Me thinks thou doth protest too much...

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney has certainly been pounding the news circuit lately, going out of his way to bash Barack Obama's policies in handling the terrorist threat facing America. It seems we've seen more of him in the last month than we did in the last eight years. He's found a receptive audience among some Republicans, who think he's probably right, and some Democrats, who are, in part, hanging their hopes on Cheney's polarizing rhetoric to insure their control of the White House in 2012.

Some of us are having a hard time reconciling Cheney's thinking. Outside of having a different party in control of the presidency, the policies haven't changed all that much.

Gene Healy, of the CATO Institute, made some interesting observations in this article. Among other things, Healy points out that:

"Either way, the claim that Obama has abandoned "essential tools" in the fight against terror is wearing pretty thin. Real civil libertarians aren't fooled by Obama's "kinder, gentler" rhetoric, but Obama knows that civil libertarians are a miniscule voting block. His aim is to convince Democratic voters that he's kept his promises to change Bush's draconian approach to the war on terror.

In this, Dick Cheney is an enormous asset to the president. As Obama quietly adopts the Bush policies, Cheney gives him cover by loudly insisting that there's a meaningful difference here."

Whether in foreign or domestic policy, Libertarians have long maintained that there isn't a nickels worth of difference in the two major parties. Hopefully by 2012 that miniscule voting block will get a little bigger.

Great Expectations...

My youngest brother is a missionary with Christ's Hope in Kenya. He reports a lot of native Kenyans are convinced their lives are going to get much better now that Barack Obama has been elected the next President of the United States. On the other side of the coin, I know a few people that are convinced the world is coming to an end now that Barack Obama has been elected the next President of the United States.

There's also a rush by a lot of people to buy firearms. Apparently they believe guns are going to become harder to get once Obama takes office. Given John McCain's less than stellar defense of our Second Amendment protections, I'm not sure how many of these same people would have went out purchased weapons had he won the election. Not near as many, I suspect.

Now, I don't know what's going to happen in Kenya, although I suspect the people there will be better off due to the efforts of people like my brother than because of the election of Barack Obama. And I'm not as giddy as the Obama supporters who view him as a savior, or as worried as the opponents who believe that policies as they envision them are going to change drastically.

I think we'll see the total amount of taxes that some people pay will increase, and the total amount of taxes that some people pay decrease. I think we'll see a different direction in how our tax dollars are redistributed, and I think we'll see a push for some expensive programs we can't afford to be added to the already existing expensive programs we can't afford. Hopefully most won't make it.

I also think in the next 4 years the Republican party will move to adopt a lot of the liberal policies that helped Barack Obama win the election, and in 4 or 8 years, the 4% of the voters that decide national elections will probably put another big government Republican in for President.

And after it all shakes out, the Libertarians that want a limited government will have a little bit bigger fight on their hands, a few more reasons to fight, and a few more allies in the fight.