Rand Paul, not even 1 year in the U.S. Senate, is already creating a legacy for himself. And if you believe in the Constitution and the human liberty it protects then it looks good, very good. Paul has been steadfast and fearless when it comes to remaining true to his campaign promises. This is an anomaly in the float-with-the-current like a rotten log cesspool that is Washington DC circa 2011.
Paul has pushed for balancing the budget aggressively, stood up for consumer choice, and all the while doing everything in his power to cut government spending. Now, he’s revealing his diamond-tough huevos by going up against the whimsical idiot-savants of hypocrisy in his own party and the truth-bending emotionally-charged demagogues on the other side. His only allegiances are his promises and the U.S. Constitution. If enough of his peers in DC started doing the same our Founding Fathers might stop rolling over and over in their graves to salute the flag once again.
Listen here to Rand Paul discussing recent renewal vote on The PATRIOT Act with everyone’s favorite Neo-Conservative whipping boy, Sean Hannity (from Hannity’s radio show). Near the end Rand Paul reveals who he may vote for in the upcoming POTUS 2012 election and touches on his own potential aspirations for that same office.
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Quote of the Day: “Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying “No” to any authority — literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.” — Ignazio Silone (1900-1978) Source: The God That Failed, 1950
The politicians are trying to tax the Internet again. Let’s stop them.
What do we demand from government? Jobs? Prosperity? These days those come to mind first, but during the post World War II years we had prosperity and jobs and discontent was rampant. Did we want something else then? I came of age with the first Boomers in the 50’s and 60’s and the country’s prosperity did little to dampen our discontent. What were we so mad about? I believe we were mad because we didn’t have a good national story that pertained to our generation.
And I think that in addition to our clamoring today for jobs and a return to prosperity, mine and succeeding generations have continued the yearning for a good national story. Now we have the makings of the sort of compelling story we lacked before. The only problem, as I shall conclude, is that sometimes stories can be too satisfying, too soon.
First let’s rid ourselves of the idea that a story is essentially fiction. After all, the words “history” and “story” share the same root. This is not to say that stories and history are equally non-fictional- they may be equally fictional. Their truth or falsity is beside the point. We eagerly adopt stories of either kind to underwrite our lives.
Hitler is relevant to this discussion, as he was the most strident and successful storyteller of the generations just before mine. He told different stories to different people, and everyone believed him. He told Germans that Jews and the rest of the world generally had conspired to destroy the destiny of the German people. This story was a bestseller, so to speak. Great swaths of German society devoured it as precious mental nourishment, because it made them feel good, made them feel part of something important and justified, as an effective story does. Then he told the rest of the world that he was a ferocious megalomaniac, poised to take over and punish all states and societies that were not in his thrall. That story too was a great hit, in the sense that people followed it and adopted it as their story.
The stories told by Roosevelt and Churchill were predicated on Hitler’s story: We were the defenders against Hitler, the homicidal maniac. Of course Hitler was a homicidal maniac, but as I say my use of “story” denotes neither fiction nor non-fiction. It was Hitler’s story telling capability that put him on the map. Our mental wards are full of crazed megalomaniacs whose stories are listened to by no one but bored staff. Hitler might well have been one of these isolated souls, but as a powerful storyteller, his story became, well, “real.”
Then what was wrong with post-war America’s story? Looking back I see a few things: the dreadful Hitler-enhanced war story that our parents lived, with its heroism and triumph, was not available for us to identify with, partly because it had not happened on our soil, and partly because we were so definitively post-war. Nor could we derive self-esteem from the earlier Depression, with its tales of injustice and endurance, awash as we were in surplus. We had for our coming of age rituals- not recognition of triumph over adversity- but endless exhortations conveyed via the new wonder, TV, to spend our parents’ money on keys to popularity like Brylceem (a little dab ‘ll do ‘ya!). We were just consumers of hair grease always on the look out for new products. I think I sensed even then the potential for Tom Brokaw to slander my entire generation as something less than “great.”
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.
…in his best Dr. Evil impression says, “One Meeeellion Dollars!”. Yes, that is how much Ron Paul’s Debate Day Money Bomb has raised in a little over 24 hours.
It’s like 2007-2008 all over again… but perhaps better.
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.
The season approaches when our national discussion will once again turn to the relative sainthood of our would-be federal leaders. And shadowed close by, in my own community in the fair city of Los Angeles, we will be able to choose a new mayor. This political season appears at both levels with time-honored tradition, festivities and picnics everywhere, yet I react to its approach with growing fatigue and irritation.
Why? Am I running for office, so that I have to sweat every little quirk in a typically quirky conversation? No, I’m not running for office- and I’m not “in with the in-crowd,” if you know what I mean- and have no actual use for attaching my free-floating American angst to the great battles of the day. At the risk of psychoanalyzing my apathy (yes, in my youth I had a three-legged collie), I’ll just say that it isn’t so much apathy as, well…caring too much. It’s the same thing that happened to me when, on the way back from a Dodger game in which “we” had ignominiously lost, I had to ask my sulking self, “Why are you investing emotional energy in this? It’s just a damn baseball game, get over it!” Did I mention that this happened in 1969, not last week?
It was in that same year that I cast my first and last vote during the casting of which I believed that I was expressing a sort of influence on the government. That vote was in favor of Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic anti-war incumbent, for whom I had cheered in Columbus Square in San Francisco, against the warmonger Republican Barry Goldwater. (Ah, youth!). I dropped Democrats, Dodgers and Republicans within two years of each other. Whether that made me a secular humanist, well, I’m still working that out.
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 will appear on The View, Hannity, and The Colbert Report tomorrow under the guise of promoting his new excellent treatise on liberty called, “Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom“; however, will he also officially announce his run for president?
If he wants to participate in the first debate scheduled for May 5th he must meet certain criteria by April 29th. It doesn’t take an expert to know that one of the first criteria is actually becoming a candidate. Jesse Benton has stated that Paul will meet the criteria to participate so that is certainly an indirect admission that the announcement will be forthcoming
So will Ronald Ernest Paul announce his official bid for 2012 on Monday? We’ll know for sure very soon.
May my fellow Paulites grow the grassroots of liberty in 2012 far beyond the inherent limitations of 2008.
My libertarian soul was hooked immediately. Yours will be as well. From the very first pages of The Immune, a libertarian-infused, science fiction thriller from Doc Lucky Meisenheimer you will crave something. Something that all authors wish their readers would crave–to see what is on the next page, and the one after, and the one after that, and so on.
The Immune reads like a movie that keeps you guessing until the very end. It could easily be a huge blockbuster big screen thriller someday. Of course, that is if those in Hollywood are able to overlook the anti-government and decidedly libertarian message of the story. The great thing about Doc Lucky’s story is that it remains true to the liberty message without being overly preachy. In other words, this is not an Ayn Rand novel. I do love reading Ayn Rand, but this is much more mainstream and accessible. In fact it could be used as a gentle introduction to the libertarian ideology for those just starting down that path.
The book explores privacy, gun rights, civil liberties, foreign policy, government health care, global governance, and more. There’s even an evil character that I can only guess was patterned after Nancy Pelosi.
The story follows physician John Long in the not so-distant future when bio-genetically manufactured organisms that resemble flying “man-o-wars” (called airwars) begin emerging all over the world and killing humans randomly. Long is an ordinary physician who is lucky enough to be immune to the stings of the airwars. This makes him supremely useful to the propaganda machine of an international governing body that uses the airwar crisis as an excuse to continually strip individual freedoms from the world’s citizens. Hmm… doesn’t that sound all-too-familiar? And that’s not all they try to strip away as you’ll find out when you read the book.
This is truly a wonderful first novel for Doc Lucky Meisenheimer. The Immune succeeds on several levels. It is both heavy and light. It works equally as a “beach book” page-turner, and as an intellectual pursuit of individual liberty. Perhaps some of those that utilize it as the former will morph into using it as the latter by the time the last page is read.
If you are going to pursue liberty you might as well have fun doing it. That’s what reading The Immune is all about. I can’t recommend it enough. Add it to your reading list now. You’ll thank me later.
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The Immune by Doc Lucky Meisenheimer goes on sale May 13th, 2011. To order and find out more, see http://www.theimmune.com/
Liberty Maven
“; however, will he also officially announce his run for president?
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