As a legally naturalized citizen of these United States, and a trained disciple of the cult of big government, my first thought upon reading an article stating that the world would prefer a President Obama was why the hell should I care what choice the rest of the world would make if they got to cast a ballot.

The answer is simple. The U.S. government makes a habit of forcing itself and its policies on the world. Democrats have done it. Republicans certainly do it. The world is quite aware of it. Whether you were born in Kosovo, Mogadishu or Baghdad, you might feel you have a stake in who becomes the next U.S. president. After all, the decision may determine whether or not your family gets bombed in the middle of the night. Americans don’t have to worry about that (yet).

The longer I study U.S. history the more clear it becomes that the United States government has acted as an agression machine far longer than I have been alive. As a part of that factory of forced policy (a national guardsman) I would much prefer that the federal behemoth shrink to the point where I don’t have to worry about which war I’ll be fighting next. Make no mistake, some wars are probably unavoidable. I am not a fan of rushing headlong into as many as possible. That’s something only a complete idiot would embrace.

Yet there seems to be no shortage of complete idiots. We also seem to have an overabdundance of men and women willing to use force to make others comply with ideas that start off well intentioned and almost always turn into unmitigated and poorly managed disasters.

If the world prefers Obama, who am I to tell them they have no say? It seems to me that they do.

It’s true that Barack Obama loves guns. But only for the privileged politician and bureaucrat classes. You see, without guns, the bureaucrats would get a lot less cooperation fighting all the wars they are engaged in. Gun control is not about protecting us from each other. Gun control is about protecting bureaucrats from their subjects.

You don’t have to go back that far to find Obama taking an extreme stance against gun rights. In 2004, while running for the U.S. Senate, he promised to bar citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits. The Chicago Tribune reported then that Obama “backed federal legislation that would ban citizens from carrying weapons, except for law enforcement.” Obama explained his plan to pre-empt state concealed-carry laws with a federal bill: “National legislation,” Obama said at the time, “will prevent other states’ flawed concealed-weapons laws from threatening the safety of Illinois residents.”

For a man who doesn’t know me to arrogantly make assumptions about my level of competence and tell me I am not allowed to defend myself is morally wrong. Government has lots of guns. Why can’t I have guns?

The assumption is that government is more responsible with guns than regular people. Prove it. How many individuals have declared war on a country and killed millions of its citizens? Take away every gun regulation. The equation would remain exactly the same. People would still go crazy from time to time without thousands of gun regulations. Some of them would still get access to guns. If all the guns were gone, they would use a car, or poison your food and water, or devise some other method. The mentality a society teaches its citizens is much more important than the rules it writes down in books.

Maybe you could care less about guns. Maybe your pet issue is social injustice. Fine. Let’s talk about that.

The basic problem with government is that it doesn’t actually solve problems. It manages them.

Name one of the social injustices that government has declared war and won. War on Poverty? Nope. We’re nowhere near winning that one. War on Drugs? Nope. Drug use is up. Doesn’t matter if you look at illegal substances or prescription abuse. Not winning. That particular boondoggle isn’t going away anytime soon. War on Terror? The term itself is asinine. The program isn’t designed to stop terror. It’s designed to make us all very afraid. Of real and imagined boogeymen, some of whom wear government issued uniforms and lord it over you at the airport, border crossings and increasingly, on your city streets. We’re not winning the War on Terror and we never will because you cannot wage war on something as broad as “terror” - the whole idea is idiotic.

Finally, the most important war the government is fighting. I see the bureaucrats making a great deal of progress in that particular campaign. The War on Intelligence is moving right along. No, they aren’t winning per se. But the federal government has certainly managed to dumb us down since it took over educating us in 1979. No Child Left Behind has to be one of the most intelligence damning pieces of legislation ever written. The Idiocracy is coming. We’re 23rd in math and 16th in science. Under the management of FedGov, those numbers are sure to get bigger.

Let’s get back to our next President Mr. Obama and his worldview for a moment.

He has promised to pick guardians of the Constitution who do not respect gun rights and believe that a comprehensive ban on gun ownership is consistent with the second amendment.

Senator Obama has a history of projecting a misleading moderation in his politics — and he does it very smoothly. According to his biographer, David Mendell, one of Senator Barack Obama’s greatest political virtues is “his ingenious lack of specificity. . . . While talking or writing about a deeply controversial subject, he considers all points of view before cautiously giving his own often risk-averse assessment, an opinion that often appears so universal that people of various viewpoints would consider it their own.”

It is my belief that Barack Obama has no interest in solving my problems. That’s good because I don’t want him to solve my problems either. The tricky part is that I don’t even want him to manage my problems. They are my problems, and I’ll deal with them.

Mr. Obama when you become President all I want you to do is leave me alone to live my life. I have the audacity to hope you’ll end the four unwinnable wars your predecessors have been managing so poorly in direct violation of the Constitution they swore to uphold. Let the states handle social issues. Let me handle my business. You worry about protecting our borders and getting us out of all those ill advised foreign police duties we’ve assigned ourselves over the last 60 years or so. I’ll worry about running my own life, saving for retirement, choosing which medicine and medical treatment is best for me, picking what kind of gun I want to keep for personal defense, educating my kids and living as long and as healthy as I can. I don’t need help managing any of that stuff, please and thanks. The more rules you try to make me follow in my day to day routine the less likely it is I’ll cooperate with you. Hint: the same rule of thumb applies to people in other countries. Most people who didn’t ask to be managed don’t appreciate it when you decide they need managing.

I appreciate your taking a moment to consider this American’s viewpoint.

Someone named “Spengler” writes an interesting article entitled: Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess.

Again, the Russians misjudge American stupidity. Former president Ronald Reagan used to say that if there was a pile of manure, it must mean there was a pony around somewhere. His epigones have trouble distinguishing the pony from the manure pile. The ideological reflex for promoting democracy dominates the George W Bush administration to the point that some of its senior people hold their noses and pretend that Kosovo, Ukraine and Georgia are the genuine article.

What an interesting supposition. The author is saying that the Bush Administration is playing “fake it till you make it” - a dangerous game because a lot of those who play make believe never actually achieve the reality of their fantasy. Believing you are free and actually being free are two different things.

We all play political games in life. Nation-states play these games with rulebooks, guns and lives in ascending order.

Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by “war games” is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers’ pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America’s idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a “moderate Muslim” government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent’s king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life, like Ingmar Bergman’s crusader in The Seventh Seal.

So one side is fighting for “freedom” using Monopoly rules. The other side is fighting for “survival” using chess rules. As usual, the pawns are dying while the politicians move the pieces around on the boards. All we can count on is continued upheaval in former vassal states of the USSR. As usual, America will seed these conflicts by playing the world’s SuperNanny™ at our taxpayers’ expense.

Today, Mikheil Saakashvili has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal wherein he expounds on the reasons the West should intervene in the conflict.

On Friday, hundreds of Russian tanks crossed into Georgian territory, and Russian air force jets bombed Georgian airports, bases, ports and public markets. Many are dead, many more wounded. This invasion, which echoes Afghanistan in 1979 and the Prague Spring of 1968, threatens to undermine the stability of the international security system.

AP

An apartment building, damaged by a Russian air strike, in the northern Georgian town of Gori, Saturday, Aug. 9.

Why this war? This is the question my people are asking. This war is not of Georgia’s making, nor is it Georgia’s choice.

The Kremlin designed this war. Earlier this year, Russia tried to provoke Georgia by effectively annexing another of our separatist territories, Abkhazia. When we responded with restraint, Moscow brought the fight to South Ossetia.

Ostensibly, this war is about an unresolved separatist conflict. Yet in reality, it is a war about the independence and the future of Georgia. And above all, it is a war over the kind of Europe our children will live in. Let us be frank: This conflict is about the future of freedom in Europe.

I understand the yearning for freedom. I have it too. And I have a different perspective than most on what freedom is. You see, I don’t believe the West is all that free.

Georgia (the country) used to be a part of the USSR. Georgia (the state) is a part of the United States and happens to be my state of residence. If most Georgians today decided that the United States didn’t represent the type of government they wanted and declared independence by seceding from the United States of America, I think the same thing that is happening in Georgia would happen in the United States. I’m certain that the federal government of the U.S. would use force to keep a member state from declaring independence. That’s not freedom.

When Mikheil Saakashvili asks for the West to intercede in Georgia he is just trading one master for another. Perhaps one master is gentler than the other, and maybe existence under that other master is more tolerable. And that might be OK for some people. It’s not enough to satisfy me.

A truly free society always emphasizes as wide a range of choices as possible. That is not what the West offers, although it may offer more choices than Russia is most matters, it is still a master. Georgia will not be independent in the foreseeable future, anymore than South Ossetia has been. Georgia is a pawn in larger struggles between Western authoritarians and Russian authoritarians.

The most powerful thing about independence is a that it is a state of mind that the state cannot defeat. Have you really thought about your state of mind? Or the state you live in? Or the range of choices available to you in life? War can visit anyplace, at anytime. Are you mentally ready to fight the important battles? Do you even know what is important to you?

Citizens of Tbilisi are being asked by the government to shelter in the subway. Apparently Russian attacks are anticipated.

The evacuation of strategic points and main state structures has been launched.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs confirmed to InterpressNews the above mentioned information.
The evacuation of the vicinity of Avlabari district has begun as well. The civilians, living in Avlabari district are being taken away from the district. As is well-known, the residence of the President of Georgia is located in Avlabari.
The evacuation of the Ministry of Defense and the vicinity of it is being carried out. The civilians are called to seek shelter in Metro station.

The country of Georgia’s entire population is only 5 million people, less than the metro Atlanta area of the U.S. state of Georgia. Russia, the other combatant, has a population of 150 million.

Not much of a contest.

The reasoning for Georgia’s initiation of the current conflict may be based in Iraq, and in the fact that Georgia was coaxed into participation in the ill named Global War on Terror.

Georgia has about 2,000 troops in Iraq, making it the third-largest contributor to coalition forces after the U.S. and Britain.

It is aggressively lobbying to join NATO, a campaign that has infuriated a Kremlin loath to see its former vassal state slip further away from the former Soviet sphere of influence.

One analyst suggested Georgia’s unexpected assault may have been
rooted as much in a sense that its NATO bid was faltering as in
antagonism with Russia.

Earlier this year, NATO quashed Georgia’s drive to get a so-called
road map for alliance membership amid alarm that President Mikhail
Saakashvili was backtracking on democracy with his violent suppression
last year of opposition rallies.

Georgia got assurances that it could eventually join, but “this
pushed Georgia into a philosophy of self-reliance — the idea that
Georgia will be able to regain breakaway entities only by its own
means,” said Nicu Popescu of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

What do I know? I served alongside Georgian troops in Baghdad’s Green Zone in 2005 and 2006. Russia has been posturing. South Ossetia has broken away. Georgia is testing to see what the West will do. Another potential war for U.S. troops to engage in. As if two wasn’t enough. I’m pretty sure Iranians are watching the developing events with great interest, as are many others in the region.