I was watching Larry King Live tonight and Penn Jillette made the claim that you should vote for the person whose ideas and policies match yours the best. I was ok with that. Until he emphasized that competency shouldn’t come into it.

I don’t know if Penn supports McCain or Obama, or if perhaps he’s going to write in Ron Paul to assuage his Libertarian leanings, but his comment on voting from ideals implies to me that he’s going for McCain/Palin and the only way to intellectually justify that was for him to say “vote for ideals, not capability.” (Of course, if that was his rationalization, he probably should have also looked at the extreme religious views of Palin, which would likely disqualify her in his mind)

I respect Penn Jillette, because Penn and Teller: Bullshit is a great show. I don’t agree with everything they say on their show, but on the balance it’s a public service that they talk about these things that tend to go unnoticed or unchallenged. That said, I think that voting exclusively from ideals is lunacy.

Now obviously policies matter. If you’re a strict Libertarian, you’ll probably never vote for someone who wants to increase the size of government or introduce anything remotely socialistic, but that doesn’t mean you should vote for the incompetent guy just because he wants to give you a tax cut. I’m just saying, let’s not be idealogues about this. There are numerous things that should factor into any decision you make, and the decision as to who will lead your nation for the next four years especially should not be so oversimplified.