Liberty Maven

As if we needed further proof that it didn’t really matter if you voted for McCain or Obama in 2008. McCain appeared this morning  on “This Week” and vocalized his displeasure at the growing “isolationism” (his word, not mine) being expressed by the 2012 GOP candidates. Of course it was McCain, who during a debate in 2007, accused Ron Paul’s “isolotianism” of being the kind of policy that brought about WWII and the rise of Hitler. Here’s a video of that exchange:

This morning McCain sounded a similar tune when talking about Obama’s recent support of actions in Libya.

“There’s always been an isolation strain in the Republican party, that Pat Buchanan (a former Republican presidential contender) wing of our party. But now it seems to have moved more center stage, so to speak,” he said.

There is no question that President Barack Obama, a Democrat, made the right choice in lending US military support to the NATO mission in Libya, McCain told ABC television’s “This Week” program.

“If we had not intervened, Kadhafi was at the gates of Benghazi. He said he was going to go house to house to kill everybody. That’s a city of 700,000 people. What would be saying now if we had allowed for that to happen?

“That’s not the Republican party of the 20th century and now the 21st century,” McCain said.

McCain is a neo-con Republican dinosaur with a jingoist broken record roar of, “America F&%K YEAH!” It is as tired as it is desperate. He also, along with much of the media, needs to learn the proper definition of isolationism. For more see this excellent video on isolationism from Jack Hunter.

It is a testament to Ron Paul that his message of non-interventionism is now being echoed, in various forms, by his 2012 GOP opponents. However, let’s not kid ourselves, not a single candidate in the field other than Ron Paul can be trusted to put action behind the words.

In 2008 I wrote that I didn’t think America was ready for Ron Paul. Here in 2011-2012, America just might be ready. Even if Dino-McCain isn’t.

This morning Ron Paul appeared on Good Morning America ahead of his speech in New Hampshire where he announced he is officially entering the race for POTUS 2012. This is unsurprising given his recent move toward running and the results in recent polls.

Here is his appearance on GMA. Note his excellent responses to all of the questions posed to him. Much like his fire in the first GOP debate, it has become obvious to me that this 2012 effort is no longer just an educational effort like 2008 admittedly was. He’s in it to win it this time around. The thing about Ron Paul is that even if he loses in the conventional sense (which right now appears likely) he will win and has already won the hearts and minds of a new generation of leaders. And their sole focus is what the America of the future needs most: liberty.

A few years ago I spent the 3 hours necessary to watch a BBC documentary/mini-series  called “The Power of Nightmares”. I found it fascinating as it explored the symbiotic relationship between American neo-conservatives and terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. You can watch the entire series online at archive.org. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this topic.

In it we learn that neo-conservatives philosophy is based on Machiavellianism. It’s the elitist mentality that neo-cons know what is good for all citizens and can morally (in their eyes) use all means necessary to reach that perceived good. We also learn that the roots of neo-conservatism come from the left.

Now that Usama bin Laden nightmare is dead the neo-conservatives need a new nightmare to justify the continued global war on terror. At first they tried to spread general fear about a retaliatory strike. This is a real and genuine fear; however, it isn’t quite enough for them. They need a face of terror–a single person. Initial indications are this new face of terror will be Usama’s 20 year old son Hamza. He already has a nickname, “The Crown Prince of Terror” as evidenced in this recent article from The Telegraph:

Hamza, thought to be the youngest of the Saudi-born warlord’s sons, has been described as the “crown prince of terror”. He featured on an extremist website to mark the third anniversary of the July 7 London bombings in which 52 people died. He read a poem called for “destruction” of America, Britain, France and Denmark.

Intelligence agencies believe he was being groomed as a possible future leader of al-Qaeda.

He was implicated in the assassination of moderate Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto in 2007.

Well, it didn’t take them very long did it? Hopefully it won’t take 10 years, billions of dollars, and countless lives, to find bin Laden 2.0. No doubt we will begin hearing about how the son is even more evil than the parent was.

In any case, I long for the day when our troops can come home from all over the world and we can expend our resources on true defense and better intelligence-gathering rather than the expensive nation-sitting we do now.

Ron Paul is on fire. That is my opinion of his performance in this first GOP debate. Of course, I’m biased. Feel free to make your own judgement after watching the entire debate below. There were a few stellar moments from Ron Paul, including his answer when asked about legalizing drugs, and his answer about being the “Founding Father” of the Tea Party movement regarding Michele Bachmann.

I don’t agree with a lot of what Herman Cain says, but I have to admit he has charisma that will give him a lot of support. Expect the other candidates to start attacking him if his poll numbers go up. I think they will.

Gary Johnson did very well with a few odd moments. If I’m looking at him through social-con or neo-con eyes voting for him would likely be impossible. He did come off as a very honest “make the hard choices” candidate. Sort of like Cain without the charisma.

Pawlenty seems to be channeling John McCain a bit too much and Santorum just comes off as angry. Both seem to be going after the George W. Bush voting block; however small that is these days.

Enjoy the entire debate below.

Following Bin Laden’s death, the scenes of celebration in America were the equivalent of the losing team in the Super Bowl celebrating like they just won the game. As Radley Balko points out, Bin Laden has already won. And all the proof we need is recognizing that we are far less free and further in debt today than we were on September 10th, 2001. Balko writes:

In The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright lays out how Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

• We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
• We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
• In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
• We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.

Read the rest at Balko’s The Agitator

Glory to Allah! Well it appears that Osama Bin Laden is dead. He was supposedly killed about a week ago via a bomb/missile. The neo-conservatives will now be scrambling to find a new evil-doer to keep them aimed toward their goals. I’m sure they will tell us very soon who the new face of terror will be. Or how about this instead…

…how about we get the hell out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and everywhere else and save some money we don’t have?

The most likely scenario will be that we will be told how we now need to be extremely alert due to the potential for retaliation so we’ll need to send more troops and spend more money on the never-ending war on a tactic.

More thoughts to come as more information is spoon-fed to us via an untrustworthy media.

Ron Paul officially announced the formation of his exploratory committee today so it was a big news day for the Pauls. Senator Rand Paul appeared on CNN and effectively painted Donald Trump as a liberal sympathizer evidenced by his historical donations to Democrats.

In the morning, Ron Paul appeared on Fox and Friends:

Then Ron Paul appeared on MSNBC with Eliot Spitzer:

And Paul then appeared within the friendly confines of Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano:

Here is the previously promised Colbert appearance:

And finally, look for Ron Paul on John Stossel’s show Stossel on Fox Business on Thursday night.

Ron Paul appeared on Canadian TV’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin to answer some very thoughtful questions regarding American foreign policy. Yet another excellent testament to Paul’s consistency and integrity when it comes to non-interventionism. He also discusses one of his favorite topics, the Federal Reserve.

Rand Paul took the Senate floor today and fought for the Congressional authority to decide on matters of declaring war. Check it out below.

America has become a nation marching to war in lockstep, left foot following right foot towards the all-too-certain future that has already befallen the body’s other half. Crushing electoral defeats serve as little deterrent in a political system where the pendulum swings comfortably on the same axis, the defeat coming at the hands of the opposite extreme which just as aggressively pursues the same noble goals via the same dead ends with the same overdrawn credit card.

What are the American people to care if their government’s missile strikes land in the bedroom of a young boy who was guilty only of being born in the wrong nation, to the wrong family, at the wrong time? That missile was far enough away from the American’s suburban home not to leave an impression in his more sophisticated brain – you know, the one with the attention span that lasts longer than 10 seconds only when celebrity gossip or local rumors or evening sitcoms are on the agenda. The same brain that can comprehend the suffering of an upper-middle income child who needs more government grant money to get that Bachelor’s degree in Political Science, so they can go to Washington, DC and feel self-important, lobbying a tiny cell of the organism that is the American war machine.

That machine is marching, left foot following right.

That young boy looks down in spirit alongside a newfound friend from a faraway land called Afghanistan. Thousands of miles away, a child’s family is no longer weeping. The older brother has given his life a new meaning, driven by the emotion that could only be delivered from a plane high above. He doesn’t know who the missile was intended for, but he knows where it came from, and he is determined to exact revenge within his lifetime, for his brother, for his family, for his God. He’s training with a group he had no interest in just a year ago, far away from his family, who quietly, tearfully told him they understand.

His parents see the men in uniform patrolling the streets where they grew up. They march by in lockstep, left foot following right.

They’ve seen the strange men before – different uniforms, hammer and sickle where stars and stripes now sit – and they wait for the day when their homeland will once again be theirs, and theirs alone. They rush home to meet curfew as the sun fades below the barren mountains to meet the other side of the globe, giving rise to a morning that will see political speeches on the glory that democracy has bestowed upon such an ungracious people who are unwilling to accept responsibility for it.

Americans greet the day with a fill-up and a subsequent lament about the outrageous price of oil over their five-dollar lattes. In the corner of the marble-floored coffee shop, a muted television shows a talking head offering his take on the political ramifications for the next election cycle. Trendy twenty-somethings are too busy discussing the imminent danger of global warming for sea otters to look up and notice. Fiscally conservative thirty-somethings on the opposite side of the street are voicing their contempt at another tax dollar wasted on health care.

The missiles are too far away to matter – if a Libyan dies in the chaos and no American is around to hear it, he apparently doesn’t make a sound. Left side of the street agrees with right.

War isn’t personal, especially those of the humanitarian variety. Profiteering government contractors, self-righteous politicians, and Americans on Main Street have one thing in common: they all want to keep it that way. They all march in lockstep, left foot now following right. Previous generations have dragged their feet and forced the gears of the war machine to come to a halt, if only long enough for the leg in power to flex and leap forward once more. Nothing close exists in the modern-day war machine. Our generation has needed no story about the humanitarian causes for their violence, for they’ve managed to pretend it simply doesn’t exist. Of apathy and outrage, apathy was the easier pill to swallow, poison though it may be. The government and the media won’t stop selling it, FDA regulations be damned.

One day, the realities of war will set in, and it will be far too late to take back the lives, the money, the apologetic excuses for why the politician on my side means well, unlike the politician on the other side who did the same thing. That day can’t come soon enough.