The problem with this country isn't jobs. It isn't the economy per se. It isn't a clash of ideologies so much. These are but symptoms of the problem. The real problem is a rampant denial and fear of objective truth. This fear crosses party lines. It is shared by almost all.

The truth is that the federal government is not a safety net. It is not there to make sure you have even the most basic of necessities. That is your responsibility. And if your state or local government wishes it, they can take care of you instead. But, constitutionally, the federal government is not there to do these things.

That scares people, because they've come to expect it. See, the federal government made a deal with the people a long time ago. The "New Deal" of FDR was a big part of it, but it started before and was added to after, even up to today with Obama Care. The deal was this: trade your responsibility to care for yourself, and we the government will shelter, feed, clothe, and care for you.

The problem with such "deals with the Devil", is that few people read the fine print, or even the big print sometimes. In this case, it was trading liberty, because liberty and responsibility are interconnected. It is a bond that cannot be broken. The more freedom a person has, the more responsibility. The less responsibility, the less freedom.

Blackmane gets that. A lot of us get that. The Founders surely did. But the average American no longer understands that, or chooses to overlook it. The elderly want their subsidized health care. The poor want their food stamps. Young women apparently want their abortions and contraception. But the elderly didn't plan ahead to cover their own health care costs; they shirked that responsibility. I'll give them a pass, because they were told by the federal government that they were basically investing in that by paying a tax during their working years.

But what about the others? The poor want their food stamps and their government housing. Some of the poor use these things until they get up on their own two feet and make a life for themselves, and I applaud these people. But the rest find it easier to give up the liberty that a better life affords, and just take what the government gives them.

The young, oh those silly young people...they want to be on their parents' health insurance until they are nearly 30 years old. They can't get a job, they say. Oh? What happened to working two or three jobs? People used to do that. Now, what people call "a job" is a full-time affair with tons of benefits and great pay. Part-time jobs don't really count anymore. Used to, if it's part time, you had time to work other jobs and make up the difference.

And abortions and contraception? Heaven forbid any of these people might want to practice the responsibility of not having rampant sex. But my taxes must go to their lifestyle, because the federal government promised to take care of the messy consequences.

These are but a few examples of how the American society has been lulled into accepting the lies of an increasingly overbearing federal government. And many of these same people vote. The hardest thing to do when you've lived in a lie, is to accept the truth, even when a guy like Blackmane spells it out for you. So we should be happy that Stav didn't win the primary. He could never beat Obama, who is well versed in deception.

And nothing would make the voters happier than to be assured by the warm glow of the continuous lies they've been fed since birth.

Introducing Stav Blackmane, Candidate for President

[Nuking Politics conducted an interview with long-shot dark-horse Republican presidential
candidate, Stav Blackmane. This interview took place just prior to the start of the Republican
primary, and is the first in a planned series of interviews and expected speeches we will
transcribe. We do not know how long Mr. Blackman's candidacy will last, but find many of his
positions compelling.]

An interview with Stav Blackmane, conservative dark horse candidate for President of the United States.

1. Why do you think you're the best candidate to take the Republican nomination? You're up against Romney, a former Governor, businessman, and the political favorite, and then some political regulars.

Let’s define our terms. No, scratch that – that’d take too long… I’m all about evidence, honesty, taking a hard look at brutal truths, etc., so I’m going to answer both your question about being the best candidate/nominee, and your un-asked ultimate end position of who would be the best President.

I’m going to say something that would give my “message handlers”, if I had any, endless nightmares. I can’t claim to be the best candidate, given any normal accepted definition of the term. I’m starting way behind the line, with almost no name recognition outside of eclectic conservative circles. But I can say with confidence that I would be the better President.

All successful Presidents have shared a number of traits, regardless of which party they belonged to. In fact, it is a long list, but the relevant ones are those which will catch the public’s attention, and which will sustain them through their term or terms in office. They’re charismatic, they command a room or a crowd with equal ease, they’re stoic, they have a marked inability to panic. All the successful Presidents have been headstrong bulldogs. Unfortunately, some of the unsuccessful ones have been as well, but it is a trait you can’t overlook. The successful ones are not, however, headstrong to the point of foolishly discarding their advisors’ advice. Governor Romney and I share those traits. He would be a good President. I would be a better one because I am innately more conservative. And I mean that both in the “Traditionalist” sense, although I’ll admit to having a strong techno-geek streak, and in the “Individualist” sense.

Romney has more business experience than I do, largely as a factor of age. I hope he doesn’t hold my youth against me, as I am only now barely knocking on the door of being 50. But I can counter, negate, nullify that advantage by means of the obvious tactic of having men like Romney – and I’d be honored to have the man himself, if circumstances play out to my advantage – as part of my trusted inner circle of advisors. I will co-opt the knowledge and experience of my advisors – it should be obvious that’s what they’re for.

2. What is your real opinion of Obama?

I believe him to be a sad, abandoned boy now trapped by time in manhood; who was deceived by those who claimed to love him: who had hatred of this country, of our society and our values, fed to him with his mother’s milk, except actually without the mother’s milk part: whose rage is now full-grown. I don’t think he is either stupid or incompetent – I think he’s malignant, and that the non-natural disasters that have befallen our country have not been the result of his policies’ failures, but rather of their successes. This is not “conspiracy talk” by the way; I’ll remind you of his “energy prices will necessarily skyrocket” quote as a perfect example. He’s a bitter narcissistic far-left radical, playing out his mommy and daddy issues on a stage writ large, who has been quite successful at achieving many of his goals.

3. Obama claims that you don't care about the poor, or the old, or the disadvantaged, or minorities. What do you say to that?

(Checks the time) This is not going to be a short answer, but I’ll try to keep it under “book length”.

What do I say to that? I say that he’s not very original. What Republican hasn’t been accused of such (except in locations and for position in which Republicans run unopposed)? It is tired old tripe, redistributionist rotting garbage, and doesn’t even rise to the level of Orwellian “Newspeak”. It is “Antispeak”. Not only is it a lie, it is based on anti-truth. The “Truth” is, and I’m speaking from any authoritarian viewpoint, is that anything you want more of, you subsidize. Likewise, anything you want less of, you penalize. The relevant point here being that the Left needs the poor, the old, the “disadvantaged”, and minorities to be dependable voting blocks. So they’re bought. The Left are nothing if not masters at using public funds – yours and my tax dollars – to purchase dependent voting blocks. 

Now you might think I’m being unfair here… because paying the old doesn’t keep them old, just like paying minorities doesn’t force them to continue being minorities. But it DOES keep them dependent. Likewise, strangely enough paying the poor, for nothing more than being poor, doesn’t make them “not poor”. It doesn’t enrich them; it keeps them dependent. As for the “disadvantaged”; that term is a flexibly definable grey void useful for any purpose the Left needs. If you really want to accuse me of not caring for the disadvantaged, define which ones and I’ll dispute the label, or call you a liar and successfully rebut your accusation.

The Right in general, and myself in particular, care about the poor. Authoritative statistics on charitable giving are ample evidence of that; you can look them up yourself. But more importantly, far more importantly, is what could be mischaracterized as our selfish motive. We don’t want the poor to remain poor. Why? I mean “Why, aside from loving people in general and wanting the best for everybody?” I’ll tell you why: We “selfishly” want people to succeed in life, to do far better than just being hopelessly poor and dependent on government handouts, because A) productive people don’t suck tax dollars out of our wallets, and in fact help share the burden, and B) productive people VOTE for us, because they ARE US. The poor are paid just enough to capture their vote and keep them poor. The productive vote for people like themselves – i.e. other productive people.

I often hear that “children are our treasure”. Not really. Don’t get me wrong – I treasure children, certainly, especially my own, but in the political sense that matters, children are not our treasure. Children are our future. The ELDERLY are our treasure. They are our storehouses of knowledge and wisdom; they’re the living definition of “experience”. While our government has made a compulsory and unsustainable “social compact” that I will do all in my power to end, I will not break faith with our elderly who have ordered their retirement – their very lives – according to rules they had no choice in obeying. We’re in a financial quagmire. In fact that’s a ridiculous understatement, but since an accurate rendering of our country’s financial status would take a trillion obscene terms to describe, let’s leave it at “quagmire” for now. Someone is going to – unfairly and unjustly, but out of necessity – take it in the shorts for the rest of the country. Now that can either by “everybody”, which would doom the elderly who would have no means of coping, or “just the elderly”, which would be pointless, stupid, and homicidal, or “everyone but the elderly”, which makes perfect sense to me.

Regarding minorities, let’s be honest and admit that while many Liberals may mean “this or that” minority, depending on their pet causes or the subject at hand, since we’re talking about Obama’s accusation specifically, we’re talking about blacks. And yes, I will use the term “blacks” because there’s nothing racist with that term, just like there’s nothing racist in referring to “whites”. He might as well have accused me – as has been said of other Republican presidents in the past – of not caring about black people. I’ll address this two ways.

First; I consider it indisputable that nothing – NOTHING – has harmed Black America more than our welfare system; mostly but not exclusively for abrogating the role of the father within black families. If you want to be angry – and by “you” I mean anybody; you don’t have to be black to feel this way – if you want to be angry at someone or something for the downtroddeness of minorities, be angry – be full of rage – at those who purposefully and systematically transformed a huge section of our population not into slaves, but into prisoners. Prisoners of the welfare system, where they sugar-coat their shackles with base payments and lies, deceiving those on welfare that they’re helpless and can’t survive without that government check. Their politicians say “Just keep voting for me, and I’ll keep the gravy train a’comin’”, but it isn’t gravy their divvying out a drop at a time – it’s poison. While Mom, and decreasingly Dad, and increasingly Grandparents, are kept prisoners of welfare, their children – sons lacking fathers to guide them and show them what it means to be an upright and responsible man, daughters denied the adoration, treasuring, and guidance from their fathers that is so crucial to every woman’s natural and healthy development, suffer, and more and more become literal prisoners indeed.

I want nothing to do with that system. I want our citizens to have nothing to do with that system, regardless of their color or heritage.

Second; Do I care about black people? Well yeah, and to any black person listening I would say that – God’s honest truth – I care about you because you’re “people”, not because you’re black. I don’t give a damn what color anyone is. I may be curious about someone’s ethnicity, but only because people fascinate and interest me, and knowing about THEIR ethnicity can help complete the picture. But my interest is in THEM, not in their ethnicity itself. I may be fascinated by the detail, but at the same time the details are incidental. You may be half Antarctian and half ethnic-Martian, and while – believe me – I’d find that absolutely fascinating, it would have no impact at all – one way or the other – on how I felt about you as a person.

I think I’ve beaten this horse into the ground. Let’s move on.

4. What do you plan to do about taxes?

Overall my general answer is “Slash them”. If you could be more specific as to which taxes you’re asking about, I can give you more specific answers. But in the meantime, if you can think of a tax, there is a high probability that I want to cut it deeply. In fact, you know how our government has on occasion inflicted “punitive taxation” on this or that? Well I think it is high time we inflicted a little punitive anti-taxation upon our government. So while there are many sound economic reasons for cutting taxes, I have to admit that for me there’s some spite mixed in as well. And to be perfectly clear, that’s not spite towards our citizenry –gosh we’ve had more than enough of that – but rather, it is on their behalf.

5. What do you plan to do about spending?

“Slash” is such a tame, nonviolent word, compared to what I plan to do with spending. If the Left wants to accuse me of being a radical, let it be for this: I want to do radical chainsaw surgery to our spending. Many, many branches of government will cease to exist. Useless and in my opinion far-worse-than-useless departments and agencies will be terminated with extreme prejudice. Sacred cows will be sacrificed on the altar of fiscal responsibility. Many personal oxen will be gored.

6. What, in your opinion, is really the role of government?

I’m going to assume you simply mean “federal government”, because my answer would be different if we were talking about State or smaller governments, and say that it is well defined in our Constitution, which I won’t (and frankly can’t) recite verbatim here. But in a nutshell, it is to protect our country from foreign aggression, negotiate with foreign governments on matters of national security, establish courts and fairly mete out justice, prevent the States from levying tariffs on each other – and before you ask, YES, “Wickard v. Filburn” was wrongly decided, en excelsis. 

That sort of thing. There’s more, but just not a whole lot more.

7. Simply answer yes or no...do you believe the United States is the best country in the world?

YES. I assume you mean “best overall”, and let me reiterate “Yes, and by a wide margin. So wide there’s really nobody in second place. I think the ‘next-best’ country in all honesty would have to enter the ranks somewhere down near 5th, even though that makes no real sense. It is an emotional issue - they’re hard to rank numerically.” But if you’re asking “best at – this or that” then you’d have to name the this or that. For example, tragically, shamefully, annoyingly, we are temporarily no longer best at manned space travel. I’m determined to make that temporary situation truly short term in nature.

8. Again, a simple yes or no, should government be a safety net for people?

I’m going to have to break the form on this one, because that’s not a simple yes or no answer, not even for a self-described hard-core conservative like myself. I have to ask, “Which people”? I’m a native of Texas, not Sparta. I believe in self-reliance both as a principle and as a practice, but I don’t believe in, for example, abandoning our crippled to die on the mountainside. There is going to be some form of social compact. 

We conservatives would like that to be as small as humanely possible, but we won’t abandon the “humane” part of that, and in fact despite what you hear otherwise and relentlessly in the media, we are far better than those on the Left at providing, encouraging, fostering, and requiring humane treatment be shown to those who simply cannot provide or care for themselves. Even in the healthiest, most independently-minded society, there are always going to be wards of the state, most often through no fault of their own. Talk about disadvantaged! I didn’t make this up, obviously, but “safety-net, yes, hammock – no.” 

Now let’s talk about whether or not there should be a safety net for people who are NOT wards of the state; those who can actually provide for themselves the bare necessities for survival. They may be down on their luck, they may not be at fault, they may be TOTALLY at fault, they may be the victims of a profound injustice, whatever. We’re talking about providing some sort of taxpayer-funded dole that will be just enough to survive in trying circumstances long enough to get their lives together.

Generally, under those circumstances, my answer is “No”. 

For more reasons than I can easily list here.

Other than by getting the hell out of your way – which will be in some form a stated business goal of my administration – the government is not here to make your life easier. Oh, if we can may your life easier by ceasing to be some sort of obstacle, then we should certainly do that, but not by handing you money forcibly extracted from someone else.

Life is tough. Get a helmet. Life is unfair. Get tougher and plan to have alternate plans. If you’re one of those victims of a profound injustice you should certainly have the means and the right to sue for restitution, but we all know that’s often not possible. Truly tragic and sad and undeserved, yes. Does that equate with a justifiable burden on the public coffers? No.

But we’re Americans. Never assume you have no options left. If you think that a “safety net” is you’re only hope, you only believe that because you’ve been lied to all your life about it. Guess what… At some point in your life – and for most of us this is a multi-occasion sort of thing – you’re going to be a burden to someone. 

Doesn’t matter if you’re young or old; if you’ve been born at all then you’ve been a burden to someone, and will be again one day. So make sure you have around you those who would happily welcome the burden, who love you and wouldn’t begrudge you such care. I obviously mean families, but I don’t mean JUST families. I mean friends too and don’t forget – we’re Americans – I also mean neighbors. If you don’t know of any neighbors who have come to the aid of another neighbor in need, then you either live in a bad neighborhood, aren’t really a good neighbor yourself, or live in such a remote area that you basically don’t have neighbors. 

Move if you have to and you think it important enough, but MOST of us know that although it would be a radical departure from the normal walk of life, in a crisis we wouldn’t hesitate to turn to our neighbors for help, or would happily be the good neighbor providing such aid. In fact, that’s kind of a ramification of the “Golden Rule”. If you live your life in such a loving, caring manner that the people who know you – and even possibly some who don’t – would be happy or even honored to care for you in your darkest hour, what need have you of the government’s blundering intrusive hand? And here’s a clue: If you live your life so that no one wants to help you, or even rejoices in your pain, don’t be deceived - you’ve got far bigger problems than whether or not a publicly-funded safety net exists.

9. What do you propose to do about Iran, or nations like them?

I’m trying to remember if Iran officially declared war on us during or after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, because if they did then we basically ignored it, and if they didn’t, well, they’ve certainly been acting since then like they did. Whatever. My policy will be to treat our enemies like they’re enemies. While this is not necessarily a prescription for endless war, I won’t hesitate to rebuke our enemies in whatever manner I see as best fit to achieve our goals, up to and including turning their entire reality into an endless terrifying nightmare from which there is no hope of escape outside of utter capitulation. If you’re familiar with these two examples, consider my position as being essentially George Bush’s “we’ll respond in a time and manner of our choosing”, heavily seasoned with Frank J. Flemming’s “Nuke the Moon” foreign policy recommendations.

10. If you could have five minutes with Obama, what would you tell him?

Unless it is as part of my transition team’s efforts, I would probably pass on the opportunity. I seriously doubt I could change his views on anything and there would be too great a danger my words or actions might not reflect well upon me, too great a chance my fallible human nature might eclipse the command I’m under to show grace and love to all. And flying tackles by Secret Servicemen hurt. Believe me, I have a history here. Who hasn’t said things in anger that were hypocritically contrary to their own beliefs? I certainly have. And I’d rather avoid the temptation and opportunity to do so again. 

True story: I once walked past former President Bill Clinton, passing within ten feet of him, on the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro. I never even noticed him because I was extremely preoccupied. I’m very comfortable with the idea that God saved me from causing an embarrassing international incident, not to mention potentially facing complicated and protracted legal repercussions. 

Best to just let those five minutes slide.