Libertarians will laugh last
Democrats may enjoy stumbling Republicans now, but it won’t last
Comments (...)(MCT) — The economy is in the tank. Americans are hurting, out of work and underemployed. The housing market hasn’t recovered. And a weakened President Barack Obama hopes for good news.
So why are Democratic operatives and their media cheerleaders laughing? Because the Republican presidential candidates are so darn amusing in the slapstick of this campaign.
There’s nothing like watching politicians stumbling and bumbling, tripping on all those abandoned and forgotten principles, to help you forget that it’ll be your turn one day.
And as Democrats laugh at all the hilarious Republican pratfalls, can they see their own party stubbing its toes a few years from now on their own abandoned ideals, such as the civil liberties that were once so important to so many liberals?
Right now, Democrats have the White House and they aim to stay in power. And many liberals who are concerned about civil liberties are guzzling the Kool-Aid, perhaps as desperately as their conservative counterparts guzzled it when former President George W. Bush was pushing big-government conservatism with a straight face.
Now the Republicans are presenting a carny show. They’ve sent in the clowns.
Newt Gingrich is the one big-government Republican who can really slap down those big-government Democrats. And he offers a highly articulate, sweeping, passionate, almost lyrical conservatism. But Newt has a problem: Political Tourette Syndrome. He shouts out what America needs:
Manned colonies on the moon!
As Newt remains the stranger in his strange land, Mitt Romney sees weakness and is ascendant in Florida. But Mitt has his own problems. Let’s call them “Mitt’s Funds in the Grand Cayman Islands” and “Mitt’s Swiss bank accounts.”
If a President Gingrich puts the 51st state on the moon, then the least a President Romney could do is conquer the Cayman Islands. They’re only about 480 miles from Miami, there’s a lot more cash, there’s some good fishing and they’re a lot cheaper to occupy than the moon.
At least conservative Rick Santorum seems to believe about half of what he says, which is a marked improvement over the studied sincerity of the other two, but not enough.
And libertarian Ron Paul?
“Well, I don’t think we should go to the moon. I think we maybe should send some politicians up there,” Paul quipped.
Gingrich and Santorum have done their jobs as status quo blocking backs, so Paul will never get the one-on-one confrontation he needed to defeat the corporatist Romney. Still, I think Paul will have a victory, not this year, but long term. And not personally, but through his ideas.
You already see it, in the energy level of young. They’re turned on by libertarian ideas, by smaller government, by less taxes, and they don’t want to fight any more wars. Many young people are also quite intrigued by a strange document, one that prompts snickering among establishment big-government Democrats and big-government Republicans.
You may have heard about this weird booklet.
We call it the Constitution.
Things are already changing. Only a few weeks ago, Paul was ridiculed as an “isolationist” for not wanting America to fight wars. But recently, there has been a subtle but significant shift in establishment rhetoric.
The word “isolationist” has been replaced. The new, almost officially approved term is “noninterventionist.”
That’s far less pejorative. And you’ll see it used more often, an acknowledgment by the elites that the young people who do most of the fighting and the dying in American wars aren’t inherently evil simply because they want to live.
That youth vote once belonged to President Obama. Years ago, he was the hope and change agent from Chicago’s City Hall. But that seems like eons ago, back in the days when he cared about civil liberties.
When Bush was in the White House, Democratic liberals like Obama shrieked at the loss of civil liberties. Conservatives saw it happening, saw the federal muscle being used on Americans, but they drank the Kool-Aid, convincing themselves that there was some greater good.
Now they see their party has lost its way. Back then, the Democrats were out of power. They were loud critics of Bush and anyone who’d deny Americans their rights. These days, Democrats guzzle the Kool-Aid and Obama uses civil liberties to clean his shoes.
Last month he signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which would allow the military to jail and detain Americans without charges if they’re suspected of consorting with terrorists. Think of that.
American armed forces arresting and jailing — without charges — fellow U.S. citizens. To keep his civil liberties cred, Obama insists it won’t come to this, but a former law professor should understand that if you give the government power, it will use it.
“You go down a slippery slope,” liberal Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., told The Hill last week. “To not give people a hearing, to not give an American citizen the right to have his case heard in a court — I think that’s one of our basic rights. Once we’re starting to get rid of our basic rights, we’re in real trouble.”
But with so many Democrats laughing at the Republican circus, and all those glasses of Kool-Aid being raised, who can hear him?
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All right let's get it out in the open, Ron ignored the last Administrator just like the new one. To him the first was Halpin's spy and the second wrong because hiring him bumped out the girls he promised the job. So Ron handles it by closing the door everyday with the two girls for hours scheming who knows what. Resign Mr. Chairman, your over your head. Millie, your personal feelings in Government are wrong, resign your Chair. |
