Tom’s Big Picture

The Day of Reckoning for the Ron Paul Revolution has come.

At first, they dismissed us.

Then they ridiculed us.

Then we outraised them in money, setting an all-time record for grassroots fundraising.

Now they fear us.  Even the belly of the neoconservative beast, the Wall Street Journal, once dismissing Paul, is now hedging its bets, preparing its readers for the possibility of a Paul victory.

All of the hope and labor and sweat and tears of the last year has come to this.  The time is now.

It is time to win where it counts, in the coming voting over the next six weeks, particularly the imminent contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.  This may all be over by Valentine’s Day.

But instead of a pep talk, I am writing this to give a warning.

For months we have complained of biased polls showing Dr. Paul with single-digit support among “likely” voters.  This has not shaken our faith because it conflicts with what we see with our own eyes.

We see the bumper stickers and yard signs for Dr. Paul.

We see the enthusiasm of our local meetup groups.

We see the overwhelming victories of Dr. Paul in straw polls, online polls or almost any forum requiring a modicum of active effort to participate.

But there is something yet missing from this reasoning.  The polls, though biased, do measure one thing.  They measure the opinions of people with a history of voting.  And that, frankly, scares me for our Revolution.

In my experience in local politics, I have found one thing to be true: voters are voters and non-voters are non-voters, and never do the two meet.  Despite hours of effort and thousands of dollars, there seems to be nothing in heaven and earth than can motivate the non-voter to vote.

The statistics are grim.  In one campaign I managed, people who voted infrequently, despite being contacted personally by the campaign and even agreeing to vote for my candidate, were only 15% as likely to show up and vote as someone with a solid voter history.

So in some sense the polls are accurate.  They are a snapshot of where Dr. Paul stands among those who’ve voted and are likely to vote again.  Which means the test of our Revolution has come: for Dr. Paul to win, something must change.

What must change is that the conviction of our hearts and the desire of our souls to begin the political redemption of this country must exceed our apathy.

No matter how much you’ve read and watched about Dr. Paul or how much you’ve given to him, none of that does a bit of good unless you, yes you, your physical person shows up and votes.

If you don’t, nothing happens.  Either this Revolution permanently destroys the statistical models of the pollsters by bringing millions of new voters they never guessed would show up or WE LOSE.

Dr. Paul is 72 years old.  Though he’s in excellent health, he can’t run again.  There’s no one else like him in a comparable office or with a comparable following.

And the momentum we have right now is a gift, a precious gift of a once-in-a-generation coincidence (for those who believe in coincidences, though I certainly do not!) that has left no heir apparent to the nomination and has cleared the path to victory if we will only reach out and take it.

This is the time and this is the hour to save our country.

Show up and vote.  Get as many people as you can to do the same, or else watch this great country run into the ground by Tweedledee or Tweedledum (for it matters not which is elected!) as you spend the rest of your days in painful contemplation of something that almost was and might have been.

This is either the turning of the tide or the last death throes of the Old Republic.

The choice, for better or for worse, is yours and yours alone.

On Meet the Press this weekend, despite Tim Russert’s hostility, Ron Paul hit a home run when questioned about his views on property rights, the right of free association and Lincoln’s War of Aggression:

About 4:50 into the broadcast, Paul defends his views on the Civil Rights Acts AND his opposition to the necessity of Lincoln’s invasion of the South.  My wife and I watched this and our mouths dropped open.  Did he really say that?  Is a man that principled really the best-funded Republican candidate for President?

I mean, I thought Tancredo was the best we could do, and a little stomach-turning Lincoln-worship might be part of the deal if we wanted to save that which was left of our nation.  But Paul shows what’s possible when people stand consistently on principle.

I am reminded of Robert E. Lee’s quote regarding the outcome of the war:

“In spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair the future? The truth is this: the march of Providence is so slow, our desires so impatient, the work of progress is so immense, and our means of aiding it so feeble, the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”

Does Ron Paul mark the end of the Lee’s “ebb”?

A post on Lew Rockwell’s blog sums it up beautifully:

George W. Bush and the Republican establishment are, if nothing else, Lincolnian, regardless of what anyone might say. The party of corporatism, imperialism, centralism, economic fascism, dictatorship, aggressive war, militaristic duplicity, conscription, direct taxation, cronyism and police statism has never strayed much from its 1860s roots. And it has always advanced despotism in the name of liberty and national honor, from Lincoln to Teddy, from Nixon to Reagan, from the Bushes to Benito.

Ron Paul is indeed an exception within the GOP. And he has stood up, heroically, to the Lincoln myth. This will get people thinking — perhaps there is something similarly wrong with aggressive war on the Iraqis and on the Southerners, a continuity between the rape of Atlanta and the rape of Fallujah, between Lincoln’s internal improvements and Bush’s Haliburtonization of Middle East policy. Maybe Operation Iraqi Freedom and the War Between the States were both murderous and deceitful. Maybe the two Republican administrations to suspend habeas corpus unilaterally, only to have their kept Congresses rubberstamp the tyranny, have a lot in common, after all.

No one serious who really thinks about it for more than 45 seconds can conclude there would still be slave plantations in America if not for Lincoln, so that smear just won’t work. Black Americans won’t fall for it either, despite the PC establishment that has taken for granted this demographic for so long. Americans of color can tell which Republicans are a genuine and grave threat to their liberty, and it’s not the one who challenges the corporatist warfare state that has always depended upon blacks as cannon fodder.

But Ron Paul has done something that no presidential candidate of any prominence has done in many, many years — he has challenged the cult of Lincoln, the ideological godhead of the modern American regime. The Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, the Wilsonian empire and now the Lincolnian central state have all become national issues of discourse again. Thanks, Ron Paul. Once again, you have told the American people what they need to hear. If we want America to become a free country, we must go further than overturning the legacy of George W. Bush. We must overturn much more, and replace it with liberty itself. We are closer to that goal than ever, as the ideological basis for the modern American system is crumbling at every moment of exposure to Dr. Paul’s truth serum.

I do apologize to my readers that this blog has become a running commentary on the Presidential race, but I think we are witnessing one of the most interesting races in a generation. Among the recent topics was this ad by Mike Huckabee:

As a student of political tactics, I’m going to take some time here to respect Huckabee the politician. I don’t know if there’s been a man with more natural political charisma since Bill Clinton. And in many ways, Huckabee is more likable than Clinton. This is precisely, of course, why Huckabee is so dangerous. Like Clinton, he has floated through life on his natural people skills, believing he can talk his way out of any situation (and often succeeding) such that he never is forced into the political inconvenience of standing on any real principle.

Unlike Clinton, who was intelligent enough to adapt to changing political winds, Huckabee is Dubya dumb, not necessarily of particularly low intelligence (Dubya’s 95th percentile SAT scores exceeded Kerry’s, a little known fact; I seriously doubt, however, Huckabee approaches either, the high academic standards of Ouachita Baptist University notwithstanding [average SAT score of about 1085, at about the 60th percentile]) but given to a particular type of self-righteous stubbornness, based not on principle but on himself. Witness Bush’s description of himself as “The Decider” as other such nonsense.

But let me just focus on this political ad in particular. Many were offended, assuming Huck’s intention was to say that he was the only Christian in the race. Even if he intended it, it is true, though, vis-a-vis Romney (Mormon), Giuliani (open adulterer), Thompson (see previous) and McCain (questionable as an Episcopalian, a group whose gay-marrying Scripture-denying theology is infamous). The only other known Christians in the race are Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter, both Baptists.

I am a Ron Paul supporter, but the reaction of some of the Ron Paul people and even Paul himself (who quoted the liberal culture-critiqueing Sinclair Lewis: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”) reflect a sort of libertarian blindness to and (among some) sympathy for the 20th-century culture destroyers like Lewis and their penchant for declaring healthy family relationships as repressed petri dishes for fascism. It’s the same Freudian pseudoscience perpetrated by the Frankfurt School in their fraudulently-conducted “Authoritarian Personality” studies: families with strong religious values and strong fathers are inherently defective because of sexual repression which inevitably expresses itself as hostility to the “other”, particularly Jews.

The disproportionately Jewish Frankfurt School researchers read into American Christianity evidence of fascist tendencies. Never mind the fact that if not for American Christians willing to die on their behalf, the pagans of Germany would have had their way with them.

The argument works because it is subtly circular. Neurotic psychoanalysts like Freud, who are obsessed with sex, power relationships and defecation, assume everyone else shares their mental illness. Since we aren’t neurotic and crazy like them, it must be because we’re repressed. Thus the naturally neurotic define normal Western psychology as deformed, while simultaneously defining their neurosis as evidence of normality! (Aside: when one considers the prevalence of deviant sexuality in Hollywood movies, at seemingly random moments in no way adding to the plot, we get a window into this mindset: these people literally think about sex and potty humor all day long.)

The American people are tired of being told that their traditional culture and religion are defective. And they’re particularly tired of the repression of Christmas. In this ad, the real message was not “I am the only Christian” but rather “I am not ashamed to publicly identify myself with your culture despite pressure from the media elites”.

Unfortunately, many libertarians, as Tom Fleming put it, “run gagging to the sink” at any suggestion of religious, cultural or ethnic solidarity. Paul should have been out front with an ad like this, and he missed an opportunity.

I have to give it to Huckabee on this one tactically: he hit the bullseye and the other candidates just got schooled in the art of identity politics.

Good article on his record of embracing theological liberalism as president of the SBC.

Whatever positive I’ve said about Tancredo, I take it all back.  This is about as bad as Buchanan naming a woman with a history of mental illness as his running mate in 2000:

www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-tancredo21dec21,1,2538989.story?coll=la-news-politics-national

We’re down to Ron Paul or worse than Bush.

The last thing he wanted was for his continuing candidacy to “contribute to the nomination” of someone whose record on immigration was abysmal, he said, citing Huckabee and Arizona Sen. John McCain, a supporter of legislation that would have put some illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.

“Gov. Romney, to his credit, . . . did something I don’t think is politically correct in the state of Massachusetts — stopped giving driver’s licenses and in-state tuition to illegal aliens,” Tancredo said, adding that Huckabee’s action in Arkansas was a “totally different kind of situation.”

The Huckabee campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Romney and Tancredo met earlier Thursday, and their conversation convinced Tancredo to make an endorsement.

In a brief written statement, Romney thanked the departing candidate for his support: “While we don’t agree on every issue, we agree on the need to keep America strong. I look forward to working with him and other Republicans to achieve that.”

I guess I understand.  If evangelicals are dumb enough to support Huckabee, and one assumes Paul is unelectable, then patriots are forced into a difficult position of trying to counter the Huckster with the least of the remaining evils.  Of course, I do think Paul is electable, but many disagree.  We’ll know in a few short weeks.

In an interview with CBN recently, Huckabee claimed to have a theology degree:

“I’m as strong on terror as anybody. In fact I think I’m stronger than most people because I truly understand the nature of the war that we are in with Islamofascism. These are people that want to kill us. It’s a theocratic war. And I don’t know if anybody fully understands that. I’m the only guy on that stage with a theology degree. I think I understand it really well.”

This is a lie, it turns out. He was caught in the lie, but shrugged it off with the following:

“I have a bachelor of arts in religion and a minor in communications in my undergraduate work. And then I have 46 hours on a master’s degree at Southwestern Theology Seminary. So, my degree as a theological degree is at the college level and then 46 hours toward a masters — three years of study of New Testament Greek, and then the rest of it, all in Seminary was theological studies, but my degree was actually in religion.”

First of all, this may not sound like a lot to the press, but to anyone who actually knows anything about theological degrees, there’s a huge difference academically between a religion degree and a theology degree. Theology degrees are much more technical and difficult, particularly their emphasis on the academically rigorous requirements of learning two foreign languages, Greek and Hebrew, and possibly a third, Latin. Huckabee knew he was lying when he said this: an equivalent secular comparison would be a person with a bachelor’s in criminal justice claiming to have a law degree. It would be a lie and they would know it was a lie.

Secondly, what does it say about a man who wants to be President that he dropped out of seminary before even finishing his master’s? Given the near-ubiquity of Ph.D.’s among pastors, one does not get the impression that the seminaries are particularly selective in awarding them assuming someone is willing to put in the work. Could this explain Huckabee’s disdain for knowing the issues, lazily falling back on puppy dog eyes and a cutesy anecdote?

But since Huckabee suffers from an inferiority complex, he always has to “one-up” the other guy, whether that’s claiming to have degrees he doesn’t have or engaging in self-righteous rhetoric about his moral superiority on the immigration issue. This is a man who will not govern on principle, but based on what he thinks will make him liked.

I have nothing to add:

Gullible and self-righteous: click here for the details on one of his pardons.

Gov. Huckabee probably never read the confession of a demented killer named Glen Green before he made the monster eligible for parole.

Green’s confession is so depraved, its sadistic details so scary that no sane, responsible adult would consider him for parole.

If the governor didn’t read the confession, he is guilty of dereliction of duty.

But if he read the confession and still considers Green deserving of parole, he’s certainly unfit to hold office. Who would free a madman who beat an 18-year-old woman with Chinese martial-arts sticks, raped her as she barely clung to life, ran over her with his car, then dumped her in the bayou, her hand reaching up, as if begging for mercy?

In usual fashion, Huckabee’s office didn’t even contact the victim’s family about the clemency.

Although he’s required to by the Constitution, the governor, as is his custom, won’t say why he granted clemency to this crazed killer (over the unanimous objections of the Post-Prison Transfer Board).

As he grants clemency to scores of violent criminals, Huckabee’s motives are the subject of speculation: Why, people are asking, is he doing it? After studying the record for several weeks, all one can say is that his actions perhaps reflect a combination of arrogance and avarice and ignorance.

While his fellow governors keep electing him to top positions in their little club, he has alienated Arkansans of both parties. They’re shocked at not only the amazing number of clemencies but also at the way he ignores the suffering of the victims’ families, who are always the last to know when their loved one’s killer is up for parole.

Bilenda Harris-Ritter, an attorney who now lives in California, is one of those people who worry all the time that Huckabee might free the man who killed their relatives. Harris-Ritter’s parents were murdered in north Arkansas, and she has had to deal with heartless state bureaucrats as she fights to keep the killer locked up.

Now why did he do it?  Well, because one of his friends told him this guy was really alright and had come to Jesus.  You see, Huckabee’s trusts his friends more than a jury or the concerns of victims’ families:

Huckabee apparently listened to Green’s minister (and a friend of the governor), who thinks the murder was an accident and Green was forced to confess.

This guy shouldn’t be anywhere near a pulpit, much less the Presidency.  Doesn’t he realize what will happen if pardons and commutations in this life are linked to repentance and conversion?  Does it not occur to him that pardoning criminals for appearing repentant will end all real repentance and salvation that might otherwise occur?

Huckabee is from Arkansas, and having grown in up in Texas and Louisiana, I can tell you what Arkansas is about: it’s basically Louisiana except the politicians have less style and they can be bought at cheaper prices.

Huckabee’s record of commutations just looks like somebody who’s taking cash under the table.  What politician would spend that kind of political capital without some of the real kind in return?  When you consider the materialist bent revealed by he and his wife’s use of “wedding registries” to get gifts when they left office (click here for that story- I mean really, if this isn’t Clintonian white trash* behavior, I don’t know what is), it doesn’t seem all that unlikely.

Or else he’s a soft-headed liberal at heart with poor judgment.

Or if you’re self-righteous Mike Huckabee, maybe both.  Just a little cash under the table to grease the wheels of justice, that’s all…

There are three presidential candidates I consider to be worse than Bush on the Republican side: Giuliani, McCain, and now Huckabee.  Let the voter beware.

*This is a phrase I really hate to use, as it fuels the insanity of the Great White Status Game, but I couldn’t think of an idiom that better captures the essence of Mike Huckabee.

Another great effort by Sailer to address the histrionics and moral grandstanding associated with this issue:

www.vdare.com/sailer/071203_iq.htm

You would think in our increasingly global society where valuing diversity is our highest value that an epidemic spitting on someone because of their religion would at least merit a mention in the nightly news summary. I mean, that sounds like something out of a Steven Speilberg “comic book Nazi” movie, except the messiness of reality reverses the media-anointed perp/victim mythology (click here for the story):

Christians in Jerusalem want Jews to stop spitting on them
By Amiram Barkat

A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face.

Funny how Israel gets a free pass to pursue policies in their national interest: a preferred place for their historical religion, a restrictive and selective immigration policy, a functioning border fence to keep out terrorists and a foreign policy in its own self-interest. Funny how the neoconservatives and neoliberals who support Israel’s right to do so deny the same to Americans.