Partisan Hypocrisy: At Least the Right Wing is Less Stupid About It

Democratic would-be presidential candidates Beto O'Rourke and Pete Buttigieg have been floating plans to Make America Suck Slightly Less by bringing back slavery -- sorry, "mandatory national service" for young adults. The thing that baffles me most about these renewed calls for mandatory national service – and I know, this is basically a rehash of previous complaints I've made regarding “calls for gun control” and “calls for anti-hate-speech laws” – is this: both left- and right-wingers in America have a tendency to replace principles with partisan political hackery, but for all their hypocrisy, at least right-wingers are generally smart enough to ONLY call for increased government power when “their guys” are in charge: we've all known people who (for example) supported every government power-grab under G.W. Bush, rediscovered their “small government, personal liberty” principles within nanoseconds of Obama taking the oath of office, then re-abandoned said principles when Trump took over.

Not the left wingers, though. During the Bush/Cheney years they were all “Aargh! Bush and Cheney are turning this country into a fascist dictatorship!” (Pause.) “I wish those would-be fascist dictators would hurry up and confiscate everyone's guns, because agents of this fascist government I so fear are CLEARLY the only ones who can be trusted to own any means of self-defense.” And now? The left wingers are the ones calling for “mandatory service” or “the government should pass hate speech laws and decide what people can and cannot legally say.” Which would be cringeworthy enough coming from them if St. Obama the Trustworthy were still in the Oval Office – but FFS, how farking clueless do you have to be to think “Yeah, Trump is a terrible president – let's give him even MORE powers to wield! Surely Donald race-baiting 'Some of those Nazis are very fine people' Trump can be trusted to use hate-speech laws to ONLY go after bad guys, right? Surely Donald 'build the wall' Trump can be trusted NOT to abuse a mandatory workforce of millions of young able-bodied Americans, right?”

If you believe President Trump is destroying America (a belief I happen to share), then why in Zod's name would you want to give him even more powers to destroy America with?