and it is: making converts. i know it works because a former winger friend of mine explained to me how he came into the Light.

his trajectory was childhood christianity--> reagan-->ron paul-->ross perot-->liberal values. each step he took towards our side began with a conversation about some small part of a liberal value with which "libertarians" and true "conservatives" are concerned. anxiety about immigration, although often racist in tone, has more to do with economic stress, which all of us in the working class share. if you can get them to shift the overton window (or something) and make them understand that, and you've made some progress. the important part is about not being derisive about their anxiety, but instead correctly directing it.

so i invite paul supporters to come to my blog, and to engage me anywhere on the internets. i see them as potentials, allies in the making. paul has many flaws, from where i'm sitting. he is not worse than bush, not by a long shot. that is an essential difference to me, and i believe the same is true of their supporters.

if we were all alike.

I watched a really good movie yesterday.

Much better than wasting one more word on this guy.

Voting ourselves out of this mess is not an option.

The framework has been laid, the damage done. The next five years proves the point. About all we can do is hang on for the ride. Or die.

I did inhale.

Paul talks about getting back to the Constitution, yet he seems to have skipped past the old Preamble, which outlines quite nicely the role and relationship of government to the people being governed.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Ron Paul's blindness to the significance of the Preamble typifies the world view of an intellectually hardened ideologue. Where in Ron Paul's vision is the perfection, the unity? His policies would destroy any sense of community, dividing people and leaving them vulnerable to all manner of threats, both domestic and foreign. This should sound familiar to anyone who has noticed the effect of George Bush's domestic policies. Divide and conquer the populace of your own country.

Would eliminating public-minded things like Social Security and Equal Opportunity really help establish justice? Is there any domestic tranquility while established powers are allowed to repress all competition?

Without regulations, without taxation, how can a country continue to exist at all? Without even trying to secure the blessings of liberty to the governed and their posterity, what good is Ron Paul's kind of government?

Ron Paul is just another false prophet of the right. People enamored of his "brave" anti-war stance are missing the real point: He doesn't like war because he doesn't think citizens should pay for anything. He wants to eliminate government altogether. That means you might as well find a nice tree, climb up it and prepare to defend it against all the other apes.

Let's call it "jungle conservatism." If Ron Paul becomes president, then welcome to the jungle, America.

"Death before being dishonored any more." - Col. Ted Westhusing

(not exactly known as a right-winger) would disagree with your assessment that it is the government that forced positive social changes on us "at the point of a gun".

A People's History of the United States

From Publishers Weekly
According to this classic of revisionist American history, narratives of national unity and progress are a smoke screen disguising the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress and exploit. Historian Zinn sides with the latter group in chronicling Indians' struggle against Europeans, blacks' struggle against racism, women's struggle against patriarchy, and workers' struggle against capitalists. First published in 1980, the volume sums up decades of post-war scholarship into a definitive statement of leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography. This edition updates that project with new chapters on the Clinton and Bush presidencies, which deplore Clinton's pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions' slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays. Zinn's work is an vital corrective to triumphalist accounts, but his uncompromising radicalism shades, at times, into cynicism. Zinn views the Bill of Rights, universal suffrage, affirmative action and collective bargaining not as fundamental (albeit imperfect) extensions of freedom, but as tactical concessions by monied elites to defuse and contain more revolutionary impulses; voting, in fact, is but the most insidious of the "controls." It's too bad that Zinn dismisses two centuries of talk about "patriotism, democracy, national interest" as mere "slogans" and "pretense," because the history he recounts is in large part the effort of downtrodden people to claim these ideals for their own.

In fact, the government has always been the enemy of progress and it was the will of the people that forced these changes upon the elite classes that control government. Women won voting rights, blacks were imancipated, sweat-shops closed only when those in power feared for their lives. After making the changes, then they put on the coat of a good guy and say, see what we did for you.

I did inhale.

I would vote for Ron Paul is because he is the favorite of the anti-Illuminati crowd. He won't every be president and even if by some remote chance he did win the vote they would kill him off anyway.

All of this trivia about how everybody feels about this or that will soon disapear into the oblivion of another 1929 style depression.

I think a good Ron Paul bumper sticker would read:

Vote Ron Paul and restore America to a time before Upton Sinclair destroyed it!

I think we are missing the frame here, by saying that utopian end visions are equivalent to tactical political moves.

I would say that I am a big state person, or at least that is my general inclination compared to Dr. Paul. However, at the same time it seems apparent that bureaucracies self-perpetuate in a nasty way, and for example, the Department of Education appears to make everyone more stupid.

I have encountered people all around the political spectrum, from anarchists to standard elected Republicans to those anti-Mexican 'patriot' whatevers. In each of these three cases, you see a kinda of hostility to 'the cultural/money elite'. They have very divergent utopian goals, but maybe you might have tactical goals you share. (when i was a little guy, conservative christians and the latte liberal set joined together to stop a casino in my town of Hudson Wi. We didn't avoid a coalition for fear the Christians were just trying to create a theocracy next Tuesday)

The federal government is an out-of-control bureaucratic monster that is fueled by the Federal Reserve and the IRS. Paul is pretty much out there on his own to call against that stuff. His utopian vision is kind of scary in a serious way. But it would never be accepted by any side of the entrenched power structure, any more than JFK could splinter the CIA to the winds.

The crazy 'right wing' 'patriot' guy I talked to, got right into Bohemian Grove and elite deviance, an Alex Jones fan. We could share a laugh over that shit. It showed me that the left-right dichotomy in politics is often a perception management tool.

Believe it or not folks, pause for a minute envisioning the implementation of someone else's total utopia. Instead consider that we need Paul to shake loose a lot of shitty dominant narratives, in order to create more space for critical negativity against the big ol authoritative power structures.

There is a certain utility with Mr. Paul. And seeing a youngster with a loud Paul t-shirt purchasing an "investigate 9/11" t-shirt after a screening in Mpls of '9/11 Press for Truth' indicated to me yet again that the need to get critical with authority structures, takes all the allies you can get. Barney Frank and Paul are kinda friends b/c they don't "worship at the temple of the Fed." Be flexible and remember that utopias are just that. No place real.

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Hongpong.com