I Choose Hopeby
Thomas R. Eddlem With Ron Paul out of the presidential race, the age-old pleas of Washington lobbyists are as predictable as the tides:
The unstated assumptions behind the pleas are that Hillary Clinton is some combination of the Wicked Witch of the West, the Egyptian Plagues and an unsightly toenail fungus. And that’s probably not far from the truth. When I was told Hillary Clinton cried in public a while back, I confess my reply was "And did the water from the tears make her then cry ‘What a world, what a world…’?" Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are genuinely feared by many Republicans, which include a good number of solid constitutionalists at heart … even if they are stupidly loyal to the GOP. And that’s just why the Democrats are not so much of a threat to our republic as a man like John McCain, who takes the same big government positions as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. McCain supports tax increases, deficit spending, and a hundred years’ war in Iraq. The difference between a Hillary Clinton presidency and a McCain presidency is that Clinton would be opposed. McCain would continue to buy the silence of the right so long as Clinton and the Democrats are stalking in the political woods. The communist left has a saying that is apropos to this situation: "The action is in the reaction." Since the Republican Party will not nominate Ron Paul (or his ideological clone), then I want it to go down to an ignominious defeat in November. At least then I’d have the hope of an imperial presidency opposed by the right. Then I would have a totalitarian presidency that was opposed, rather than the totalitarian presidency we’ve had since 2001 that’s been met with silent consent from people who should know better. They, like me last time, fell for the biggest lies of politics:
McCain, however, would be worse than Bush. He would be worse even than Clinton or Obama. Since McCain has voted for leftist Supreme Court judges in the past, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, social conservatives would not even have an ally in a McCain White House to unite behind their agenda. I stupidly voted for Bush in 2004 for one reason and one reason only (other than the fact that my vote in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts was merely a protest vote against Kerry), and that was because I hoped we might somehow get a couple more justices on the Supreme Court who will dust off their copies of the Constitution and overturn Roe v. Wade. The lobbyists got me on their "Supreme" line. The one thing I’m now sure of is that my vote for George Bush in 2004 was a wasted vote. I owe Michael Peroutka or Michael Badnarik a major apology. Even my then-12-year-old daughter was smart enough to tell me to vote for Peroutka back in 2004, but I confess that I’m not as bright as my daughter. Like a majority of voters, I voted for George Bush. But America and I got John Kerry’s leftism: record deficit spending, new socialist spending programs, endless war, an attack on all of the Bill of Rights (including the Second Amendment with the federalization of the National Guard), and on and on. Roberts and Alito leave much to be desired, but are perhaps the best that can be hoped from a Bush presidency. McCain would offer no hope of such luck for pro-lifers. McCain’s "pro-life" posturing is the impractical centralist model, which depends upon such doomed gimmicks as constitutional amendments and their impossible 2/3 majority votes. And McCain, author of the anti–First Amendment McCain-Feingold law, has a vested interest in appointing judges that will ignore the Constitution. Moreover, McCain has stated we’d be fighting a 100-years war in Iraq if he had his way. War is a pro-life issue too. I can’t imagine a future more hopeless than a McCain presidency. We’d vote for McCain and get Hillary Clinton. I’d rather take the Egyptian plagues instead. I’ll never waste my vote again on a leftist Republican. Besides, my 12-year-old is now well into her teens, and is not likely to let me off so easily this time. Regardless of how people reading this article act, the Democrats will win the presidency and retain control of Congress in November. John McCain is a political dead man walking, and anyone who knows anything about politics knows this is a Democratic year – whether the issue is the economy or Iraq. It won’t matter. The Republicans are doomed anyway. I’ve checked my Chinese calendar. Last year was the year of the pig, but this is the "Year of the Jackass." There is a different opportunity for an American R3VOLUTION. It depends upon the Constitutionalists standing fast and voting third party for president, and constitutionalist on the congressional level. We can tell the Republican Party they will continue to be defeated until they nominate a real choice rather than an echo. And then we can watch the inevitable defeat. Our real opportunity is after November. And that brings me back to Ron Paul. He’ll be the only man on the right – real or phony – who’ll be left standing in November. He’s the only man who built a real organization in the Republican Party over the past year, and the only one who built a substantial fundraising base. He’s got political army on the ground of 1,400 MeetUps and a fundraising base of much more than 100,000 donors. Nobody else comes even close. Mitt Romney has spent his money, and it got him something like one vote for each of the trillion dollars he spent. Who’s going to rally behind that political windsock Mitt Romney now that he’s done in the primaries? Nobody. He has no organization, and no fundraising base other than his own checkbook. Come the second week of November, Ron Paul will be the de facto leader of the Republican Party. The Ron Paul R3VOLUTION will be stalking the Clintons or the Obamas in the brush. They will be limited in what they could do, for fear that another R3VOLUTION of 1994 (only better) would happen in the 2010 congressional elections. It gives us the action in the reaction. Ron Paul, constitutionally speaking, sought a demotion from the highest office in the land – the U.S. House of Representatives – to the presidency. He knows this. He also knows that the Ron Paul R3VOLUTION has to be larger than himself, larger than a run for the presidency, for it to succeed. He knows he’s just been the lightning rod for the R3VOLUTION, not the R3VOLUTION itself. The Founding Fathers set up the people’s House of Representatives as the only branch of the federal government to be directly elected by the people for a reason. The lightning rod of the R3VOLUTION will have a chance to inaugurate the beginning of the constitutional R3VOLUTION at the Republican National Convention, regardless of the outcome of the primaries. Ron Paul’s run for the presidency may even set him up for a rallying prime time speech at the Republican National Convention. Congress is where the real R3VOLUTION needs to take place for liberty, anyway. I admit that I am a partisan of the whiggish Samuel Adams–style revolutionary; someone who holds that liberty only exists when the legislature is the most powerful branch of government. Under our Constitutional system, the legislature was designed to be the most powerful branch. The whispers of change can already be heard on the internet, in songs like Marc Scibilia’s "Hope Anthem":
Yeah, I can feel the coming change. I remember feeling the coming change looking at the Ron Paul website at 1:00 a.m. on December 16, looking for my pittance of a contribution to be acknowledged on the website. I never saw my name, but as I listened to "Do You Hear the People Sing" from the Les Miserables soundtrack I saw something far more important. I saw an army of more than 50,000 people donate on a single day, and send a message to Washington that it will never forget. These are truly "a people who will not be slaves again." Lifelong friendships and trust have been built in the MeetUps. The R3VOLUTION is coming. I can’t just sit by or journal the injustice. I can’t choose a Republican or a Democrat … because I choose hope. March 28, 2008 Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] edited the just-published book, Liberty in Eclipse, by William Norman Grigg. Mr. Eddlem is Legislative Action Director for RightSourceOnline.com, and is a contributor to LewRockwell.com and AntiWar.com. Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com |
