Carey Wedler is a young liberal who makes videos. She’s very good. But last month she made a video that really annoyed me, Why I’m Burning My Last Bridge With Obama. In it she talks about how disappointed she has been with the president. I’m all for that, even if I personally haven’t been disappointed. I had low expectation. I knew that he was a typical, cautious, centrist Democrat. And I also knew that like all presidents of either party, whatever he had said during the campaign about privacy and the farcical “war on terror,” it would vanish just as soon as the career spooks got at him. But as Democratic presidents go, he’s about par, and from an absolute standard, that’s pretty bad.
So I forgive Wedler for being young and idealistic, thinking that all that “Hope & Change” rhetoric was something more than the poetry of elections. And her complaints are valid. She does an excellent job of running down what’s wrong with Obama’s term in office:
I would disagree with a couple of these and I would go further on others, but it’s a good list. And it is a sad but true reality that part of growing up involves developing a certain amount of cynicism. But Obama didn’t perpetrate the kind of bait and switch she suggests. He was very clear during the campaign that he was no radical. And he certainly never claimed that liberals should just sit back and relax while he fixed the world. So her response to his election is totally unacceptable:
What’s more, it is simply wrong to say that Obama has become exactly like George Bush, but I will allow that he isn’t different enough. So as a protest, Wedler burns her “Obama Is My Homeboy” t-shirt. I’m all for protests. But she goes on with a rant that combines hippy free love with the looniest of libertarianism. And sadly, I don’t get the impression that she realizes that she’s doing this.
The “both parties are the same” argument is an argument for everything that I suspect Wedler hates. If there is no difference between the parties, then there is no point to voting. And if Wedler and her generation don’t vote, we can depend upon people like Ted Cruz getting elected. The hope of democracy is not that a great candidate will get elected and fix all of our problems. The hope is that enough decent people vote that we can make steps — every person, every policy, every day — to improve the country. If our political expectations are going to be “all or nothing,” then what we will get is nothing. Actually, we will get worse. The modern Republican Party isn’t for keeping things the same. They want to make things worse.
If I could talk to Wedler, I would tell her that her issue videos are great. But what we need right now, is a video to tell people to vote. Maybe she could run her Obama t-shirt burn video backwards. Because Obama is far from ideal, but he is much better than all the Republicans who will get elected in November if young people like her don’t vote.
Afterword
Also: people like Wedler should be out taking over their local Democratic Party operations. They should be running for local office. That’s where the world is changed!
Except she’s not a liberal in any modern sense of the word. She’s a libertarian anarchist who understands that government is inherently flawed and people’s rights shouldn’t be up for a vote in the first place.
@Chris – She [i]was[/i] an Obama voter who thought that he would solve all the nation’s problems.
And the term is not "libertarian anarchist." It is "individualist anarchist." And I don’t get that she is that at all. She seems more like a "social anarchist." I think you are reading a lot into what she thinks based upon your own political philosophy. I’ve rarely met a libertarian who didn’t think libertarianism was hugely popular. Hence the highly skewed LP test where just about everyone scores as a libertarian. And all you are saying in this brief comment is that democracy is mob rule.
I don’t have time to debate every libertarian who comes by here. Search "libertarian" in the box above. I’m sure I’ve spent more time thinking about the subject than any of the many libertarians who come here.
Carey, I will not label you a liberal, a self-hating Jew.I don’t know you and I will not judge you on the basis of a one or two videos I have watched of you ranting about the injustices in the world. I refer specifically to you "How I became a self-hating Jew" a title which is ambiguous, depending on how you look at it. In your very immature video you are clearly blaming others for calling you a Jew hater. Yet your sad video does exactly that: It portrays you as a Jew hater because you spent 10 minutes debasing Israel as an aggressive, inhumane country that murders Arabs. I wonder Carey if you have ever been to Israel. I doubt it, because if you had, you would be a lot more informed than you obviously are. I also doubt that you know that in 1947 the Jews agreed to a partition of Israel which the Arabs rejected – they wanted the whole country and us out of it. The Arabs also started the 1948 War Of Independence, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War and it was Hamas that began the current war in Gaza by throwing rockets into Israel unprovoked. In 2005 Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip, uprooting dozens of Israeli towns in a very painful process of compromise. The Gazans were given a chance to thrive and become the Sigapore of the Middle East, but Hamas came to power (basically by coercing Gazans to vote for them) and turned it into a dangerous underground terror of hell with one very clear objective which is openly stated in the Hamas charter: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE. Carey, Israel is not perfect – it has its weaknesses like every other country, but one thing it has tried to do in all its history, is live peacefully with its neighbors. I live among Arabs Carey. They work in my local pharmacy, supermarkets, hospitals,hi-tech, universities. The Palestinians in Gaza have been sadly and corruptly used as a political pawn for decades. And why? Because that way, peace-loving people like yourself buy into the terror propaganda machine of Hamas. ISIS,the Muslim Brotherhood to perpetuate the very terror that they propagate. Have you ever asked yourself Carey why Israel is a successful, progressive country, while most of people in the 32 Arab countries that surround it live in fear and squalor? I will tell you why.It is because the Jews 1. believe in life, not death; 2. The Jews put their terrible past of the Holocaust and Jewish persecution behind them and moved on to create and build; the Jews take responsibility for their own destiny and do not blame other peoples for their woes and failures; The Jews have historically been a peaceful people that have put their energies into a better future rather than putting their energies into hating and blaming others as radical Islam does. In your video you say "Ok, so Hamas is a terrorist organization and that is bad, but that doesn’t justify Israel killing Palestinians" Carey, the fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization ends and stops there! There are no buts. These people are pure evil in forms you have never faced in your nice cozy, terror free life. Carey, you do not have to love Israel.You do not have to be proud that you are Jewish. No one can make another love anything. But please stop endorcing a terror organization that would get no greater pleasure than kill you because you have Jewish roots. Terror cannot be overcome with talks and concessions and appeasement. Those things can work in a peaceful world. They are the stuff of a peaceful world. But terror organizations, specifically radical Islam spits peace in the face. The word of Allah to spread Islam at all costs is all that matters to these people. Don’t buy into it. You and I and Israel and all other democratic people ARE better than them because we have moral values, respect for others who are not like us. Terror groups need to be wiped with the same force that they came to power, and Israel has had no choice in this war but to respond with fire to this madness. I live with my family in Israel. Life is hard here, a lot of stress and it’s not easy to make a living. But Israel is a wonderful, moral country with incredible people and there is nowhere else in the world where I could possibly become a better person than I can here. Feel free to write to me.
@melanie shapiro – First, I don’t understand how someone who writes as well as you can decide that no paragraphs are necessary in this long comment. Second, I don’t know Carey Wedler and she almost certainly hasn’t read this article. Third, the video you are talking about is [i]not[/i] the one I was talking about. Four, you need to tone it down. Five, your argument has no nuance and sounds like it comes from a lobbyist.
I’m just sad when I read things like, "You and I and Israel and all other democratic people ARE better than [they] because we have moral values, respect for others who are not like us." The same thing was said about "radical Zionists" in the last century. Such talk does no one any good.
You are most welcome to comment away. But please try to comment on what is written here. I understand that a search of "Carey Wedler" brings this article up on the first page of Google. But this isn’t a post office.