Skip to main content

Ron Paul, child of scorn, grew lean as he assailed the seasons

. . . He wept that he was ever born, and he had reasons. . . .

Ron Paul represents a legitimate political philosophy:  Libertarianism.  He doesn't hate government.  He just wants it to be spare and lean, like him.  Liberty, for a Libertarian, is maximum personal responsibility, and a minimal government.  Government should be only what people cannot do for themselves, even if people are stupid or unlucky.

Logically, Libertarians represent the right wing urge of the Republican Party.  The other side of Republicanism wants a government that supports a more generous, but conservative government that supports business and social necessities.

The Tea Party pretends that it is Libertarian when it scorns big government but, at the same time, they want government to control marriage, and abortion, and what women can decide about their own bodies.  There is a mindless fundamentalist religious urge in the Tea Party.  There is, in other words, a very activist desire in the Tea Party, wanting the government to regulate people's religious and personal freedoms.

Right now, the Republican Party ignored Ron Paul, who represents their real conservatives, and lusts after its Tea Party governmental activist wing, so long as that activism gets into bedrooms, cuts taxes, and goes off to war.

The Iowa Straw Poll is a phony poll.  Candidates pay the entry fees for voters, and stuff them with pulled pork and sweet corn.  (They also provide something to eat!)  Michele Bachmann got 28% of the vote, and Ron Paul got 27%.  Tiny Tim Pawlenty got 13%, in third, and he quit.  You would never guess that from the Republican response:  it is all cheers for Bachmann, Romney, and Perry!  Whoops!  Wha' hoppen to Ron Paul?

The Republican Party today isn't your father's Oldsmobile!  It has been hijacked by people who hate taxes and Social Security and universal health care, but who love war and unregulated banks and White Anglo-Saxon fundamentalist religion.

It is a party flirting with thoughtless disaster.   It talks jobs and cuts unemployment insurance.  It hates taxes and demands bigger and better wars.  It scorns governmental interference, and asks for subsidies for oil companies.  It praises personal liberty and wants an ethics monitor in your bedroom and at the altar.  It praises male control of women.  It calls us an "exceptional nation" and despises immigrants.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there