So you want to know who to vote for in 2016? All right, let's talk this through. First of all, while you don't think you voted for Barack Obama, you did. The fact that you voted at all, or for anyone, validated the vote for Barack Obama. It lent credence to an election that, not knowing that you had been defrauded, it was a legitimate election. It was not.
The reason I brought that up at the outset was to establish context under which all the rest of this post will be written.
One must understand that what we have had for a long time is an acquiescence to voter fraud. What voter fraud does is disenfranchise every legal voter of the nation. When a person votes illegally, it takes one person who voted legally out of the process. It is a one for one exchange. The fact that democrats and republicans alike (no matter what they say to garner one's vote) have acquiesced to the fact that illegal immigrants vote is a slap in the face to every legal citizen of this nation. This fact is attested to by the push by democrats to allow millions of illegal immigrants into the nation and the refusal of the vast majority of republicans to oppose it. The fact that they oppose it when appealing to the legal votes of Americans is irrelevant. Lying is what they DO. They are both either counting on illegal votes, or don't want to alienate the illegal voters hoping that they might get some percentage of those illegal votes if they don't appear to be antagonistic to illegal votes.
So, let's look at the democrat/republican issue. It was a republican president who gave us the Patriot Act, the DHS, TSA, the NSA spy program, etc. It was a republican president that, faced with an economic meltdown, decided to put the average American on the chopping block; to destroy lives and fortunes accumulated over decades to save the very banks and investment houses that caused the economic meltdown. It was a republican president that chose to "violate principles of the free market to save the free market" (what a load of bs).
George W. Bush was a "bad hire" and we have done nothing to improve our hiring process.
Our only criteria should be whether or not the candidate will likely restore liberty. Not some liberty, but the concept of liberty that places the government in the losing position to individual liberty and there are none.
So, let's look at the field of republican candidates. Jeb Bush (more of the above) Mitt Romney (couldn't do it the first time and he looks no better against any other democrat) Rick Perry (I like him in a lot of ways, but the opportunity he had to put the brakes on the feds came and went) Marco Rubio (I like him as well as I do many of these candidates, but the question is will they restore liberty once in office and I do not see Marco Rubio as being someone exceptional, who truly understands that individual liberty is the key and source of all innovation, creation and sustainability as an economic and military super power). Ted Cruz comes to mind along with Rubio. I am a fan of the Hispanic understanding of entrepreneurship, hard work and talent, but that does not make one a republican and while Ted Cruz has established some liberty-minded credentials, it does not wipe away the fact that when it came to putting his foot down on amnesty and Obamacare, he proved himself less than a champion of the liberty cause. One might discount a whole group of other republican candidates with one swipe (Graham, Santorum, Huckabee, Fiorina and their ilk) as just politicians with no convictions other than administering the office. There is no fire for liberty, or understanding of the American ethic or willingness to make the difficult decisions to save the republic. They are merely placeholders in a declining society.
The only other candidates worth discussing are Scott Walker, Ben Carson and Rand Paul. Scott Walker has fought the enemies of liberty in the state of Wisconsin for several years. He went up against the media, the unions and the liberals to establish good government and institute free-market principles in his state and it has worked. If one wants a good administrator, there are few, if any, better than Scott Walker.
Ben Carson is an intellectual and gained famed in a direct confrontation with Barack Obama over Obamacare. As a doctor, Carson is intelligent and thoughtful and has even made traditional republicans like Graham, Santorum, Huckabee and Fiorina blanch at his conservative views. Of those in the field, Carson is articulate enough to carry the liberty message with authority, if he believed in it, which is a question that concerns me. He knows that Obamacare is wrong and can detail its failures like no one else, but does he truly understand the value of individual liberty? Does he grasp the enormity of the changes that need to be made and demanded before we achieve rightful liberty? I don't think so. I just don't, because none of them do. The fact that he has never held public office is not a demerit, but our current president was an amateur as well and did not carry the liberal message as well as he might, what would be the chances that Carson would? If I thought Carson would act as a monarch the way Obama did, but for the cause of liberty, I might be a bit more assured, but I am not.
Rand Paul (only partially because he is from Kentucky) is my personal favorite, though I think his foreign policy is flawed and his isolationism is misplaced. No, we should not get involved in foreign wars unnecessarily, but there is no doubt that foreign nations such as Russia and China are seeking to dominate the US in a variety of areas including natural resources and that they will fund and support proxies in order to diminish the US's ability to wage war. To be unwilling to engage these powers wherever and whenever they encroach the US sphere of influence is unacceptable. Paul is a champion of liberty and the most legitimate candidate for his stance against the NSA spying practices, but the entire Patriot Act should be repealed. I fly internationally a lot, but I do not think that the TSA does anything other nations do not do without that extra layer of government oversight.
It is important to understand one thing about terrorism: one must not accomplish the terrorist's goals by deterring terrorism. It is clear now that those terrorists who flew planes into the twin towers on 9/11 did not destroy America as they hoped, but that we destroyed America in an attempt to deny them the victory. America, as a functioning republic, has been destroyed by our leaders with 9/11 as the excuse, but to believe that they did not thirst for the opportunity is delusional and a republican president pushed the destruction through.
While I admit that some candidates are attractive in the constraints of voting "A" or "B"; we as a people must demand more, or at the minimum not validate such elections with our votes. We must destroy the concept that winning an election is the same as giving consent. We need to be poor losers, because the stakes are much too high. The influx of illegal voters is bound to be substantial and should be challenged legally as a denial of voting rights. It is a civil rights case that must be made, if the authorities are not diligent in exercising their obligations to prevent illegal votes.
Since this is not possible in the diluted social context of today's politics, it is time to declare all elections as illegitimate to be challenged as such and demonstrated against on a civil rights basis. The only way to do so is to refuse to condone such obvious fraud with a vote. The only way to make a case that elections are illegitimate is if there is a substantially low voter turnout by those who consider the process illegitimate. That's how politics is done. That's how legitimate resistance is started, that's how majorities of sentiment are emboldened to action.
This is assuming that there will be another election, an eventuality of which I am not assured.