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Monday, September 08, 2008

Commenter Peter recently launched another of his commercials for Ron Paul in response to a TruePunk post about the Republican Convention. Peter has commented before, and both InstaPunk bloggers and some of our more able commenters have sought to reason with him about his, uh, convictions. This time, though, he seems to have stepped in it. He made Mrs. IP mad, which is hard to do and never a good sign about your writing and thinking ability. At such times, we all know the best thing to do is stand aside and hope the high winds and lightning don't take us out, too, by accident. Sorry, Peter. You have had it coming for quite a while now. And Mrs. IP always did like McCain. A word of warning to everyone who doesn't want his ass kicked in print.

THE THINGS THEY SAY. Peter. I read your comments and take great exception to what you’ve said and your use of this forum to make such statements with not a single example. It seems to me that you have indulged in the same type of smear tactics you object to in the media.  So I have made some responses in boldface to individual paragraphs of your comment. I have also added a brief statement of my own at the end.

I was MN as well this past week, but at the other event across the river. There people like Gary Johnson, Grover Norquist, Bruce Fein, Tom Woods, and Doug Wead talked about the country's problems, the GOP's problems and solutions for both. Theirs were familiar pleas for the party to listen to the movement, for once, and for the movement to actually take its role, power and mission seriously. They had their opportunity in the primaries. What you fail to understand is that your movement failed to be convincing or even persuasive to more than a splinter group of delusional fanatics.

Yes, Barry Goldwater, Jr. came out and said that the direction Ron Paul suggests is the best thing the movement has going. Then Ron Paul came out and expounded with the usual. You may disagree with policy suggestions, but that's all the substance that came out of Minnesota this week. The majority does not agree. Again, this is what primaries are for. As for citing Barry Goldwater, Jr., I feel for you. I, personally, have always admired Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the Great Emancipator, who  lived up to the legacy of his father by committing his mother to an insane asylum.

I want to like Sarah Palin. I want McCain's compelling story to make a difference to me. Likewise, I want this website's writers' insight into McCain's deepest motivations, and their self-projections onto his candidacy, to win me over and to make me feel good about not just voting for McCain, but working to get others to do so as well. But I'm not sold. It seems to me that John McCain’s own words should be what must convince you, not someone else’s interpretation. It also seems to me that the only input which ever sells you on anything is your most recent exposure to Ron Paul. Unfortunately, I dare say McCain and Palin know that about you, too. The one thing Paulistas have made abundantly clear to everyone is that nothing anyone can say to them will ever convince them to take their heads out of the sand and look at the world as it is. Which makes you quite a bit like the hardcore Obamaniacs. A door long slammed shut against common sense and garden variety logic.

What about policy? This must not be discussed. We know Barack Obama will be bad for the country. McCain's personal story and Palin's small-town cred are not answers to that, though. Policy is not discussed because there would be no fundamental difference between either administration. No fundamental difference between either administration? That’s ridiculous. Indeed, it’s preposterous, In point of cold fact, the only way to begin the kinds of reforms libertarians claim they believe in is with the “veto pen” McCain referenced in his speech. Without that pen as a first step toward slicing the lard out of existing government, every plank of Paul’s reform platform is as much a naïve fantasy as his belief that the U.S. can turn its back on the world without crippling consequences. John McCain’s record on reducing federal spending speaks for itself. Your bald assertions to the contrary are offensive.

This is because they share a love for big government, an imperial presidency and the arrogance that the elite in this country know what's best for not only every person in each American town and neighborhood, but for every 'global citizen' and their nations. As President, Obama or McCain know they have to answer to no one regarding their dealings with other nations. If you took the time to actually check John McCain’s record, you would know what a malicious falsehood this statement is. I’m wondering if you understand the structure of our government. Does the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a check and overseer of “imperial” executive foreign policy decisions ring a bell? Again, you fail to discern the obvious. If the Congress had a real rather than strictly political case to be made against the Iraq War, that war would be over. They could have defunded it any time in the last two years. They didn’t. Not because their mattresses were bugged, but because they don’t have an alternative foreign policy that effectively addresses what even they know is a serious terrorist threat. I truly believe you are becoming a monomaniac on this issue.

Just like with Jindhal, I'm worried that what could have been a great thing for Alaska will be a Sarah Palin as VP remade into what is best for the DC establishment, of which McCain is certainly a part - at least once election season is over. The great thing about being a paranoid is that wherever they look they see evidence of their worst nightmares. Must be hell.

National political conventions used to be days, sometimes weeks long. There party activists and officials actually debated and did battle with members of their own party to best define it and elect the best candidates who will represent the ideas for which that party is a vehicle so that it would be united against the opposing party. And who do you think the delegates were? They did debate, and they had some acrimonious fights. Easy to miss that if you decided ahead of time that it didn’t happen. And your nostalgia for smoke-filled rooms is quaint to the point of infantile. Today’s party reps can communicate and argue and resolve issues without necessarily being locked in one room for a few weeks. Have you heard about recent developments like cell phones, email, video conferencing and chat rooms? If you haven’t you might find them exciting if you opened your eyes long enough to escape from the 1880s.

This is no longer the case. The entirety of this event was a media show, of course, but it was a show in which the delegates, and thus the rank-and-file Republicans who elected them at their caucuses and county and state conventions had no say. There were no resolutions, no debates, no motions, no voting. Only a coronation to look good for the media. Wrong. These things didn’t occur on the convention floor because the media is watching and filming the convention floor 24/7. It all happened behind the cameras, in un-smoke-filled rooms, but it happened nonetheless. You’re free to disagree with a platform that doesn’t call for total unilateral disarmament and abandonment of the world to apocalyptic Iranian Jew-haters, neo-Soviet adventurism, and suicidal European socialists, but that doesn’t mean your ignorance is proof of some kind of imperialist conspiracy.

In fact, the media's presence is the main argument for this scenario. However, if the media's main goal was to make Republicans look bad, even among the delegates there were ample opportunities and people I know that were on the floor, and were interviewed, who highlighted the corrupt nature of the event. This paragraph doesn’t even make any sense.

Two major reasons none of these accounts are aired or printed, in my opinion, is first that the media and its establishment has no interest in allowing the public to consider, if even for a second, that these conventions and the meat of the political process are centrally controlled and not in our best interest (as most probably already know), but that every aspect of the political process the public can easily take total control over, wresting power from the few and returning it to their neighborhoods. See comment about paranoids above. Of course the media would have an interest in exposing the lunatic conspiracy you describe with no evidence whatsoever. That’s the kind of story that makes journalists rich, networks more powerful, and restores vanishing circulations to newspapers. For someone who claims to believe in capitalism, you appear to have zero understanding of how it works.

The other is that greater media scrutiny and individual involvement would cement for the public the similarities between the two parties (at least their DC wings), thereby shutting down the horse race the people eat up which makes the whole charade possible. Thank God there’s you, the one supremely brilliant person on earth who sees through all the lies being perpetrated on the American public. It’s absolutely staggering how well you can do this at such a distance from everything that’s going on, while surrounded by certifiable crazies who haven’t understood anything that’s happened in America since 1932. Hats off to your genius.

Please, go become your GOP precinct committeeman. Get on your county GOP central committee. Get on your GOP state committee and work to get actual conservatives as your State Chairman and national committee members. We can write and yell all we want, but politicians and party hacks know they don't have to change because our votes are in the bag. Actual involvement starting at the precinct level is the only way to change this party and what its elected officials do with the mandate we give them. No more.  You forgot to tell us where we should send our checks, money orders and credit card payments to Ron Paul to fund the most doomed political campaign since Pat Paulsen ran for President.

That’s your say. Here’s mine. Your wandering, ahistorical, data-free assertions are no longer cute. Not to me, anyway.

I have known about John McCain for decades. I remember his capture, his long captivity. I remember the talk when the last POWs were released by North Vietnam. No one was sure he would be released. Because of his father’s position, we were afraid he would be kept. Photographers and reporters scoured the buses to find him. I remember his return. The next time John McCain crossed my radar was his involvement in reestablishing relations with the Vietnamese. I asked myself what sort of man who had suffered all that he did at the hands of such a cruel enemy would want to be part of this. I also followed some of his career in politics as he hit the headlines from time to time.  For you to blithely lump him in with Obama as part of a vast monolithic sameness that is perceived only by you and your wannabe revolutionary co-zealots is actually disgusting to me. American politics is not a video game. It’s a flesh-and-blood reality where personal character, biographies, and decades worth of political positions and records are more important than rigid ideologies.

It sounds as if you’d prefer the parliamentary systems that are slowly strangling personal liberty, capitalism, and vigor in the European nations you want us to stay away from. In the U.S., we don’t vote for local ideologues who pick a party leader to lead the nation. We choose a president whom we trust to make hard decisions, including decisions we may not always agree with and which cannot be punished by an immediate ideological vote of no-confidence. It seems you have failed – for all your vain constitutional talk – to understand this central identifying characteristic of the most successful democratic republic in human history. I feel sorry for you on that count.

The critical point for me in presidential politics is actually believing what I’m being told by each candidate and trusting that the person will do what he says and that what he does is in the best interests of Americans. On September 11, 2001, I was at a meeting in a closed conference room on a Navy base. Suddenly, the door opened and we were all informed of what was happening. The base was being shut down and all civilians were ordered to leave. As we left, we drove out on the road alongside the base to get back to our highway. I was immediately struck by how little protection there was. A relatively short cyclone fence, just like what you would have in your backyard, was all that closed the perimeter. Anyone with a pickup truck could have driven right through it.

I realized just how open a society we are – so confident that our way of life is preferable to any other that we can’t even formulate a scenario where we would be under attack. Some still also believe that our oceans protect us.

I believe we are still struggling with the methods needed to protect ourselves. I see weaknesses everywhere. But there certainly have been improvements since we have not come under such an attack again. I am thankful George W. Bush understood that a nation as free as ours cannot fold in on itself for defense like an armadillo. He understood that the only way a society as free and open as ours can defend itself against the treacheries of terrorism is to seek out the enemy and attack him in whatever non-domestic battleground can be found.

Nobody tried to lynch FDR for joining battle against the European conquests of the Nazis by fighting them first in (huh?) Saharan Africa. (Damnit: shouldn't we have gone immediately for the Eagle's Nest [scroll]?) Bush, and McCain, too, found their own desert in which to confront al qaeda, and because there were no invisible mountain redouts like the ones Afghans have used for centuries to bleed invading armies (Brits, Russians, etc) to death, the United States Army and Marines have killed more al qaeda troops in Iraq than they’d ever have seen in the Barbaristans. And that’s why that frail Home Depot cyclone fence still hasn’t been breached in all the years since 9/11.

There was a time when I was convinced that a civilian president was the best choice for Commander in Chief.  We are, after all, a nation of citizen warriors. I have since changed my mind. In a world of terrorists who wish all of us dead, we need a person who understands the complexities of both the Department of Defense and the military structure. For all his good intentions and perseverance against fierce domestic opposition, George Bush could never overcome this lack in his own experience. It took McCain to sell the necessary Surge ito the administration and the congress, which he did by a heroic refusal to take the easy political out.  That’s a sterling example of why your glib ideological rantings aren’t worth the tidal wave of alphabetic characters you waste on them. And if you’re paranoid about a militarist dictatorship as well, go (re)read your American history. The record shows that previous Republican presidents who had prior military careers were anything but militaristic or imperialist (HINT: Do a Wiki search for Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower. They had their weaknesses, but tyranny wasn’t one of them).

When our nation must call on its military in a time of need – as we must now, regardless oif your willful and juvenile blindness -- I want someone who has shown some skill and comprehension about how best to use it. John McCain has proven he has that understanding by calling for the Surge long before anyone else and defying his own party and his president to win his case. You might recall that he received a lot of criticism at the time and even well after positive results were being achieved. Today, the Surge is a huge success acknowledged by all but Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Even Obama conceded late last week that it has been successful beyond all hope, even though he still refuses to admit he was wrong to oppose it. Character does matter, young man. The one thing Obama’s character can never permit him to do is acknowledge an error or a mistake. That’s a sign of narcissistic egomania. I would never vote for such a person for president, and I would advise you to consider what your own persistent refusal to face the obvious holes and errors in your political views might mean about yourself.

I will have more to say as the fall campaign continues.  For now, I suggest that Pete and others like him do a great deal more homework before they attempt to condescend to the rest of us again.

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