August 26, 2012
Start with joke.
With this presidential campaign and the last, congressman Dr. Ron Paul has achieved world-historical greatness, having swayed an entire generation of Americans back to our country’s Jeffersonian, individualist roots.
-Having changed the way they see politics.
-Having proven that you don’t have to be a liberal to oppose empire, or a conservative to oppose taxation.
-Having inspired and changed the lives of millions of people.
It’s a whole new day for the cause of liberty. The message is finally getting through to Americans from every walk of life.
There must now be millions of new libertarians, thousands of new antiwar activists and hundreds and hundreds of new — or soon-to-be — credential-level Austrian school economists in the world. Hallelujah. And thank you Dr. Paul for working so hard to spread these ideas.
The two campaigns already have been the greatest speaking tours on behalf of liberty in the history of the world.
But millions and millions more minds could still be won! …
It’s sad but true, the Republicans have successfully gangsterized us right out of this nomination: Paul and his supporters were ripped off in Iowa, Maine, Nevada, Colorado, Louisiana and more, and now we’ve been screwed out of our delegates’ right even to nominate Dr. Paul from the floor of the convention and hear him speak.
The Devil Rove and his minions would rather we go to hell and let them coronate their prince in peace.
Well that’s fine.
I’ve got an idea for how we can still win the presidency, save the country and realign American politics forever — without the GOP:
Dr. Paul: You’ve got to keep running! Not as a third party candidate, but as a Second!
Here’s how it could work:
Get Dennis Kucinich or another principled progressive as your running mate and run a bipartisan unification campaign bringing together the best of the left and right around your libertarian platform of peace, the Bill of Rights, and an end to all bailouts and corporate welfare.
The Obama-Romney match-up could not be a more perfect foil for a continued campaign. All Dr. Paul would need to do — with his typical grace and good humor — would be to insist that Mitt Romney replace Joe Biden as Barack Obama’s running mate, since he and the president agree on everything:
The wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria — not to mention support for the dictatorships of places like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Palestine; Both favor the power of military arrest, indefinite detention and even targeted assassinations of American citizens; Guantanamo Bay; the Patriot Act; NSA spying; torture; bailouts; stimulus spending; Keynesian theory; protectionism for favored industries; immigration; corporatist healthcare; gun control; the drug war; all the spending…
Seriously, email me if you’ve ever heard of a difference between the Governor and the President on any of these things.
They do agree on everything important. Everything horrible.
The war in Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot be won, and each and every death over there on all sides and the civilians too are wasted and in vain. Obama knew the “surge” in Afghanistan could not succeed in building a US-allied nation state there. According to the Washington Post the president refused to read a CIA report that he knew said so before ordering the escalation anyway. It’s murder. It’s wrong. It has been. Obama has promised to end the war by 2024. Romney has said let the generals decide.
In Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria we also fight wars that benefit our enemies. This happens either indirectly by clumsily killing everyone nearby while trying to kill them with robots remote controlled from New York State, in Yemen and Somalia, recruiting dozens of new fighters for each “militant” killed by a CIA drone. Or we fight for our enemies directly, as in the case of Libya last year and now Syria, where the U.S. is deeply involved in financing and organizing the so-called “rebels” which include al Qaeda suicide bombers and what used to be known as the “terrorists” — the Sunni based insurgency from Iraq, which is now sending its veterans off to fight for Obama, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the King of Saudi Arabia in Syria. Why is the U.S. doing this? Because, as president Obama explained to the Atlantic, it might help to weaken Iran.
Iran which is not now making nuclear weapons, and which hasn’t been this whole time you’ve been hearing that they were. (Ever wonder what was takin’ so long if they’ve been about to get them and use them for the last 30 years?)
But the lie that Iran is a nuclear threat to Israel and the United States has justified layer upon layer of “crippling” sanctions on Iran, sanctions which are already hurting the weakest members of the civilian population — the young, old and sick — while of course benefitting the regime they’re supposedly meant to target, sanctions which of course are an act of war, and could lead to a real war — a war the Pentagon warns would be sure to “go regional” and leave us dealing with the consequences for generations.
Obama claims to want to negotiate an end to this nuclear non-crisis, but sabotages all of his own offers, and refuses to accept the acceptance of them that comes anyway, all the while threatening that “all options are still on the table” for dealing with Iran next term. Romney says go ahead and start the carpet bombing now.
We’re killing people chasing ghosts. It’s madness.
And just think how much of the Bill of Rights we’ve lost since September 11th, 2001. Rather than our foreign policy, it was said that the terrorists hated freedom. So we surrendered to them on that one.
The first amendment’s protections of free speech and free association are now routinely violated, and even freedom of religion is threatened; the fourth amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches is a dead letter. Police regularly violate our houses, cars, computers, emails, financial records, and reading materials without judicial warrants or probable cause; the fifth and sixth amendment’s protections against punishment and loss of life and property without due process, and forced self-incrimination (that’s a protection from torture) and the 8th amendment which also bans torture have all been scrapped as well.
With president Obama’s newly claimed powers to use the military to abduct and/or kill American citizens, we are seeing the reversion of Anglo-American law back 900 years to the days before King John signed the Magna Carta. Rights granted to subjects by their divine ruler then are being discarded now by our democracy under the overblown threat of terrorism.
If the president can order us killed, what can’t he do? What can’t he make us do?
If Americans can’t take these rights back now, they could be lost forever.
And the longer we keep this Homeland Security State, the less we’ll be the kind of people who ever want to take them back. After years justifying these horrors to themselves, the American people have already become less… American.
And the empire is driving the economy to ruin. The neo-cons and -libs have wasted as much as 8 trillion dollars on militarism and war since September 11th when the National Security State here at home and future long-term costs of medical care for all the wounded vets are added in.
Not to mention the fact that the economic crash was caused by an bubble which was inflated by George W. Bush and Alan Greenspan in the first place in order to disguise the costs of all the extra wars they wanted to wage beyond hunting down our few dozen actual stateless terrorist enemies in the world.
Ron Paul is right. We must abandon this terror war and our militarists’ quest for world empire.
It’s killing innocent people, it’s creating more enemies than it eliminates, it’s corrupting our law and our morality and it’s breaking our bank — impoverishing our people as well as those whose societies we destroy with high explosives.
But the war will not end, nor the police state nor our years in financial hospice care, not as long as the Obama-Romney bipartisan imperial consensus rules Washington DC.
They are in complete agreement, and if they had any honesty at all they’d admit it and combine the Romney campaign with that of the president so we can finally move toward a real Two Party System in this country:
With the best of the left and the right on our side, and the worst on theirs, we can create the new Democratic-Republicans for Life and Liberty and let them be the War Party of Taxation, Inflation, Poverty, Torture and Death.)
(Yes, I admit, this would be incredibly difficult to accomplish, but it would still make a great talking point for Dr. Paul and Dennis Kucinich. Even cable TV news anchors might be able to pick up on the jist of it.)
(And yes, Obama tortures people. Somalis. In a dungeon beneath Mogadishu. I read it in The Nation.)
Despite all the hype, Obama is nothing but a typical conservative Democrat, just as Governor Romney is a liberal Republican. Like Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, they are centrists, but far from moderate. In fact the establishment consensus they represent is what is extreme — a bankrupt world empire quickly devolving into a lawless police state.
Paul and Kucinich are very different – but they are both good on The Most Important Things: The wars, civil liberties, and an end to unfair subsidies and bailouts for politically connected economic elites. And the surveys say the people are with them, with us, on these issues too!
Freedom is popular again, mostly thanks to you Dr. Paul.
But your political career is not over yet. We need you to keep running, to keep realigning and redefining this country’s political priorities.
Many Americans won’t even begin to pay attention to politics this year until after the conventions. A continued Second-Party campaign through November could be huge — could be bigger than the last two campaigns combined!
We could get the rEVOLution up and running again! We could get Ralph Nader and Judge Napolitano to team up and help stump for the Realignment Ticket!
And just think of the TV ads: by attacking Obama on his many wars and civil liberties violations and Romney on his Big-Spending, Big-Government Rockefeller-Republicanism, The War and Bailout Party will be humiliated and libertarian ideas will take root in the minds of millions more in this country and around the world — and we just might win.
Even if we don’t, it would still be the greatest thing ever to happen in American politics.
Both of the other candidates are walking betrayals of who they claim to be. You, Dr. Paul, are the real deal.
You have already changed the political conversation in America forever. An all-out Second Party run could help to solidify those gains and further push that realignment of American politics toward it’s only legitimate purpose: securing individual liberty.
Thank you so much Dr. Paul for all that you have done and will do for freedom. And thank you-all for listening.
