Editorials

Taking Note of the “It’s-My-Way-or-The-Great-Abyss” Vote

During the Obama Swarm of ’08, Republican Virgil Goode lost his heavily-Republican district (VA-05) by a few hundred votes to One-Term Tom Perriello, when, after polls closed some ballots were found in the trunk of some clerk’s car. This was something not done in Virginia, we believed. But for some reason, Virgil did not protest. Nor did he run for re-election in 2010, when Perriello was a shoo-in to be shooed-out.

Instead, Virgil Goode decided to get even with the Republican Party. (???) This year, as the Constitutional candidate, he’s teamed up with Gary Johnson (the Libertarian candidate) to see who could best keep Virginia in the pocket of Barack Obama.

Don’t ask me why Goode wanted to do this. I’m sure it’s inside baseball stuff. Personal grudges, maybe. But did I mention that until 2000 Goode had been a Democrat?

Johnson, otherwise a really nice man, I’m told, decided, if the Republicans won’t have me, I’ll see what I can do to wreck their chances and give ol’ Barry another four years. Can you connect the dots on that thinking without using the words, vanity, pride, and me-ism?”

But enough of vainglorious politicians who are forever of the “my way or the highway” bent. As someone said in 2009, and has been quoted often since, America’s big worry isn’t Barack Obama being president, but the type of people who will vote for him. And this includes the bass-ackward thinking of right-leaning, selfish so-and-so’s.

With the election just three weeks away, it’s time, once again, to profile that peculiar political animal who would rather go down on a torpedoed ship, yelling, “See, see, I told you so…” than survive the torpedo blast by lending a hand to save it.

I accused a commentator of this very crime back in the day when I wrote diaries elsewhere. I won’t name him, but he was incensed that the voters of Arizona had actually enacted their now-famous immigration law, and once signed into law, he refused to even consider the reality of the law existing. I wasn’t particularly in favor of the law myself, but did like the thumb-in-the-eye Jan Brewer had just poked Obama’s way, and wrote a short piece about the way forward I would recommend for Arizona now that it had passed the law. (I practiced law there for a few years.)

This commenter lambasted me for proceeding under this reality (the law) that he still couldn’t abide. He continued to insist the state government act as if the law didn’t exist. It was at that time I accused him, as described above, of preferring to go down with the ship, and taking everyone else with him, yelling, “I was right, I was right,” than surviving with a boatload of people who had actually worked hard to keep that ship from sinking.

Vanity

I often quote Ecclesiates 1:2, “All is vanity,” and this is a primary condition of this species.

Last December I wrote a long article about this condition, in the context of Ron Paul’s candidacy, describing the type of personality (psychology) of his followers that people of moral conscience should tip-toe quietly to avoid. It’s long, but if you wan to read it, you can, here, Ron Paul, where Libertarians and the Left are Joined at the Heart.

My point still is, libertarianism and conservatism are joined umbilically at several points, say 17 of 20. But it’s where they aren’t joined that I want to discuss here, for that is where they are joined, by nature, by personality and psychology, with the Left.

As a personal credo, as a way to manage one’s life, I hold libertarianism very high. But on humanity’s three belly buttons where they are not joined with conservatism; vanity, pride and elitism, the libertarian is still nonetheless joined; only with the Left. It is this detachment, personal vices all, that separates true libertarians from the more numerous self-absorbed, snotty, arrogant, overly-prideful, condescending, libertarian we so associate with the Paulbot. Know-it-all’s and Know-Nothing’s all merged into one solid frame of unfathomable contradictions. It’s more or less the way Mark Twain distinguished between the “professing Christian” and the “professional Christian”; one who wears Christ in his heart, the other, on his sleeve.

And you know this type in your own world, often on sight. Every office has one. Aloof, distant, a crackerjack at running numbers, hell on wheels at meeting deadlines, still he always seems to be Number 2 when promotions come around. He never goes out with the team for beer.

Hell, just driving down the road, you can often tell a Paulbot just by the way he drives. He’s the guy who pulls over in the passing lane, sets his Buick on 68, 3 mph over the speed limit, then holds it there, never moving back to the right, no matter how many lights flash off and on or horns blow behind him. His logic? He’s already speeding so you have no right to demand that he enable you to speed more. As the Brits say, it’s a point of personal order with him to be in the right, no matter how much the world is mucked up in his proving it.

Fifteen cars and twenty minutes back, I always give these people the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe they’re 80 year old dowagers, hands trembling, trying to steady the faster-than-light speed of 68, and a little tentative at making the risky move back to the right lane. But when I pull up even with them, and looking over I see it is the same sumbitch I see almost every time, with or without a bumper sticker, head thrown back, the Mussolini chin jutted, eyes fixed straight ahead, so as not to have to see the 15th consecutive bird that has been thrown his way, but proud of every one of them, as we finally slip around on the right.

You need to understand this person, for there are many of them out there. And they can be dangerous come voting time. Sometimes there can be enough to change the course of the election, as Ralph Nader’s Greens did in 2000.

For you see, they all share much in common, to begin with, a public school education which has produced the most under-educated, most-under cultured and most self-esteemed individuals in world history. What generally separates them is that Paulbots are fastidious, fussy and a little solitary.

In film, they identify with Strelnikov in Dr Zhivago, or Boromir in The Lord of the Rings (though never reading the books.) In Hud, they identify with Hud. In The Mentalist, they empathize with Red John. (Nah, just kidding.) You can make of game of this.

But they all share a hatred for the common man, all of them refusing (Psychologically) to see that it is the “uncommon” in the common man the Constitution not only unleashes, but was designed to unleash. (Or that it was so with their own parents.) Just like the Left, they define themselves by what they hate, and it is so emblazoned on their souls I’m afraid it creates an unbridgeable chasm with conservatives, who I believe to be far more representative of what the Founders had in mind; not a nation of Cro-Magnon individualism but one of reciprocity and freedom.

Libertarians hate living in a world governed by C-students….forgetting they are the children of C-students.  Like Liberals, they are a couple of connected dots short of a completed bridge design.

I understand “I’d rather be dead than Red.” I also understand people who cannot live in a godless, impure or just plain ugly world. They build monasteries, convents, and prisons, for those sorts. Libertarianism is an ideology of “I” only there is no “I” in We the People. There is no “Me” in Nation, Republic, or Ship of State.

The math of this election is simple. Any vote for any candidate other than the two who have a chance to become the next president is not simply a vote thrown away, it is a vote to sink the ship. Now I say this knowing Obama voters see losing as a trip into the abyss just as we do, so any Green or Nader vote is one for Romney. Fine with me. I want all the help I can get to help slip them into the chasm of darkness.

But it should be all hands on deck right this time, on both sides.

But this time I haven’t heard a peep out of the Naderites or Greens. And some say, due to Ron Paul’s refusal to endorse Romney, right-leaning third party votes may outnumber left-leaning third parties for the first time since Ross Perot in 1992. In the past two elections, the Left had “given” the Republican candidates (Bush and McCain) app 100K more votes than our Libertarian/Constitutional parties gave the Dems.

You can only be fastidious up to a point when you’re swimming in muck. Let’s hope they can sense just how deep it is, and join us in getting out of it. First.

This election, unlike all the others before will tell us how many there are of them who really have taken complete leave of their belief in we as a nation, or lost their sense of smell.  I’d like to think most can connect the simple dot of liberty.

Win or lose, just find out who they are, and make it your daily mission to walk your dog past their yard in order to do his business.

Let them know that it is easier to declare one man a pariah than an entire society.

 

 

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