As promised, I now turn to explaining why every clear-thinking Liberty and Freedom (“L&F”) activist and onlooker must vote for Romney. But first…
…I have to thank my buddy Bob for instantly responding to my original entreaty with this:
<FLASHBACK 2008> “why *we need to vote for McCain, as distasteful as it may be to all of us….”
<FLASHBACK 2004> “why *we need to vote for Bush, as distasteful as it may be to all of us….”
Ohhhh…funny, man. (Not!) What is being complained of above is the fact that George W. Bush (like his father before him), John McCain in 2008, and now Mitt Romney are really RINO’s—or at least near-RINO’s—who run (as they always do) as “conservatives” in order to win elections. Once elected, of course, they act (as they always do) like statist pigs, joining the political class team once victory is theirs.
So yes, the problem is real. I don’t deny that. And “the lesser of two evils is still evil.” I don’t deny that either. Does it logically follow that when the L&F forces are mousetrapped and double-crossed by RINO GOP party hacks at the highest level—as they were at the national convention last week—thtey should take their balls and bats and go home, refusing to continue the game? Of course not! That’s what the other side WANTS us to do! They want us out of the room!
And that is what we cannot allow. Listen: Party hacks don’t care about “conservative” or “liberal,” or “statist” or “libertarian.” Power is their desire, and politics is their game. They neither care about nor understand the philosophy of liberty and freedom. They’ve either never read or didn’t get the message from anyone, from the Founding Fathers in the Federalist Papers, to Milton Friedman, to Ludwig von Mises, to Ayn Rand, to F.A. Hayek, and from multitudes of other thinkers, writers, and defenders of freedom against statism. The name of the game for them is just “win at any cost.”
So where does that leave us? When we get stabbed in the back it leaves us with a lot more knowledge and wisdom than we had before, for one thing. And it doesn’t mean that we quit the field of battle. It doesn’t mean that we stop fighting the enemies of what we believe in. What it means is that we have ever-better views of who our enemies are!
Hear this: The foes of liberty and freedom are plentiful inside the Republican Party as well as in the openly statist, collectivist Democrat Party. The difference is that the Democrats make no bones about it: They are socialist pigs, and they wallow in it. The Republican party hacks, by contrast, pretend to both understand and support the values of the liberty-and-freedom movement, but they do that only to assist in their true aim of “winning power.” Then, then they win elections, they go on to expand statism. It makes these people our enemies.
I’m talking about people at the highest reaches of the Republican Party leadership. Those, for instance, who told President Ronald Reagan that he could “make a deal” with the Democrats, if he would only raise taxes in 1986. (Wrong.) Those who urged President George H.W. Bush to violate his sacred promise to “read my lips, no new taxes.” (Wrong.) Those who assured President George W. Bush that doubling the budget of the Dept. of Education and attempting a federal takeover of public education in America would be a good thing. (Wrong.) Or that supporting the largest expansion of the entitlement state since Medicare, the prescription drug benefit boondoggle, was a socko idea! (Wrong.) Within the Republican Party, these people…are…our…enemies. They must be defeated. They must be expunged from positions of leadership within the Party.
But there are gradations of enemies. Will we invite these people to vote for real L&F candidates? Of course! Will we attempt to drive them out of our Party? Absolutely not! We merely want to replace them with L&F leadership…as we largely did in New Hampshire with the elections of Jack Kimball as Party Chairman and Bill O”Brien as Speaker of the House. Did the party hacks strike back? Of course. And did the L&F forces suffer setbacks? Yes again.
But so what? Does that mean that we give up, that we refuse to soldier on both inside and outside the Republican Party, identifying our enemies and fighting against them at all levels, with all our strength, and at every opportunity? No way.
As for Romney, shouldn’t we refuse to vote for him? I mean, look at the damage George W. Bush and his father did, both after being elected as fake “conservatives.” No. We should vote for Romney. The fact is that the alternative is always worse. How about several more Sotomayors and Kagans on the Supreme Court? How about several more legislative accomplishments like Obamacare? How about a continued expansion of statism, racism, progressivism, collectivism, and every other pathology exhibited by the current leadership in Washington, DC?
The bottom line is this: In order to keep on fighting, you’ve got to be in the room. If we quit, go home, and refuse to keep on fighting, that makes the RINO’s happy! They want us to do that! That way they can run the party the way they want, and in the end it really doesn’t make much difference to them whether a Republican statist or a Democrat statist wins. They’re all pretty much on the same team anyway.
So in the end, here’s the fact: We must all stay in the Republican Party, we must all vote for Romney—because he truly is the lesser of two evils—and most of all we must continue fighting against statism wherever we find them…in both the Republican and the Democrat parties. If we keep on doing that, in New Hampshire at least we will ultimately win. And as far as I’m concerned, the fate of New Hampshire at this point is equally or more more important than what happens in the corrupt, failing, fetid swamp of Washington, DC.
So I’m voting for Romney. You should too. (Sorry.)