Grin and Bear It was the name of a Sunday comic strip I loved. Its writer/artist went by the name George Lichty. When I was a kid, he did one I've always remembered. In Stalinist Russia, two bureaucrats with star-shaped "Hero" medals on their chests stand either side of an office safe with a broken door. One of the two is lamenting, "Is terrible news, Comrade! Someone is stealing results of next week's election!" Welcome to 21st century America.
You've seen it yourself, and recently. The state-controlled "news" media announce that Michelle Bachmann (or Herman Cain or whoever) wins a "straw poll", while Mitt Romney (or some other zombie) takes third, and Rick Perry, a southern-fried born-again New Englander pretending to be something real, trades him—in this instance—for fourth place.
Guess who came in second.
Notice that there's no question mark at the end of that sentence, because it's not a question—it's an instruction. All any of us can do is guess, because the round-heeled press, those well-known ladies and gentlemen of the evening, are paid obscene salaries not to tell you. And to help cram another mercantilist goon down our collective throat.
Mitt Romney (if you'll pardon the expression) wants to allow the Federal Reserve cartel—the real reason that the rich grow richer in this country and the poor grow poorer—an alien excrescence on these shores and a self-confessed deadly enemy of the people of America and their Constitution, continue to bleed the Productive Class as if nothing at all untoward had happened here, on or since September 11, 2001.
Or since 1913, for that matter.
While he attacks Obamacare, when he was governor of Massachusetts, this pathetic excuse for a leader imposed a brutal system of "healthcare" on the state precisely as evil and pernicious as the current federal mess, and he will not renounce it or apologize for it, even though it's rapidly destroying the state and the wellbeing of its people. He is also a stubborn purveyor of the great pseudoscientific hoax of our times—global warming—perhaps in hopes that he will be the one to wield the power it offers to ambitious and authoritarian politicians.
He is a meat-puppet for the Israeli government, the only thing he seems to disagree with the United Nations about. He's a big fan of Agenda 21.
Romney's record on defending the unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right of every man, woman, and responsible child, to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon— rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything—any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission, is comparable to that of Charles Schumer, Carolyn McCarthy, and Sarah Brady. Like them, he is clearly of the opinion that it's better to see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her pantyhose than see her with a gun in her hand.
Online sources I consulted seemed surprised that many areas of Michigan considered safe for Democrats voted for Romney in the straw poll there. What's to be surprised? He is as conservative as Barney Frank, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi. The R after his name stands for "RINO". At best, electing Romney would be like reelecting the Bushes, the Wimp or the Idiot. More likely, it would be like reelecting Obama, an unthinkability we'll get back to in a moment—with extreme prejudice.
Now as to Rick Perry. Like so many other individuals who know absolutely nothing, philosophically, ethically, about what it means to be a human being, he yearns to criminalize a woman's control over her own body—in the context of abortion, what else?—nationalize and enslave her uterus, presumably for the same reason that Hitler did, to provide cannon fodder for the wars in the Middle east and elsewhere he enjoys.
Like every other Republican candidate—with the exception of the guy whose straw poll results we don't get to hear about—Perry is a warmonger.
Sadly, he's also wishy-washy on he environment, citing the green things he has "accomplished" out of one side of his mouth, while correctly identifying global warming as a hoax out of the other. Once again we see that to a politician, a "green job" is one that hauls in plenty of green, from environmentalist pressure groups, crony capitalists building phlogiston factories, and voters who have been misled into mistaking the exhalation of carbon dioxide for Original Sin.
The man also doesn't seem able to sort out his various conflicting views on economic freedom, often calling for reductions in taxation and regulation without daring to refer to first principles concerning property rights and self-ownership—the only thing that's going to save America, if America is to be saved—and abolishing them altogether. He doesn't really mean free trade, or seem to know what it is. All he wants is a different regulatory regime than we suffer under now. And he's as snakily forked-tongue about unions as he is about environmentalism.
One thing he's very clear about: there's no such thing as gay rights. Just as there's no such thing as the human rights protected by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments if you happen to be stuck in public housing—thanks largely to taxation and regulation stifling the free market—and resent the mandatory police state drug sweeps he's proud of.
Probably worst of all, the man can't seem to keep his religion in his pants, and takes possibly the most cowardly position on evolution—meaning antievolution—that I've seen in politics so far, citing various unspecified "recent findings" that he never gets around to identifying.
Naturally, the conservatives aren't any better, not in any way that our Founding Fathers—including Frederic Bastiat, Lysander Spooner, Leonard Reed, Ayn Rand, and David Nolan—would be able to identify.
Many times over many years, I have heard—initially in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, from my high school biology teacher who was also a lay-preacher in the Baptist church—that God buried fossils—and jiggered the rate of radioactive decay in minerals—simply as a test of our faith. They say He got his raw materials by drowning most of the animal and plant kingdom, not to mention all but a handful of the human race, in a gigantic snit. Einstein had it wrong: God is both tricky and mean. And nasty-tempered and murderous into the bargain.
Sarah Palin has been fairly cagey about all this—she even made the Constitutionally and scientifically correct decision about having Alaska school kids indoctrinated in the fraudulently-labeled "creation science"—but Michelle Bachmann swallows it whole, or at least she claims to, and, given some other indications, I'm inclined to believe her. I don't know about Herman Cain (I have my suspicions) or Gary Johnson.
H.L. Mencken went to some pains to point out more than eighty years ago, that anybody with more than a third grade education who refuses to acknowledge the most firmly-established body of facts in science, the process of evolution by natural selection—accepted by an overwhelming majority of Christian denominations by the way—is a moron. Sorry, but there's simply no better word for it. If you would rather have a baboon for President than be a monkey's uncle, you're a moron.
Thus I was disappointed, even a little surprised, when I heard Ron Paul, a physician with a scientific education and more than passing acquaintance with the architecture and operation of the human body, its wonders and shortcomings, claim not to "believe" in evolution. If he's telling the truth, not simply pandering to his perceived constituency, it's the first thing I've ever heard the man say that was stupid. If he is posturing, then it's the first time I've ever heard him tell a lie.
For what it's worth, a person doesn't "believe" in evolution, any more than he "believes" in gravity; it's just there, an aspect of objective reality, regardless of whatever he chooses to believe, and he ignores it at his peril. Me, I've long been interested in a wrinkle of human evolution that may account for the insatiable lust that some individuals manifest for power over others. If that's something Charles Darwin led us to, that alone justifies our interest in his ideas.
But once again, I have digressed.
It is tragic but undeniably true that each and every one of these candidates has serious problems of one kind or another, that render them unfit for any public office, including dogcatcher. The media- acclaimed frontrunners, Romney and Perry, are the absolute worst of the lot. Ron Paul and Herman Cain and Gary Johnson could end this Depression overnight, albeit at the cost of my daughter's personal sovereignty.
It's equally tragic but true that the establishment—including the owners and operators of the Republican Party—are going to fob Romney or Perry on us at the expense of those who actually know what they're doing and are willing to do it. If Paul, by some fluke, were actually to capture the nomination, the RINOs would do the same thing to him that they (a "they" that includes Mitt's daddy, George) did to Barry Goldwater: go limp on their own candidate and let the Democrats win.
That was my introduction to national politics. But this time, it's going to be different. If it happens as I describe, I will spend whatever time I have left, and every resource at my command to make sure that the Republicans—Socialist Party B—never elect another President.
Nominate—and fully support—Ron Paul, and I will hold my nose and vote for him, apologizing to the women in my family. Before I vote for another stiff like Romney or Perry, I will vote for Obama, let the poor country slide completely into ruins, and rebuild on the ashes afterward.
Call it a game of chicken on a global scale.
I'm up for it, Republicans, are you?
Poster Comment:
Thought provoking commentary from The Libertarian Enterprise.