The PE Un-Dorsements White Paper Version

Looking over last night's endorsements and un-dorsements, I realized that I buried both un-dorsements at the end of exceedingly long posts. Since the un-dorsements are in many ways more important to me than the endorsements, I reprint a revised version of them both here in white paper length.

First up: The Republicans.

Mitt Romney must be stopped. He is the logical successor to all that is wrong with the Bush-Cheney administration, as Sully notes.

There are many, many reasons for this un-dorsement: His repeated assertion that the most important civil liberty you get "from" the government is the right to life; his perpetual flip-flopping on social issues; his outright meanness; his refusal to say whether he thought waterboarding is torture; his love of an L. Ron Hubbard novel; his pandering on economic policy questions; his nanny-statism on video games; his abuse of dogs; his Ken Doll roboticism; his exemption of atheists and agnostics from the concept of American freedom. Get the picture?

There's probably not a single area of agreement he has with libertarians at this point. He has a very good chance to win the nomination, and probably would have a shot against Hillary or Edwards. But most important of all, the only thing he seems sincere about is obtaining power for himself; he will say anything in front of any audience, as long as he thinks it's what they want to hear. Which means not only is he inclined towards authoritarianism, but it's also impossible to know what kind of authoritarian he'd be. But my guess is that he'd just be a younger, tanner version of Cheney- except he'd actually BE the President.

Next, the Democrats:

Obviously this came down to Hillary or Edwards: the cynical triangulator with the sense of entitlement vs. the dapper class-warfare populist. Both of them love to attack the "special interests," but their definition of "special interests" just means "groups that don't and won't support me." In other words, both define anyone who disagrees with them out of existence as a legitimate opponent.
In the end, Hillary gets the un-dorsement, though:

1. The possibility of 20 consecutive years of Bush-Clinton is too much to bear

2. Executive power is the most important issue to me in this election; on that issue, she would be every bit as bad as Bush-Cheney; where Obama would largely decentralize the political process, the unitary executive under Hillary would become massive. While I suspect Edwards wouldn't be much better on this issue ideologically, I also don't think he'd be able to get away with it in the way Hillary could.

3. She is in the running for the "Person Whose Voice Most Makes My Skin Crawl" Award. This is not merely an aversion to her voice, mind you; instead, it is a combination of her way of speaking ("Ack!ACK!Ackackack!ACKACK!"), the insincerity with which she does it, and the holier-than-thou attitude that underlies it. If I had to choose between listening to her speak for an hour and listening to Bill O'Reilly speak for an hour, I would probably choose to just get waterboarded for an hour.

So to any Dems who might be listening out there: for the love of all that is good and right in the world, please, PLEASE vote for anyone but her.