I saw a bumper sticker today that said, “I Love Sarah”. I assumed it meant Sarah Palin and not Sarah Jessica Parker, but I can’t be sure. Last month Palin was echoing Ron Paul on the role of the Federal Reserve in America’s economic crisis. I encouraged her (not that she gives one moose about what I think) to echo Ron Paul on foreign policy as well.
Yesterday it became quite clear that she was never in danger of becoming a foreign policy non-interventionist like Paul.
Palin published a note on her Facebook page Tuesday that encourages President Barack Obama to grant a request for the tens of thousands of additional troops reportedly requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in the country.
“Now is not the time for cold feet, second thoughts, or indecision,” Palin wrote on the site. “It is the time to act as commander-in-chief and approve the troops so clearly needed in Afghanistan.”
Noting the possible consequences of not helping to build up Afghanistan’s institutions, the former Alaska governor also wholeheartedly endorsed McChrystal’s counterinsurgency approach to continued U.S. military presence in the country.
“We can win in Afghanistan by helping the Afghans build a stable representative state able to defend itself. And we must do what it takes to prevail. The stakes are very high. The 9/11 attacks were planned in Afghanistan, and if we are not successful there, al Qaeda will once again find a safe haven, the Taliban will impose its cruelty on the Afghan people, and Pakistan will be less stable.”
She is just confirming that she never was and never will be a libertarian, especially when it comes to foreign policy. Don’t let the new designation (or Eric Dondero) fool you. The Palin-Cons are the same old Neo-Cons.
Ron Paul chose to enter politics in 1971, the year I was born. The reason he entered politics was due to then President Nixon driving the last nail into the gold standard coffin. Nixon severed all ties of gold to the U.S. dollar. This event implicitly granted the Federal Reserve to print money without bound. For Ron Paul being anti-Fed is not just another political position, it is the political position. It is in his blood.
In those early years and up until the economic crisis of last year Ron Paul was brushed off as crazy whenever he brought up the unchecked powers of the Federal Reserve. Once the bailouts began and continued it became politically expedient to be more like Ron Paul. That is, as long as you are talking about economics. On foreign policy Ron Paul is still apparently crazy for firmly believing in non-intervention.
I am not alone among the Ron Paul faithful when I say that I’m very tired of reading articles with any of the following labels attributed to Ron Paul:
Radical
Quixotic
Fringe
Extreme
Crazy
In a recent article he had a few labels of his own for Sarah Palin supporters. He called them “establishment” and “country club” Republicans. Palin-ites reacted with fervor in dismissing Paul as just being envious.
“Slowly, inexorably, Ron Paul’s message is beginning to take. Members of his own party and liberal media personalities, some who would have been the least expected, have begun to sense the danger. Conservatives are coming home, some ashamed, acknowledging that it was they, not Ron Paul, who had drifted away. Some Governors and senators and televisions pundits are now mimicking Ron Paul’s message, even paraphrasing his exact words. There are Ron Paul look-alikes, such as Governor Mark Sanford. “He’s just like Ron Paul,” his supporters assure us, “only better.” Who would have thunk it? It is now popular to be like Ron Paul.”
For all of Wead’s articles on Ron Paul, I think I enjoyed this one the most thus far. He outlines the history and reasons for Ron Paul’s popularity and then explains why we should look to him for solving our economic crisis.
After Wead’s series of articles on Sarah Palin being the GOP front runner and listing Ron Paul’s chances of the GOP nomination at 25-1 he goes back again to trumpeting his candidacy.
Ron Paul has an uncanny and effortless way of making neo-conservative Republicans’ heads explode. He merely tells the truth. The modern day Republicans are desperate for an answer to “The Obama Effect” but they dare not climb up Ron Paul’s liberty tree to get there. Instead they dream the impossible dream.
They dream that they can somehow keep one hand in the neo-con cookie jar while the other hand waves over the Constitution. When Dr. Ron Paul comes along and tells them its time to amputate the gangrene neo-conservatism they dart out of the office crying like babies. One would think they would get the hint with their string of losses the past few years. Their latest and ultimate loss came this week when Al “Dog-gone it! People like me!” Franken was declared the winner over Norm Coleman in the hotly contested Minnesota Senate race.
One of Liberty Maven’s (soon-to-be) Liberty Heroes, Thomas DiLorenzo, was interviewed by columnist Ilana Mercer. DiLorenzo, who recently wrote Hamilton’s Curse, discusses at length Hamilton’s strong desire for mercantilism in this country, and throws the stated desires of Obama and McCain into the mix for comparison purposes.
Obama is a slick politician, so I expect him to continue to administer the neo-mercantilist, Hamiltonian empire that has been built up by both parties over the decades, with all of its schemes for corporate welfare for defense contractors, investment bankers and myriad other politically active businesses which, in turn, provide financial support for the regime. But Obama is also a hardcore leftist who spent his earlier career working with some of the craziest socialists in America, groups like ACORN, who advocated such things as kicking doctors off the boards of hospitals and replacing them with “the poor,” and Soviet-style nationalization of the energy and health care industries.
The media is starting its barrage of attacks on Sarah Palin, reporting such things as her not knowing the countries involved in NATO or that Africa is not actually a country. The attacks may have some truth to them, and it seems like they are making large efforts to throw her under the bus so she is going to be far too damaged for a run for President in 2012. FOX news, as shown below is one of the leaders of attacks.
I wonder if this is an orchestrated effort to damage Palin because she supposedly went “rogue” during the campaign and decided she had her own opinions after all. I think this situation is ripe for Ron Paul to reach out to her. She can be an ally in helping to change the GOP from within. It seems the current party leadership is vulnerable. A few Palin and Paul media counter attacks are in order.
If Palin truly did go rogue, then what is stopping her from doing so now as the media promises to continue blaming her for McCain’s loss? In fact, I think the time is ripe for Ron Paul to contact every endorsed candidate in his Liberty PAC and have a public forum (hopefully televised on CSPAN or another outlet) discussing the future of the GOP. They could make attempts to publicly push the Republican Party towards its Old Right roots. I would love to watch a forum including Jeff Flake, Sarah Palin, Walter Jones, Gary Johnson, Mark Sanford, and many of the other Ron Paul endorsed Republicans.
Paul did something similar with his “vote third party” press conference. He ignored some of his own principles to find a common ground. Why not do the same in a concerted effort to publicly and openly steer the GOP back towards the Constitution and limited government?
The Libertarian candidate for President in 2000 was Harry Browne. That year he released a campaign book with the title, “The Great Libertarian Offer“. The positive libertarian sentiment in that book was both educational and inspiring to me and many other liberty seeking individuals. There has been quite a bit of talk in the past year about the demise of the Republican party to the delight of loyal and liberal Democrats everywhere. This demise represents a great opportunity for libertarian ideas to either reinforce the Libertarian Party itself or modify the Republican Party’s neo-conservatism into libertarian conservatism.
I say opportunity because the outlook for liberty at this point in our country’s history is quite bleak. The popular political culture pendulum is swinging far to the left with Barack Obama’s pending victory. Following 9/11 Neo-conservative Right ideals were in vogue. The question remains what happens when the rebound occurs from the current move to the left? This is where libertarians can capitalize if the cards are played properly.
You laughed at him. You made fun of him. You called him extreme, a gadfly, a kook, and many other trite terms of marginalization. His only crime was the truth in stark contrast to every calculated, vacuous platitude uttered by his Republican opponents. Now I can’t help but imagine Ron Paul sitting in his easy chair surrounded by gold and silver bullion smiling knowingly saying, “Who’s laughing now, bitches?!”
No, that isn’t Ron Paul’s style, as we learned from the debate where Paul whispered, “Make, fun buddy”, under his breath in reaction to yet another moronic insult emanating from somewhere between Mitt Romney’s sculpted sideburns. Ron Paul is a man deserving of integrity and respect at work in the sea of extreme buffoonery that is Washington DC.
Nothing illustrates such an assertion better than the last few weeks of having to listen to every pundit and politico tell us why we all had to fall in line behind a bailout bill that no one wanted to pass and no one was sure would work. But the sky was falling and the wolf was around the bend so pass it we must. America, our government didn’t listen to us. We have no representation anymore. The last vestige of capitalism is nearing death. We are on the road to economic slavery.
Over and over and over again I see headlines using the words “Sarah Palin” and “libertarian” in the same sentence. Sometimes I think it’s due to ignorance, but other times it’s clearly a crafted agenda to redefine the term “libertarian” to mean something closer to “neocon”. For some blogging enthusiasts, this article could be considered an Eric Dondero hit piece, since I will be focusing largely on headlines written by him.
In a recent blogger post discussing Sarah Palin, Dondero wrote back to one commenter who didn’t quite agree with him: “You’re a purist libertarian. You don’t give a f*** about such things. Perfectly understandable….Now go back to your Ivory Tower, and take those books off those dusty shelves, and start studying Objectivist/Austrian economics theory, like you do every day. You’ll be much happier than living in the real world like the rest of us do.“ For Dondero, if you don’t subscribe to his warped concept of libertarianism (i.e. neoconservatism) then you must be a “purist”, and not worthy of contributing to the discussion. Eric, there’s only so far you can stretch the definition of a libertarian, and you’ve gone way off the deep end.
Forget the VP Debate, it was for the birds! Besides the upcoming Break the Matrix Third Party Debate, you can have this debate right now! Let me show you with my Sarah Palin and Ralph Nader example. Plus an idea to change American politics for millions of young Americans with viral media.
<< For those unaware, please read George Dance’s critical article “Third-party debate in early October” on the upcoming Third Party Debate in early October. Date is not yet announced. >>
Fellow columnist Jonathan Cymberknopf reported in his late September article “Ralph Nader and Bob Barr banned from the media” that the media has stopped covering the Third Party tickets who have a mathematical chance to win, and this does indeed seem to be the case. These candidates in alphabetical order are:
He is mostly correct; the mainstreammedia is completely ignoring these candidates. However, viral media has the potential to take the third party’s message to millions, spreading far TRUER democracy, and revealing the current election of McBama as the staged sham that it truly is. The cool facet about it is that if it starts, its spreads like wildfire because everyone shares with everyone else. On the flip side, there is only one month left, but with the financial world reeling, McBama-supported idiotic bailouts and bank failures galore, there is a real chance this could have a lasting effect on American politics for a long time to come, if it is done correctly. Here is the idea.