Floy Lilley at LewRockwell.com contends this morning that “We’ve just finished watching yet another boring presidential debate in which, with the exception of the contributions by Ron Paul, no major issues were debated.
"Instead, John McCain and Mitt Romney were permitted to spend the bulk of the time arguing about the supposedly major differences that separate them, when in fact they actually agree on everything.”
Missing, she says, are fundamental questions like: “Should we have troops in 129 countries or 130? Income tax or national sales tax? This restriction on freedom or that one?”
Good questions. Ron Paul has the answer, she says, and “is about to blow the lid off the whole political establishment, the whole crooked game of which McCain, Romney, Clinton, and Obama, for all their supposed differences, are all an intimate part.”
There all in on a conspiracy I suppose, every single one of them. Gov. Mitt Romney as well?
Come now.
Ron Paul’s written a book: “The Revolution: A Manifesto," to be released by Grand Central Publishing. It covers everything establishment politicians lie about or ignore: war, sound money, terrorism, the economy, the IRS, civil liberties — you name it. It’s written to be understood by ordinary people and to wake them up.
Here’s an excerpt:
Every election cycle we are treated to candidates who promise us “change,” and 2008 has been no different. But in the American political lexicon, “change” always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.
Real change would mean something like the opposite of those things. It might even involve following our Constitution. And that’s the one option Americans are never permitted to hear . . .
With national bankruptcy looming, politicians from both parties continue to make multi-trillion dollar promises of “free” goods from the government, and hardly a soul wonders if we can still afford to have troops in — this is not a misprint — 130 countries around the world.
All of this is going to come to an end sooner or later, because financial reality is going to make itself felt in very uncomfortable ways. But instead of thinking about what this means for how we conduct our foreign and domestic affairs, our chattering classes seem incapable of speaking in anything but the emptiest platitudes, when they can be bothered to address serious issues at all. Fundamental questions like this, and countless others besides, are off the table in our mainstream media, which focuses our attention on trivialities and phony debates as we march toward oblivion.
This is the deadening consensus that crosses party lines, that dominates our major media, and that is strangling the liberty and prosperity that were once the birthright of Americans. Dissenters who tell their fellow citizens what is really going on are subject to smear campaigns that, like clockwork, are aimed at the political heretic. Truth is treason in the empire of lies.
There is an alternative to national bankruptcy, a bigger police state, trillion-dollar wars, and a government that draws ever more parasitically on the productive energies of the American people. It’s called freedom. But as we’ve learned through hard experience, we are not going to hear a word in its favor if our political and media establishments have anything to say about it.
If we want to live in a free society, we need to break free from these artificial limitations on free debate and start asking serious questions once again. I am happy that my campaign for the presidency has finally raised some of them. But this is a long-term project that will persist far into the future. These ideas cannot be allowed to die, buried beneath the mind-numbing chorus of empty slogans and inanities that constitute official political discourse in America.
That is why I wrote this book.
“The only drawback,” Lilley laments, is that Paul’s book “will not be released until April 30. That’s where RonPaulBookBomb.com, a new grass-roots effort, comes in.”
They want you and I to buy books now. But if Ron Paul can save the country, then why can’t he get a book out before the primaries are over and done with?
If he’s such a forward thinking free market wizard, why didn’t he get the book out long ago, and even at this late date (with instant print on demand solutions everywhere), why can’t he make something so simple come to pass? Does he have what it takes to run to our relief, if he isn’t even aware of the technology that is out there? Or will he roll up to us in a wheelchair?
Sadly for Ron Paul, he’s old, as are he and his followers’ finger pointing conspiracy theories, and his and their unrealistic answers to real world problems . . . such as unrestricted free trade, freedom through moral and political anarchy, a return to the Articles of Confederation (as an interim measure), and abolishing the Federal Reserve.
Heck, even conspiracy wonk G. Edward Griffin in “Creature From Jekyll Island” nuts and bolts look into the history and current workings of the Federal Reserve was honest enough to admit that the Fed couldn’t be abolished at so late a date without disastrous results.
Congressman Paul, no doubt, will have some good things to say; he always has. But in his appeal to the Founding generation, will he admit that even Madison knew that power would gravitate to Washington, and that this wasn’t always a bad thing?
Will there be any admission that those who were so radically opposed to federal power as Paul and the libertarian, Ludwig Von Mises crowd are today, brought us the bloodiest war in our history and the federal power grabbing backlash that followed? Or how about this: that these libertarians of old that they adore, owned slaves, men who were somehow less than men (private property they called it), and that they were doing everything in their power to spread the institution westward?
What we need is education in law and morality, coupled with the sort of moral action that gives us eternal vigilance, and these will take time. But an instant radical abolition of everything in Washington by a handful of nut cases will accomplish what? An anarchy run by (Wait a minute! Nobody is in charge!) the current populace of morally and educationally degraded inhabitants, who once they have this new boon of “freedom” in their hands, won’t know what to do with it other than quickly bring back what was overthrown, or . . . something far worse. And, by the way, if history is any guide, the latter is more likely of the two.
These ultra-smart libertarians ought to know that. And well, if we are talking conspiracy theories, then perhaps they do.
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Newsmax.com pundit Steve Farrell is the president of the Latter-day Center for Moral Liberalism (centerformoralliberalism.wordpress.com), associate professor of political economy at George Wythe College, and editor of the daily, in your face blog, “Stiff Right Jab” (stiffrightjab.wordpress.com).
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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