The pathetic US political scene is due for some radical surgery. Rampaging elephants and weeping jackasses are leaving the Republic without a champion. Those who wish to see this Republic (not democracy, federal Republic!) continue to be a free nation have no rallying point. In fact, we have to do a lot of things to get back to being a free nation.
When US politics centers on the hairstyles of political candidates or wannabe candidates, the nation is showing its bare backside and it isn’t a pretty scene. The elephants and jackasses have both spread their excrement over the hapless and feeling helpless public for quite a few decades, promising great benefits and delivering expansive, expensive bureaucracy, lobbed missiles, misdirected and expensive wars and threats of wars at the whole nation.
Now we’re engaged in a great and expensive show of military might to conquer a nation that “might have weapons of mass destruction.” Who has weapons of mass destruction? We do. Russia does. China does. Whether Iraq does or doesn’t, they have not used them on the United States and what a sovereign nation does to or for its own people should not be our business. The United Nations has no business even being, much less being privileged to interfere in the internal affairs of nations.
Civil uprising in the United States worked in 1776 when it was the secessionists vs. the crown. That won’t work today. Even if there were such an organized uprising, it would only leave America a gutted nation unable to defend against what would then be the world’s superpowers.
We don’t need war, external or internal. We need surgery in this nation to remove the cancerous politics that have led us into a nearly terminal state of imperialism … and imperialism is historically the end of a nation, the final act before dissolution.
The Libertarians have been as vocal as the Leftists about non-war and for a very good reason … this “sword of Damocles” war against Iraq, if it happens, is going to have so many unintended consequences that the United States may well have committed suicide as a world power by the time it is over, if it is ever “over.” So far, our recent wars don’t have an “over” and retreat, they have a “man who came to dinner” endless occupation.
As a Christian there are some things about the Libertarian Party with which I disagree, but not as much or as deeply as I disagree with the hypocrisy of both Republicans and Democrats … the two faces of American politics on one coin. Both parties have overridden the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but for different reasons. Yet for the different reasons, the same coin buys the same product … loss of liberty for individual Americans.
The US economy is suffering now, and not just from the dotcom failures, the Enron and WorldCom deception or the domino effects of either. Our companies have gone overseas not just for cheap labor but to avoid paying the taxes to support the country. What good is a tax cut to people who aren’t paying taxes? Enlarging the numbers on the bottom line while selling goods to a nation that soon will be unable to buy much isn’t good business.
The spirit of free enterprise is best cultivated in a climate of laissez-faire competition and ingenuity, not corporate welfare and megamergers of unmanageable behemoths of industry who can up and leave or downsize for efficiency to the detriment of the workers and the economy. Then, let the small entrepreneur try to take up the slack and what happens? Government red tape winds around them like an endlessly long python.
Bring out the scalpel. Cut the size and power of central government, cut the red tape, cut the cronyism and duplicity, cut the imperialism, cut out the overlapping layers of bureaucracy that become putrefying flesh on the body politic. Cut the nanny state philosophy and the departments that feed it. Cut federalized education and if necessary get back to one-room schoolhouses run by small local school districts for the purpose of educating the children not indoctrinating them. Cut the cords of the NAFTA and other open trade agreements that benefit other nations to the detriment of the United States and its workers.
Cut the union mobsterism that grizzlies the hand that’s feeding it and intimidates its members to follow its mandates.
It’s a long operation, a radical form of surgery that this nation needs in order to survive as the United States of America, not a part of the United Western Hemisphere.
The Libertarian Party has proponents and spokespersons who can defend a philosophy of being a free nation, but can it deliver the goods? Can it perform the surgery? If not, then let it step aside and get a Patriotist Party or some party that offers more than voting for the perceived lesser of two evils with very little choice or difference in the outcome. No wonder there’s voter apathy in so many areas. When there’s real choice, real passion returns.
There are misdirected patriots in this nation, quite a few of them, who — because they lack a party that will take the initiative in returning America to the nation it used to be and making it the nation it can be — are ready to resort to an illegal force of arms that will only solidify the position of government and intimidate the people who are ready for a real new deal … a laissez-faire new deal where individuals are people, not numbers, not blips in a database and not carriers of an identification tag imbedded in their flesh (like the digital angel).
We don’t need civil disobedience at this time, it would serve to consolidate the power of the control freaks who are stealing our guaranteed rights to liberty and make them all the more powerful and intimidating. We need an operative political party where, agree on details or not, the overall agenda is that of liberating the people of the United States. Those who want socialism can apply to Canada or Mexico for asylum and request citizenship there.
Is there a Libertarian Party or isn’t there? If there is, then it better get ready to DO something more than talk. The people are bristling out here, Real Americans who are sick of being stomped on by a government whose leader speaks of freedom and liberty at the price of foreign war and domestic suppression of rights.
I’ve been a Republican for a long time. I voted for Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. At times I’ve re-registered as “non-partisan” out of sheer frustration, but I still voted Republican.
Libertarians, give us a party of action, not just words and philosophies, and you will find that there are more of us out here than you think — even the Christian right — who will join camp and spread the fervor of true American patriotism. Just give us the party, give us the show of strength, give us a rallying point where the flag means America and “God Bless America” can be sung with pride and integrity, not political showmanship.
Give us the party of action. We’re waiting!
Then let the radical surgery begin.