Arthur Brandoch Darwin Petersen: I am a single issue voter

I didn’t vote for Bush – but neither did I vote against him! This will be the first year I’ll actually take part in the democratic process. I was mostly in favor of Mitt Romney, but about a week or two before he conceded I changed to McCain.

Why? I have decided I am a single issue voter.

Well, sort of.

Some may think it involves more than one issue - depending on how you define the scope of the issue.

I vote for life.

I have found a correlation between all of the issues I feel are the most important in politics, and they can be summed up by the concept that I believe things should be done by those in power to prevent the loss of human life.

Here are the issues I hold dear:

The war on terror

After 9/11 I understood that states who sponsor terrorism are a threat to America. State sponsors of terrorism are empirically a threat to dozens of non-state sponsors on a regular basis, yet those countries are rarely mentioned in the terrorist organizations’ much offered rhetoric about how the US is the great satan and that they seek our destruction.

Based upon the over 10,534 Islamic terrorist attacks in over 56 countries since the 21^st century began, I am forced to take them at their word that they will kill me if they can! [A]

Abortion

Maybe more than 20 million children have been murdered since 1973. [B]

The two opposing possibilities of an abortion are:

a dead child and a living woman; or a living child and a woman who went through the inconvenience and pain and other unwanted aspects of pregnancy.

The right to life of a child outweighs the right to have the convenience to kill your child. I have yet to hear a rational response to that statement.

Exportation of Democracy

The more democracy in the world, the less death by huge magnitudes.
RJ Rummel, who has been studying the effects of Democracies on the world for over twenty years claims that:

Between 1816 and 2005 there have been 0 wars between two democracies, whereas there have been 166 wars between democracies and non-democracies and 205 wars between two non-democracies.
In the 20^th century there were 0 famines among democracies, but 86 million people were killed by famines inside non-democratic countries.
262,000,000 people were killed in the 20^th century by democide and domestic violence. The vast majority occurred within non-democratic countries. [C]

Gun rights

Those who would kill do not need guns to kill. Those who would save lives by legally carrying a gun to protect oneself and others usually need a gun to do so. Guns save lives in America. A recent example is Jeanne Assam’s gun which saved dozens of lives in Colorado last December.

The issues of today that I don’t care so much about are generally not about death.

I have not yet taken any strong position on illegal immigration.
I have opinions about universal health care, but know little about it.
I think the economy should be strong, but I’m not too concerned about differences in candidates because I don’t believe the president has as much effect on the economy as people think.
Global warming efforts may hurt the economy, which concerns me, but not as much as death. Deaths caused by global warming are too far in the future to concern me now (especially if by that time we find ways to avert it).

One exception might be capital punishment. It involves death, but I don’t have an extremely strong opinion about it. My relevant belief is that those who murder must be completely isolated from society until they die. If that involves executing them, so be it.

So why McCain?

Because he is a strong supporter of the war on terror and would put justices on the bench who are pro-life.

Both Hillary and Barack say that they will withdraw troops regardless of the consequences. How demagogic!

By the time one of them is president it could well be that it is time for nearly all our troops to come home. But to make an ultimatum that they must come home before even knowing if American or Iraqi lives will be at stake is so incredibly irresposible that I cannot even consider either of them as a real candidate. If I agreed with every single other thing they said I would still not vote for them.

What would the words coming out of their mouth be if the violence drastically increases after a premature pullout in Iraq?

“Sorry that because of me more people died in 2009 than any other year, but I have my principles – I said I’d pullout and I meant it!”

I thought that the idea of opposing the war was because it is costing American lives, Iraqi lives, and American dollars.

Apparently Hillary and Barack aren’t pondering too much about these potential risks to American lives, Iraqi lives and the billions of dollars America will spend over years and years to a struggling Iraq slowly being taken over by terrorists and desperately needing our help in the form of money through USAID.

If these are not potential risks in 2009, then by all means, pull out our troops. But if these are possibilities – which they are currently – then it means Barack and Hillary are too irresponsible to be the leaders of the free world.

Don’t vote for a demagogue.

One similarity between Vietnam and Iraq is that both wars were militarily won, but popularly, or by choice, lost. Finishing what we started in both cases will prevent death.

Let me explain in three seconds what I mean:

Tet Offensive 1968.

On January 30, a holiday (during a holiday truce, no less), the NVA smashed down with a huge assault into all the major cities and provinces of South Vietnam. It took America less than a month to recapture all the cities. This was the final push of the NVA, they were at the end of their ropes and would not be able to fight much longer. A few months later, the North Vietnamese realized they could not possibly win the war through military means, so they hoped that public opinion in the US would be swayed. It was. We began pulling out shortly thereafter.

After the Vietnam War 65,000 people were executed by the government, and 1,000,000 people were in detention camps and prison for political reasons until 1978 (when they were released). [D]

1,670,000 democides are attributed to Vietnam’s government. [E]. If support for that war had been different, it is highly likely that that figure would be significantly smaller.

If we prematurely retreat from Iraq the death toll will not wither away.

An interesting note on abortion.

The book Freakonomics argues that because abortion was made legal and more available in 1973, crime went down drastically in the 1990’s. That’s great.
But only a negligibly small fraction of all of those children who were aborted would have been involved in murder had they lived.

Sources

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks

http://www.pregnantpause.org/numbers/abortgen.htm

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html

http://www.ichiban1.org/html/history/1975_present_postwar/the_aftermath_1975_1978.htm

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM