politics

The next republican that tells me how important it is to vote for Republicans because of the Supreme Court nominations, I am going to flip the fuck out.

I am not a Ron Paul supporter, in the sense that I don’t run around actively supporting him as a candidate. In fact, there are places where he and I do not agree. Now, I am not going to use this post to extoll the virtues of one candidate over the other. What I AM going to do is point out where we are.

We are on the train to national insolvency and dictatorship. The left claims that they need to tax the rich to pay for all of their programs and ensure that everyone gets a fair share of the national economic pie. They ignore the fact that they are spending us into insolvency.

The right claims that they want to control the left’s spending, but never seem to do so. They claim that we need to cut spending and taxes. Just not defense. Oh, yeah, and we need to go to war with everyone until they all bow down to us as Americans. The chief war cry of the right is: if you don’ t vote for the party hack, it is the same as voting for the other guy. Except, they forget that it won’t matter which one you vote for, because other than the D or R behind his name, there is not a real difference between them.

Lest you forget, our last Republican president brought us a 9 year long war in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11; the Patriot Act; the TSA and their intrusive searches; secret prisons; torturing prisoners for information; and added more than $4,900,000,000,000 to the national debt in 8 years.

Our current President has expanded the powers left for him by his Republican predecessor and begun executing assassinating Americans without trial, forced people to buy products that they don’t want, and has expanded the national debt by $4,800,000,000,000 in just 4 years.

The reason why I would vote for Ron Paul isn’t because I always agree with him, it is because I already know what I am going to get with the others, and I know it isn’t working. I do believe, however, that it doesn’t matter who we vote for, as our course is set. We aren’t voting our way out of this. It is only a matter of time before we sink our national ship under the weight of financial irresponsibility.

The choices left to us in the presidential race this year are not palatable choices. Let’s take a look. Here is what Rick Santorum had to say in 2006:

“This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone … [that] government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. … Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone.”

Does that sound like another freedom loving presidential candidate?

When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly…. [However, now] there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.

Do you remember who said that? It was Bill Clinton. More from Santorum, from a 2003 interview with USA Today :

And that’s sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire.

Gingrich is no better. He proposed a bill in congress 1996 that mandated the death penalty for people who deal in marijuana. Under this draconian proposed law a mandatory death penalty would have applied to anyone convicted more than once of importing two ounces or more of marijuana or other controlled substance across the U.S. border. About his own marijuana possession and smoking days, Gingrich explained:

“That was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era.” “See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral.” “Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t,”

Explain to me how there is any difference between Democrats and Republicans.

In 1940, the Republican party was in disarray. A confused mixture of internationalists, New Dealers, isolationists, and minimal government types, the Republican party had no real direction, no coherent philosophy, and no real platform.

FDR’s approval rating hovered around 60%, and he was running for his third term. The Republicans figured that they would nominate Wendell Wilkie, a New Deal Republican who was little different from FDR in policy. Since they were so alike, the Wilkie campaign focused on trying to beat FDR in a personality contest. However, FDR had a compliant press, and no one was going to beat FDR in a personality contest.

There are many parallels to this year: The Republican party is in disarray, and they are appointing an Obama clone as his opponent (Romney). This will be a personality contest, which Obama may well win, to which I say: good. If I am going to have to face four more years of a tax and spend Keynesian in the Whitehouse, I would just assume that he has an unfriendly congress to deal with.

A have a point to make, but first some history:
In 1951, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, grew tired of the British Empire’s monopoly on Iranian oil reserves, and nationalized the oil industry. The Brits needed that oil, so Churchill got Eisenhower to overthrow the Iranian government during Operation Ajax in 1953. This placed Shah Pahlavi in charge as an authoritarian dictator. That’s right- the US made the world safe for democracy by overthrowing a democratically elected government and turning it into a dictatorship. Iran was supplied with military weapons by the United States until 1979.

In 1979, the Islamic revolution overthrew the dictatorship and placed Ayatollah Khomeni in charge. In the process, the Iranians raided the US embassy and took the occupants hostage. The American people were outraged. Also that same year, the United States began training and equipping a force to overthrow the Russians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That force was led by a man named Osama bin Laden.

Iran became a thorn in America’s side, and needed to be reined in. A perfect ally was found in Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq. The CIA supplied him with weapons and other aid, so that he could fight Iran. Reagan removed Iraq from the list of terrorist nations, and began selling arms to them. A list of the supplied aid:
Helicopters, intelligence, war planning, machine tools, computers, instruments, and other goods to support missile and WMD development, howitzers, bombs, and other military hardware, along with billions of dollars in foreign aid. This aid continued until 1990.

In 1990, the US sent troops to Saudi Arabia to counter the ambitions of Saddam Hussein. This infuriated bin Laden that foreign troops would be in his country, and he turned his attention to the west.

Terror attacks increased, culminating with the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Our non-stop meddling in the affairs of the middle east led us to this point.

In a way, Reverend Wright had it correct, America’s chickens had come home to roost. Ron Paul also has it correct: it is time that we as a nation stop interfering with other nations. This mantra that we have in this nation of never ending war has got to stop.