Bill Gates for President? No Thanks.

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams recently blogged that America needs an atheist and rational thinker for president, and he’s picked Bill Gates. The idea has become a popular subject in technical circles, which are commonly irreligious and tend to be more socially liberal. But as they say: be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

Atheism a Panacea?

The main thrust behind the Bill Gates for President meme is that Gates is an atheist, and America would be better off without a deeply religious fundamentalist running things. However, the main problem with President Bush isn't that he appreciates the political support of people who believe in Jesus.

Instead, Bush is criticized for blindly pursuing strategies that are not working, and representing a corporate political war machine that seeks to establish America as a police state and the Middle East as a protectorate.

Being an atheist does not automatically make a person an effective leader or able to make sound decisions. Plenty of leaders have been driven by their atheism to do things just as horrible as the worst actions ever taken in the name of religion.

Hitler wasn’t deeply religious, yet still effectively used churches to exploit people and gain support for horrendous war crimes.

Stalin and Mao were similarly murderous, and their crimes were actually driven by their atheist ideas. Khmer Rouge mass murderer Pol Pot was also staunchly atheist, as is North Korea's Kim Jong-il. All are *gasp* far worse leaders than Bush.

Bill Gates a Leader?

Bill Gates was a rich kid with well connected parents who hooked him up with a great licensing deal. He's not much of a programmer; nearly all of Microsoft's products were licensed from third parties. His company used the considerable clout gained by leveraging IBM’s mistake and ended up with an empire built upon automatic sales.

While dominating the industry, Gates repressed the advance of technology. He repeatedly promised to deliver the future but never quite did. In 1991, his company promised a new world of Cairo that it never delivered. Ten years later, it promised Longhorn, which similarly pushed through years only to emerge as a fraction of its goal.

We now have Vista, which is NT 6.0. Discounting the 3 versions of Windows prior to NT, it is really NT 3; in 20 years, Microsoft has delivered three freaking significant versions of its modern OS: NT 4, 2000/XP, Vista. That's on the level of what IBM delivered in 5 years of OS/2.

Meanwhile, Microsoft used its position to hold back and or destroy any technologies that pushed the envelope, to ensure everything would be tied to Microsoft's own proprietary standards. It assaulted the open web, Java, Linux, OpenGL, PDF... there is not an open standard Microsoft likes. It even hopes to replace JPEG and MP3.

Gates’ visions include Palladium Trusted Computing and Windows Media / PlaysForSure DRM, efforts to move all consumer technology to a “secure base” that allows media companies to leverage unilateral power against consumers, forcing them to pay through the nose and striping them of any notion of fair use rights.

Microsoft has utterly failed in all of its efforts to do anything outside of its protected Windows monopoly. Beyond servers, Office, and Windows, every plan to expand into new markets, from WinCE devices to the Xbox and Zune to Origami to MSN TV have all been economic failures.

It doesn't matter if you like to play Xbox games, the initiative has still been a huge loss of money in a desperate bid to maintain proprietary control in gaming using DirectX.

This is the person you want running America? No political background, no experience outside of the protected walls of Microsoft, an advocate of anti-consumer policies, and the primary foe of open source?

Worst Idea Ever

Oh wait, it gets worse. Not only is the Gates for President idea poorly thought out, but it’s simply backward. The premise that Gates is an some ideal, rational leader untainted by worldly politics is merely an illusion.

In 2000, Gates hired Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition, to lobby George W. Bush on the company's behalf during its monopoly trial.

Today, Gates’ company pays huge sums to lobby congress on both sides, but has maintained what has been described as "an increasingly Republican tilt of Microsoft's presence in Washington."

That lobbying has used astroturf to shore up Microsoft’s monopoly position, but has also been used to undermine consumer fair use rights and abused to attack competitors in the marketplace.

So not only is Gates an unproven leader, anti-consumer rights, anti-open software, and anti-competition, but he’s also swept up in dirty politics already, a right-wing leaning pal of the existing establishment and a client to the ultra conservative religious right wing machine that his supposed atheism is intended to counter.

Is all of that ameliorated because Gates is now working to distribute his scandalously acquired, excess wealth as a tool of self aggrandizement?

Is Scott Adams not aware of any of these facts, or is he pushing an idea he knows to be ridiculous as a joke? Perhaps he should stick to drawing Dilbert characters.

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