Election 2012: Ron Paul’s Revenge!
My election prediction
by
<http://original.antiwar.com/author/justin/>Justin Raimondo, November 07, 2012
What’s particularly nervy galling, really
about the idea that the US ought to be
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlz3-OzcExI>spreading
our
<http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804>democratic
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2036551/Rapists-torturers-murderers-Damning-verdict-Afghan-police-help-fund.html>system
<http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/05/14938142-suicide-bomb-ups-death-toll-in-syria-to-269-since-sunday-groups-say?chromedomain=usnews>across
the
<http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/02/09BAGHDAD379.html>globe
is the fact that we don’t have anything close to
democracy in this country. Nor do we have what
the Founders intended to create: a republic,
where the power of the state is limited by
<http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html>the
Constitution. This is underscored every time
Americans go to the polls, where they are
confronted with “choices” determined by lawmakers
whose chief interest in life is getting reelected
with as little opposition as possible. These
guardians of the polity have made it
<http://www.harrybrowne.org/2000/WhatWe%27reUpAgainst.htm>virtually
impossible for so-called third parties i.e.
parties not controlled by corporate interests and
foreign lobbyists to even get on the ballot.
And if you don’t like this state of affairs, and
take action, the State will smack you right in
the face. Take
<http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20121031,0,639051.column>the
case of Richard Winger, the third party expert
and political analyst, editor of
<http://www.ballot-access.org/>Ballot Access
News, who, together with other interested
parties, sued the state of California so that all
candidates would have an equal right to show
their party label on the ballot. With the passage
of an “open primary” law, which
<http://www.ballot-access.org/2012/07/18/top-two-systems-still-have-unbroken-record-of-blocking-minor-party-candidates-from-ballot-if-at-least-two-major-party-members-run/>effectively
abolished third parties, California’s third party
candidates couldn’t even identify themselves on
the ballot. The lawsuit failed, however, and the
judge ruled that the plaintiffs had to pay the
court costs of the big corporate moneybags who
had sponsored the “open primary” legislation to
being with. Winger and his fellow third partiers got a bill for $243,279.50.
Isn’t “democracy” wonderful?
Well, no, it isn’t, not the current American
version, which merely serves to legitimize in a
“legal” sense, at any rate what is in reality
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts270.html>an
oligarchy. As this election season dramatized
once again, the differences between the two
state-subsidized state-privileged “parties” is
chiefly rhetorical: this came through loud and
clear during the Obama/Romney foreign policy
“<http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/10/23/debate-summary-israel-israel-israel-israel/>debate,”
but it’s true on domestic issues as well. The
bipartisan consensus is clear: maintain the
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard196.html>Welfare-Warfare
State pretty much as it has existed since the New
Deal, with allowances made for trimming around
the edges here and there. No matter who wins this
election, the victor will have to impose a
program of “austerity,” i.e. burdening the lower
and middle classes with new taxes and program
cuts, while granting new opportunities for
corruption and cronyism to the political class
and the oligarchs, foreign as well as domestic.
Libertarians are not small-‘d’ democrats: we
don’t believe in the efficacy or legitimacy of
the system but we don’t (or shouldn’t) disdain
it. For this is the one concession an otherwise
authoritarian-minded political class must make in
order to continue their system of “legalized”
thievery and mass murder. They must ask, if only
symbolically, for the consent of the governed
what Ayn Rand called
“<http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sanction_of_the_victim.html>the
sanction of the victim.”
But we don’t have to be victims: we can utilize
this chink in the armor of the State to drive a
stake through its rotten heart because any and
all weapons in the battle for liberty must be in
our arsenal. Yet we also should have no
illusions: everyone saw how the GOP leadership,
in league with the Romneyites,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrYdBL7BFwE>stole
a good
<http://dougwead.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/how-mitt-romney-cheated-his-way-to-the-gop-nomination/>half
of Ron Paul’s delegates to the national
convention. It was such a brazen display of
thievery that the Republican governor of Maine
where arguably the most egregious rip-off took
place
<http://bangordailynews.com/2012/08/24/politics/lepage-not-attending-gop-convention-after-delegate-dispute/>refused
to attend the Tampa coronation.
And it isn’t just about the Paulians. Every
dissident tendency in the country has been
silenced by
<http://rangevoting.org/BallAccess.html>repressive
ballot access laws which give the oligarchic
parties ample “legal” ammunition to keep
outsiders off the ballot. Previously, Democratic
party lawyers practically followed Ralph Nader
around the country as he tried to attain ballot
status,
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5272141/ns/politics-tom_curry/t/democrats-file-anti-nader-suit/>suing
to keep him off as soon as he qualified and all
too often succeeding. The Republicans targeted
Gary Johnson in
<http://www.policymic.com/articles/14389/gary-johnson-rise-makes-republicans-suppress-third-party-candidates-in-states-ballots/212658>the
same way this year. A more disgusting display of
“legal” repression” has never even occurred in
such bastions of “democratic” authoritarianism as
Belarus and Putin’s Russia. Indeed, it is easier
for a political party to attain national ballot
status in Russia today than it is for the
Libertarian party or the Green party to get on
the ballot in, say, <http://www.paballotaccess.org/>Pennsylvania.
Congressional districts are so
<http://www.slate.com/slideshows/news_and_politics/the-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts.html>gerrymandered
into shapes which give the incumbent a job for
life that we might as well make the office
appointive, or even hereditary. That way, the
American political class can confer on itself all
the titled magnificence and glitz of its
<http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Quigley_Anglo_American_Establishment.pdf>model
and progenitor: the British aristocracy.
In the face of a steady assault of election
spending legislation attempting to limit
contributions, and requiring all kinds of
“disclosure” conceivably subjecting donors to
official retribution the
<http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php>near
invincibility of incumbency is a fact of American
political life in much of the country.
The War Party has two wings: the
<http://www.cnas.org/>Democrats and the
<http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/>Republicans. All
others are outsiders, whose ability to storm the
gates is “legally” restricted by a nearly
impassable series of bureaucratic obstacles
designed to keep them out while still maintaining
the “democratic” illusion, i.e. the
<http://www.ourrepubliconline.com/OurRepublic/Quote/119>phony
two-party system, which is in reality a single entity.
It is a delicate operation, in the course of
which the political class must walk a fine line
between repression and allowing some degree of
free expression. This year how that line is
drawn, and who draws it, is going to make a big
difference and perhaps a decisive one.
There’s nothing like an election to show up the
essential fraudulence of the democratic system,
particularly how it’s practiced in America.
Nothing makes this point clearer than the
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/18/republican-voter-suppression-early-voting_n_1766172.html>Republican
voter suppression campaign, which is designed to
keep African-Americans, Latinos, and others from
voting. Aside from the ugly racial implications
of this deplorable effort, one can kind of see
the Republicans’ point: after all, with a
candidate so widely and intensely disliked,
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/21/why-does-everybody-hate-mitt-romney.html>even
by his own supporters, what else can they try?
Asking people for all kinds of identification at
the polls, and putting partisan zealots on guard
asking people to identify themselves, is straight
out hooliganism. Did you think the Romneyites were above that?
As I write, we don’t know who will win this
presidential election, but I made
<http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/03/29/mitt-romney-in-your-heart-you-know-hes-a-loser/>my
prediction long ago and I’m sticking to it. I
even half-seriously averred that, by nominating a
complete nonentity, the Republicans were
deliberately throwing the election. Romney’s
candidacy postponed the ideological blood feud
that’s going to break out when he goes down to a
well-earned defeat, but the
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1451694938/antiwarbookstore>Karl
Rove/<http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/288775_Fox_News_sees_black_man_outsid>Fox
News grand poobahs of the GOP can’t delay it
indefinitely. Just add the Ron Paul vote to the
Republican column, the day after the President
declares victory, and see what you come up with.
Most of Paul’s voters stayed home on election
day, or else voted for Gary Johnson, the
Libertarian standard-bearer this time around.
And that, I predict, will make all the difference.
When the President spoke of voting as
“<http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2012/11/03/obama-romney-revenge-ohio-election-2012/1679161/>revenge”
the other day, the wimpish girlish Republicans
immediately started up a chorus of whining one
reason why they’re such losers, and why they
deserve to lose. Yet I was heartened to hear
Obama say it, not only because revenge is such a
major (albeit unacknowledged) factor in politics,
but because it’s particularly appropriate this
election year, and even more so from my own
ideological perspective. Because what we’ll see,
this Election Day, might justifiably be called
Ron Paul’s revenge, and, as
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CgNwBh8vOY&feature=related>Ralph
Cramden would put it:
“How sweet it is!”
Okay, I’m posting this on Election Day, before
the results are in: tune in here for an update
after we know who won, and by how much, to see me
either exult in the sheer accuracy of my prophecy, or else eat crow.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/11/06/election-2012-ron-pauls-revenge/
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