The Mystery Beast of Baltimore…and Boston
by Steven LaTulippe
There have been numerous sightings over the past week of a strange creature lurking about the farms and fields of rural Maryland. The locals, although used to seeing wild animals roaming the area, are befuddled: "I looked out the window and I saw something drinking out of the water trough," said Lisa Mathis. "It looked like something out of Lord of The Rings…I thought it was a dog and then I looked closer and then I got the camera and pulled it in closer just so I could show the rest of the family." Numerous folks have seen it, everyone is hypothesizing about its origins, and the papers are full of eye-witness descriptions: Jay Wroe: "Very bizarre. I went and got my father and cousin and they came and looked at it and their reactions were pretty much the same – what in the world are we looking at?" Although it has an odd appearance, it doesn’t seem to be threatening in any way. The local TV news reports: Despite the fact it's lurking in these woods and no one knows when or where it will come out, no one here seems afraid of it. Jacob Wroe: "I don't know, it doesn't look like it's going to harm anybody." It looks like some odd combination of various "normal" animals…part dog, part pig, and part coyote. It wanders around people’s back yards, swiping pet food and drinking from birdbaths. No one knows what it is, what it is up to, where it came from, or where it is going. Meanwhile, up in Boston, a similar situation is unfolding. In what must be the most clueless, meaningless, and disjointed political convention in the history of our Republic, the Democratic Party is preparing to select a strange, yet seemingly harmless chimera as its nominee. The candidate has been seen wandering around the country speaking dull, mutually contradictory platitudes (though, to be fair, I haven’t heard of him eating from anyone’s cat dish…probably because of that butler who follows him around with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches). Is he a fiscal conservative who will balance our budget? Or is he a wild-spending liberal who will throw open the doors of the treasury? Does he support gay marriage, or is he staunchly behind the heterosexual version of the institution? Is he a 60’s antiwar radical, or a shoot’em up militarist who once cut a swath of destruction in the Southeast Asia? Did he support the Iraq invasion, or was he opposed to unilateral intervention (and how on earth did he vote for the resolution to permit the invasion, yet subsequently vote against funding the war?) While the critter wandering around rural Maryland will ultimately be of little consequence, this disastrous nomination by the Democrats will have serious negative repercussions for our nation. What America needs desperately at this juncture is a major-party candidate who will throw down the gauntlet to the interventionists in our political establishment and speak decisively against our slow-motion catastrophe in the Middle East. We are in dire need of a leader who will fight a vigorous campaign against our emerging Empire, and who will hearken back to our early Republic’s belief in non-interventionism. John Kerry is most definitely not that man. Liberals are in for a big, nasty surprise when he sends more troops to Iraq and bogs us down even further. But they can’t say they weren’t warned. It is a sad day for America when the ideals of our Founders don’t have a voice anywhere in mainstream political discourse, while all sorts of wild, un-American policies are being trumpeted in the full light of day. But, nevertheless, that is the situation in which we find ourselves. The Democrats should capture that thing in Maryland and put it on the ticket…it might just be an improvement. July 29, 2004 Steven LaTulippe [send him mail] is a physician currently practicing in Ohio. He was an officer in the United States Air Force for 13 years. Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com |