Why Does John McCain Hate America? And Who Will Defend the Honor of Ron Paul?
September 2nd, 2008
New reports have it that McCain is actively pursuing his former Republican primary rival Ron Paul for an endorsement, to discourage Paul’s supporters from voting for Libertarian candidate Bob Barr and splitting the right-wing vote. This raises a couple of questions for me.
First, Paul ran for Congress, and this year for president, on the GOP ticket, but is also a Life Member of the Libertarian Party and ran for president in 1988 on that party’s ticket. He remains closely affiliated with that party, and was the focus of a major campaign by LP members to endorse his run on the GOP ticket. As one supporter put it:
Ron Paul is not the choice of Republican voters either: 95% of Illinois Republicans rejected Ron Paul in the primary.
Ron Paul is the choice of Libertarians: 95% of Libertarians support Ron Paul.
[emphasis original]
Now, the libertarians are well-known laissez-faire whackos. Their official party platform says, among other things:
[W]e oppose all government interference with private property, such as confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain . . .
Free markets and property rights stimulate the technological innovations and behavioral changes required to protect our environment and ecosystems. . . .
We call for the repeal of the income tax, the abolishment of the Internal Revenue Service and all federal programs and services not required under the U.S. Constitution. We oppose any legal requirements forcing employers to serve as tax collectors. Government should not incur debt . . .
We favor free-market banking, with unrestricted competition among banks and depository institutions of all types. Individuals engaged in voluntary exchange should be free to use as money any mutually agreeable commodity or item. We support a halt to inflationary monetary policies, the repeal of legal tender laws and compulsory governmental units of account. . . .
Education, like any other service, is best provided by the free market . . .
We favor restoring and reviving a free market health care system. . . .
We favor replacing the current government-sponsored Social Security system with a private voluntary system. The proper source of help for the poor is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals. . . .
They not only oppose the use of government to do anything to create or maintain civilization, and are content to see every aspect of life - education, healthcare, wages, retirement, infrastructure development, environmental protection - condemned to a market transaction (they actually have an explicit section in their platform endorsing monopolies), they are anti-government conspiracy nuts as well. The platform is filled with references to “the cult of the omnipotent state” and “seizing the fruits of our labor”, under those conditions “where governments exist” (that’s apparently an open question for the Libertarian Party). They oppose ordinary government functions like eminent domain, military draft, and legal tender currency. (Yep - they’re the pro-wampum party.) They are for regressive taxes only, and insist that taxes can only be lowered, never raised, for any reason, in addition to which they prohibit all public debt under all circumstances: the combination of the two policies means, inevitably, that the first time the country faces an unplanned expense - war, disaster, recession - it will go bankrupt by official policy. They want to prohibit government regulation or oversight of banks, and government guarantees for bank deposits - that’s right, they’re officially in favor of a less reliable banking system than the one in place before the Great Depression. (Remember: this is their official platform. They’ve thought about this. And two former and current Republican members of Congress were their official presidential campagin nominees in 1988 and this year.)
In short, they’re capitalist-anarchist whackaloons who, like all libertarians, assume they’ll be the ones on the top of the heap of the inevitable state-of-nature free-for-all that would result from their policies, and simply don’t give a shit about anyone else. But note more specifically, they are essentially anti-government. They claim to be US Constitution strict constructionists, but they go farther than even the most rabid right-winger in that regard. They even regard money as illegitimate. And Ron Paul is a party member and former presidential nominee, and heavily involved in their current campaign for president. In Congress, though nominally Republican, Paul is unquestionably libertarian - he was the only Republican to oppose the Iraq war, on the general principle of no “foreign entanglements”.
So, my first observation is: McCain is now closely negotiating for support with someone who is not merely an out-of-the-closet libertarian RINO (that’s his business), and not merely a let-them-eat-cake “small government” enthusiast (not a surprise), but who is officially affiliated - and not in a small way - with a party that opposes almost every function not only of the United States government but of government in general: someone who is, in fact, an all-but-police-and-militia anarchist.
It’s not just Sarah Palin who’s the darling of the anti-government fringe. McCain himself is seeking lists of supporters and pledged delegates from a person who is simultaneously a flagship leader of an extremely radical fringe party and also a member of McCain’s own party. Both halves of the McCain-Palin ticket are tied to groups that explicitly seek to repudiate the United States government entirely, or almost all of its functions - and McCain is apparently offering inducements to the latter for his endorsement of McCain’s own “small government” platform. Not only are McCain and Palin both on record as courting secessionist and anti-government groups, but the GOP is fine with having two of that group’s presidential nominees in its own ranks, and McCain’s platform is apparently close enough to the anti-government party’s platform to enable an endorsement.
Also, there is this:
[Ron] Paul has refused to endorse Mr. McCain, and Mr. McCain’s operatives have refused to let him address the Republican National Convention. . . .
Earlier negotiations to have Mr. Paul address the convention fell through because the congressman would not change his position on the war in Iraq, which he opposes as needless and self-defeating for the United States.
Hmmm . . . Ron Paul - who is not merely a member of the Republican party, but a declared Republican candidate for President who has won delegate votes in the primary elections and has delegates officially committed to him in the nomination vote tally - is being refused a speaking slot at the party convention because he has publicly refused to endorse the candidate who has the party nomination locked up and opposes one of the central planks in the party nominee’s official platform, on which the nominee himself has invested much of his political credibility.
But wait! - I thought it was somehow immoral, and a tremendous slap in the face, to insist that your convention speakers should actually support your candidate and agree not to use their speaking slot to embarrass the candidate and undermine the party’s official platform? Paul is not merely an obscure obstructionist state governor who conducts personal vendettas against his own party members - he was an official candidate for the nomination McCain has received, and he commands pledged votes at this convention, as well as being a state delegate in his own right. Unlike whiney pseudo-martyrs of years past, Paul actually has an official role in the convention in which he is seeking a speaking slot, and is an official candidate in the race which does not, technically, end until the nomination vote is taken. But he has been shut out entirely for the small matter of seeking to overturn his own party’s campaign. Surely Republican commentators are going to be shaking their heads over this horrible display of fanatical extremism by the GOP convention organizers, for at least 16 years, right?
But it’s the same old story, of course. Nothing Republican politicians do is ever taken as actual evidence of their fitness for office or the acceptability of their beliefs or plans. And they are never held to any standard of consistency for their lying, demonization of opponents, and constant, reflexive distortions of facts and history. Obama is trashed relentlessly for months for things other people said in non-political settings, but Palin and McCain have gotten, and certainly will get, no scrutiny at all for their own membership in, or open courting of endorsements from political parties with platforms that explicitly call for the rejection or crippling of the very government that McCain and Palin are seeking to lead.
It is not illegal to seek to replace or eliminate the government of the United States (or its powers and functions) by peaceful means. But it should certainly be an absolute disqualification for the presidency. Note that McCain’s party is the one that staged a years-long witch hunt to destroy the careers of ordinary government employees - and entirely private citizens - who had merely attended meetings of the perfectly legal Communist Party, which had a (very broadly) similar agenda; McCain’s party is now the political home of two presidential campaign nominees of the Libertarian Party and is courting the endorsement of one of them for its own presdential campaign, while its VP nominee was herself a member of a secessionist party.* As for the Republican convention, it apparently applies the same (obvious and reasonable) rules for selecting speakers as the Democrats did in 1992, but will surely be spared not merely the unremitting criticism, but the continually falsified reporting, that that decision received from the Republicans when it was a Democratic speaker. And again, nothing whatsoever will come of this, because there is no standard of truth, consistency, or honor that applies to Republicans (or which, in fact, they could meet).
* Update: The membership issue is strangely complicated, but it is clear Palin has ongoing relations with the AIP - relations close enough that the AIP’s own leadership thinks she was a member. It appears now that she never had an official AIP voting registration, but party officers still continue to refer to her as having been a member. There is also a history of overlap between the Alaskan GOP and AIP (much like the GOP and the Libertarian Party): former Alaskan Governor Walter Hickel was elected as an AIP candidate in 1990, then ran for re-election as a Republican in 1994, and later endorsed Palin in her own bid for the Governorship. Some say Hickel’s AIP membership was only political opportunism, while AIP members say exactly the same thing about Palin’s GOP membership; at the very least, few people seem to think that membership in one of those parties precludes close ties with the other. George Clark, Vice Chair of the AIP, says Palin “is pretty well sympathetic to her former membership.” There is an ongoing disagreement whether Palin attended the AIP 1994 convention, though it is known that she attended their convention in 2000, and sent a recorded video message to their convention this year. In addition, her husband’s only political party registrations have been with the AIP; he has been registered as “Independent” since 2002, when Sarah Palin first went into electoral politics, and has apparently never been a registered Republican.
Categories: General, Libertarian Problem Solving, News & Current Events, Politics | 18 Comments
