Jim, here's what's wrong with your adulation of HC: it assumes that the kind of ambition which would have planned for and gotten Bill the Plumber to the White House is desirable in a president. It hasn't worked out that well for the current charlatan, has it? And there is no denying his titanic ambition.
I don't suppose any president realistically since the end of Thomas Jefferson's 2nd term hasn't had an ambition for the job. Maybe we can exclude Harry Truman for his first term which was really FDR's last. But there are some whose ambition is so titanic and so graceless that they should never be trusted with the job. Obama is certainly an example of that, and Hillary Clinton seems to be too, if your apocryphal story is true.
I admire a modest ambition in a person. It means that they are willing to do, within the boundaries of moral behavior, the things necessary to accomplish a goal. I despise a burning ambition in a person. It means they are willing to accomplish their goals by whatever means necessary. Poor old Vince Foster.
You mentioned a predilection for progressivism, and your disappointment with Obama that he isn't progressive enough (
)? How do you square your progressivism with THIS STEAMING PILE OF IGNORANCE (progressive.org on gun control)? And if that link is an indicator of progressivism's stand on the right to keep and bear arms, how do you square that with your belief that you have a right to keep and bear arms? After all, if it is your right to hunt that you want to preserve, you can hunt with a bow or a spear. If it is your right to self-defense you are worried about, you can defend yourself with a knife or a club............and you don't even need a permit to carry any of these items.The Founders may have differed on some things, federalism versus anti-federalism for instance, but I would sure like to be shown, because I haven't seen it yet, where any of them believed in redistributive economic "justice," or a ginormous grasping federal government with tens of thousands of laws creating fees as barriers to success, and penalties for achieving it, let alone any laws specific to controlling/limiting/regulating the ownership and use of firearms. There is a vast difference between Classical Liberalism—the bastion of individual human liberty envisioned by the Founders and enshrined in our Constitution—and Progressivism's core belief that humanity needs to be managed by a self-defined ruling class which believes itself, by right, to be intellectually destined for directing the affairs of men......and that the repayment for their "self-sacrifice" is that, while all men are created equal, some are just a little bit more equal than the others.
George Orwell hit progressivism's nail squarely on the head when he wrote "Animal Farm." From where I sit as a libertarian leaning conservative, Obama is a progressive to the core, and HC is Obama with a head injury. You cannot realistically deny the truth that if either one were actually crowned by divine right and given all authority to rule this country with opposition, and to do anything they wanted to according their evil progressive notions, YOUR right to carry a handgun, let alone to own one, or even to own a hunting firearm, would be thrown right out the window (unless you were a member of the ruling elite). It is a right that neither of them choose to exercise themselves, and so it has no value to either of them.
Here's another difficult truth for you...... The reason Obama has been a disappointment to hardcore progressives like yourself is that it is entirely one thing to talk a lot of smack on the campaign trail about what you're going to do when you're in office, and it is entirely another thing when you have to actually report to work on the morning after your inauguration and suddenly realize that the Constitution is a huge stumbling block to your dreams of paternalistic rule—that you have to figure out ways to convince other equally determined elected Americans who stand in direct philosophical opposition to your progressivism to agree to your distinctly un-American agenda. You come to realize that, despite your narcissist expectations, fully HALF of the American people despise what you stand for, and you can't just ride roughshod like a king over their expectations. You become aware that guns aren't just a "crime problem," but that hundreds of millions of them are in the hands of a hundred million people who are NOT going to just lay down and let you be a king over them. You become aware of just how little you actually know about how the military works, and that you actually have the power of life and death in your hands over the lives of American citizens who are going to actually die because of your decisions, and that if you actually fulfill your campaign promises about Iraq and Afghanistan, that they might die in greater numbers........so you become quite a bit more cautious about your timelines. All those promises you made to your base suddenly become difficult if not impossible to fulfill BECAUSE HALF OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ACTUALLY REJECT THEIR IMPLEMENTATION.
What makes you think that it would be any different for HC?
