In Tuesday\u2019s presidential election, I know who I \u201cshould\u201d vote for.<\/p>\n
I disagree with the Libertarian Party platform\u2019s endorsement of the current congressional abdication of responsibility to control immigration. (Don\u2019t we have the same right to control access to our welfare programs as we have to block some stranger from breaking down our door and sleeping on our couch?)\u00a0 I further disagree with this year\u2019s choice of standard-bearer Bob Barr — who has violated the Libertarian platform (both the real one and the current, \u201cairbrushed\u201d version) by putting people in prison for exercising their Constitutional right to traffic in \u201ccontrolled\u201d plant extracts and subsequently done nothing to get them out.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, Mr. Barr\u2019s party have been right on the Big Banker Bailout, right on gun rights, right on medical liberty, right on school choice, part-way right on tax cuts, right on too many other issues to count.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, there\u2019s only one true national party getting the \u201csecond-class citizen\u201d treatment, this year. In addition to the usual Libertarian exclusion from the debates, Texas state authorities allowed McCain and Obama onto the ballot against legal Libertarian candidate Bob Barr, despite the fact both branches of the Republicrat party missed that state\u2019s statutory filing deadline, They never would have allowed the LP to get away with filing late.<\/p>\n
In Connecticut, the courts ruled Barr was thrown off the ballot illegally. But they then allowed things to stay that way, rather than inconvenience state official by making them re-print their ballots. Think the courts would have allowed that to happen to Obama?<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll also watch local Nevada TV stations in vain looking for any prominent mention of the fact that Libertarian VP nominee Wayne Allen Root is Nevada\u2019s only favorite son in this race.<\/p>\n
So, ticking off issues on my list — and leaving aside for the moment the perfectly valid argument that “voting only endorses their tyranny” — I should vote Libertarian, as usual, so that I can preen in my self-righteousness, saying, \u201cDon\u2019t blame me, I voted for freedom\u201d … even though the LP will draw less than 3 percent of the vote and have no impact except possibly to throw a few close states to Barack Obama, 49-48.<\/p>\n
The thing is, often in life we don\u2019t do what we \u201cshould.\u201d Remember that colorless, unexciting person your mom thought would be the perfect marriage match for you?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m viscerally angry at the way the shrill and vicious Democrat redistributionists and their puppets in the press have savaged Sarah Palin, a woman about whom they\u2019d be making TV movies-of-the-week if her politics leaned \u201ccorrectly\u201d to the left.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not a member of the \u201creligious right.\u201d I\u2019d be just as angry at the treatment of this upstanding American if she were Catholic or atheist or a Jew.<\/p>\n
Former beauty queen (when did good genes become a bad thing?), star high school athlete who bravely played through pain to win the championship, a woman who can handle herself in the outdoors, married to a member of a defamed racial minority, who works summers on her husband\u2019s fishing boat, a charming, freedom-loving homeschool mom who took on the corrupt establishment of her own state party and defeated them to become a successful and popular state governor, Sarah Palin has accomplished far more in the first half of her life than 99 percent of her detractors ever have or ever will. Yet she\u2019s mocked as some rural Mayberry rube who isn\u2019t as \u201cqualified\u201d to be president as Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
Oh, please. Though bright and talented, John Kennedy was underqualified for the presidency in 1960. He\u2019d lived an incautious life of irresponsible sexual escapades; he hid his serious health problems from the public; he did so miserably against Khrushchev at their meetings in Vienna that the Russian premiere was emboldened to test the obviously inexperienced young president with what became the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet John Kennedy was a seasoned pro \u00d1 and a well-traveled conservative \u00d1 by Barack Obama standards. Kennedy had been in combat, performing heroically after his boat went down. Kennedy served 14 years in the House and Senate (Barack Obama has yet to serve four) and ran on a pledge to cut taxes — which he actually did! Next to the experience of John F. Kennedy — whose inexperience rendered him a not terribly effective president — Obama is a mere short-pants schoolchild.<\/p>\n
Exactly how much \u201cforeign policy experience\u201d — other than organizing anti-American rallies in London — did Bill Clinton have when he left Little Rock?<\/p>\n
Does flying a jet fighter make you a great commander of men? Not necessarily. But if war threatens, John McCain knows what it is to throw young men into harm\u2019s way. Given 20 seconds — despite his crippled arms — I dare say either John McCain or Sarah Palin could load an M-16 magazine and put three rounds in the black at a hundred yards. I doubt Barack Obama or Joe Biden could even figure out how to chamber a round. (Note Barack Obama answered a 1996 candidate questionnaire — which bears his own handwriting — saying he supported legislation to \u201cban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns.\u201d He has since voted for a version of U.S. Senate bill 397 which would have banned virtually all rifle ammunition.)<\/p>\n
Yet their experience wheeling and dealing with crooked lobbyists inside the Beltway make Sens. Obama and Biden \u201cbetter qualified\u201d to judge a proper strategy to respond to some attack on a U.S. base overseas? To stand fast against counterproductive meddling and allow our free-market economy to right itself?<\/p>\n
Why do you think Democratic registrars so often put on a sad face and cry crocodile tears as they report, \u201cAww, some of the military absentee ballots came in too late to count … again\u201d? Why do you suppose the military backs McCain-Palin, 68-23? Because they\u2019re all fundamentalist Christian cretins?<\/p>\n
What they really mean when they say Sarah Palin is \u201cunqualified\u201d is that she\u2019s a regular person who knows what it is to work a regular job and shop at a grocery store, not some bought-and-paid-for ivory tower Washington lawyer in thrall to the Brookings Institution and the Washington Post and the Council on Foreign Relations who thinks National Socialism can still work; we just haven\u2019t ever given it a proper try.<\/p>\n
Sarah Palin ridicules federal funding of fruit-fly research, and the other side says she\u2019s so stupid she doesn\u2019t understand the medical usefulness of fruit-fly research. But she didn\u2019t ridicule fruit-fly research. She ridiculed the FEDERAL FUNDING of fruit-fly research, which is indeed not authorized by the Constitution \u00d1 not even close. Opposing a federal takeover of medical practice and research does not mean you reject the usefulness of medicine.<\/p>\n
The Mainstream Media have covered this race as though Barack Obama, the only flawless man since the Nazarene, had won the thing last spring, since which time he has been made to endure the pointless criticisms of this insufferable little troll John McCain, who was supposed to just go home and shut up as of Labor Day, like the inoffensive and self-deprecating Bob Dole, who endeared himself to kleptocrats everywhere by making a joke of being old and Republican, while saying nothing at all about the fact that Bill Clinton spent decades using his office as cover for his sexual predations.<\/p>\n
Not there was a GOOD Republican. You know. Not uppity.<\/p>\n