The time has come for the Liberal Democracts to pick their pony to run in the next horse race, and as one would expect, those Liberals are checking the teeth and the gums of those ponies, and they are attempting to find the pony with the highest moral and ethical standards. You will hear comments such as, 'I think that out of all the potential candidates, John Edwards has the highest ethical standards and therefore he is probably the one who is most likely to do what is right, and will not give us the shaft as has so often been the case with poilticians in the past.'
The American Liberal truly is a backwards creature, for apparently they think that they can place a 'good Democrat' into power, and then, voila, that politician will begin to make ethical decisions. As for the Republicans, the partisan charges being leveled by those Democrats are that the Republicans are unethical and have no moral values, which is the root cause of the problem.
This form of political analysis is quite infantile, for the truth of the matter is that politicians operate while wearing a straight jacket which is supplied by the system of the status quo, and for that reason politicians always have a narrow range of options. As it turns out as that system decays and gets more and more bogged down by the historical dead weight of its past contradictions, the range of options available to any politician becomes ever more narrow, and at the end of it all the only options available to even the most ethical candidate are evil options.
Therefore we can see that American politics has degenerated to the point that all political debate must now center on which of two evil policy options was the lesser of two evils. Now it must be accepted that no matter what some American poiltician does these days it will be an evil deed, so what we need to decide is which evil deed would be the lesser of the evil options currently available to John Edwards or any other ethical politician, Republican or Democrat, who must, out of neccesity, throw his moral values out of the window once he gets into office and start practicing evil policies which will naturally enough deeply disappoint and even deeply anger the voters of the country.
Let us consider a few simple examples. Now we know that under a competitive system like capitalism, when one capitalist goes to China to exploit real cheap labor, soon enough the rest of the herd must follow and at the end of it all there will be a stampede. The option is to compete by laying off Americans and moving to China, or go bankrupt. Now the evil policy options available to a politician in a straight jacket are to allow the 'free market' to work its wonderful magic, which is gutting the American economy, or perhaps a very ethical politician could put up trade barriers and tarifs. However America has a trade deficit and needs to export, and so therefore America cannot afford to start a trade war. Therefore, given that we are thinking in terms of that status quo system, where moral and ethical values are of no real concern to us, we must now ask ourselves which, out of these two evil options, should a politician choose to implement.
Let us consider another simple example. America needs to compete and so therefore America needs to deal with its shrinking manufacturing base by exporting more products on the international markets. This would require a much lower dollar. That will spur exports and close the trade gap. However, now the Europeans are bitching that they are now losing exports because of the high Euro and they are saying that they are losing patience with being the ones being forced to pay the price to fix what is wrong in the American economy. As the European econmomies continue to stagnate, eventually they will want less American exports, which will screw up that plan. So once again our politicians must not think about moral and ethical values, but they must roll up their sleeves and choose between two evil policies with ruinous consequences, and then whatever ruination comes upon the country later can be blamed by backbiting partisans and the unethical behavior of whatever politician made whatever choice was deemed immoral or unethical, thus causing the disaster that followed.
You can easily see just how backwards and ignorant this quasi religious thought style is when you remember that the problems in that system are going to produce an evil result one way or the other.
