Strips

@ Deltargon - I don't like obama - but I don't dislike him enough to say can't stand him - so where should I vote? :p

I'm a Classic European Liberal - which is a term greatly misunderstood by people in the US - simply because in the US the word "Liberal" has a TOTALLY different meaning to in Europe. In the US "Liberal" generally means "big government" - in that the govt. is "Liberal" in it's use of power. In Europe, "Liberal" is used in the sense of "free" - and means "small government" - ie the people are "Liberated" from the oppressions of centralised government. To me - nearly any major US political figure would be a "certainly would not support". Sarah Palin, for instance - All these people in the US seem to think she's some bastion of small government. She's not - she's just right-wing - that's NOT the same thing. Sarah Palin has horrendously authoritarian leanings. True small government means them getting their face out of my private life as well as my company's boardroom - in fact much more importantly so - as to deregulate business totally is simply to had the scepter of corrupt centralised leadership to big companies rather than big government. To a true advocate of freedom, cheating, lying, multinational corporations are as much of an evil as massive, centralised, authoritarian governments. In the US it seems like you guys just get to choose which one of these two corrupt machines rules your public and private life.

As a result - to me - Obama is better than the majority of people I've seen in prominent US political positions - but is in no way "good". Nobody in mainstream political politics in the US seems to have got a handle on how to actually do small government properly. For all their posing about how they are such a bastion of the merits of limited government - as far as I can see they are one of the most authoritarian, centrally-controlled, corrupt, corporate governments in the world - no matter if a democrat or republican is in the oval office. And Palin and her demented tea-party crew are no better. Just making some kind of fetishist obsession with the colonial era and "True America" your focus doesn't change anything. Palin is an authoritarian through and through - and even Ron Paul (who at least makes a decent stab at the small-government ideas in theory) fails to notice that taking power away from the federal government and just giving it to Bill Gates and the stockbrokers doesn't mean people's freedoms are any more respected. Multinational corporations and runaway capitalistic greed are just as likely to abuse people's civil liberties and invade their personal freedoms as centralised federal autocracy is.

At least in the UK we have a valid third party, the Liberal Democrats, making some kind of a case for true limited government, as our two main parties just slug out the same false dichotomy over and over and over again, with nothing really changing.

The governments of the world are gradually moving more and more towards a Chinese-style Autocracy - and the traditions of freedom and liberty are dying, increasingly muddled and buried under the false messiah of "libertarianism" and the outright lies of those total authoritarians in the "tea-party" masquerading as saviours of liberty. In the UK the Liberal Democrats may be dying - crushed by an electorate that gave them some degree of power with, it seems, almost no understanding of what the Liberal Democrats even stand for - the Labour party has long since abandoned its roots and taken up a position in the Stalinist school of government. Mainland Europe is even worse - with these supposed "right-wing" governments in France and Germany abusing civil liberties in and invading personal freedoms in a way that would have made the true founders of their political philosophy shudder. In Australia all the main parties have become authoritarian and just argue and pull each other into the mud over managerial semantics. In Sweden over 70 years of liberal democrat rule was pulled down by a dispute over a pirate music website, and now authoritarian nationalism of an almost nazi-esque zeal is stirring (20 seats to the SD!). And in NZ the wonderfully restrained Labour party (almost the opposite of the UK labour party) has been ousted by a coalition of the more authoritarian National Party and the slavering anti-rational loonies of ACT.

Liberty is dying - all over the "democratic" world voters are increasingly being given a choice between one kind of authoritarianism and another - repressed by poor voting systems or corrupt political traditions. We may look at China and tut-tut-tut - but how long is it before we are just like them?