I am a socially liberal/economically
permissive Libertarian. I believe that as long as you are not hurting someone,
your actions should rarely be legislated. Avoiding pointless argument about
social issues (because those can only ever be resolved through real-life
experience, never through discussion), we need a Separation of Business and State Amendment. Maintain the EPA and
public broadcasting, but streamline--not "dispense with"--welfare and
military spending. Cut the strings attached to my representative, please! I'd
rather vote in those directions than for Obama a second time (Palin lost my
vote--probably fortuitously--for McCain in '08), and I sort of hoped that Ron
Paul would be a candidate of interest. I enjoy Ron Paul's debates, and he
has some things to say that I really think we as a country need to hear, but
this is pretty damning:
On the LA riots: “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began. ... What if the checks had never arrived? No doubt the blacks would have fully privatized the welfare state through continued looting. But they were paid off and the violence subsided." ~ Ron Paul Newsletter (http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/PR_June92_p1.pdf)
And I get that some of you who were intrigued in Ron Paul’s
message might say something like, “But he says he didn’t know that people were
writing this. He wasn’t aware and isn’t fully
culpable for those comments.” I get that. If he was just some guy, I’d agree to
an extent. Maybe he didn’t know. I get that you want him to be clean; I like a lot of what he says over the rest of
the GOP field too. We've just been waiting WAY too long for our confirmation
bias to rear its magical head. It’s not going to happen, folks. The fact of the
matter is that even if Paul wasn't involved in the messages of any of these
newsletters, he's running for election to be the head of one of the largest
bureaucracies on the planet. If he couldn't keep the people on his newsletter
in line, how is he supposed to wrangle the entire executive branch? How will he
keep them "on message"? This is a much more serious matter than
"I didn't know what they were printing in my name", and it can't be
abided in a president. (Though I'm perfectly happy to abide it in a
whistle-blowing representative. Maybe not mine,
but somebody’s.) You gotta have
managerial skills to pull this job off, and this dog just don’t hunt.
For more awful Ron Paul Newsletter quotes and gaffes, see: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/98883/ron-paul-incendiary-newsletters-exclusive . (And no, I don't care that it came from a traditionally Liberal source, but it's all legit. Stop rationalizing for a second and just absorb the facts. Try really hard to be factual AND right, rather than just loudly right.)
If you're a Dem, congrats on the win next fall. I can't vote for any of the current GOP candidates and Obama hasn't done much, so in that I have a pretty decent Libertarian President right now, I guess (even if that wasn't his intention). If you're GOP or Libertarian, better luck next cycle. Hopefully the party will stop courting its own destruction in time for 2016.
Much love for all of you,
Adam
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