In the wake of your decision last week to step down from the governor’s chair in Alaska, I must admit to feeling somewhat relieved. Despite the regular hatefest aimed at you from the New York Times and the Huffington Post for the past year, you were standing gamely, as there really was a constituency out there that liked and respected you.
Even though David Letterman thought you were an idiot, you wowed the crowds last year, giving some life to the moribund John McCain campaign, which before your appearance was playing to a few hundred diehards at the regular stops. Now, I cannot exactly praise you for accepting McCain’s nomination, given that McCain is a person for which no good deed goes unpunished.
You were a breath of fresh air to the political scene, dominated by women who have had their shares of facelifts or catty writers like Maureen Dowd who in saner times at best would have been writing obits for a small-town weekly in Iowa. Unfortunately, the modern political times are not conducive to decent people entering the political ring; look at the abuse that Ron Paul has received (and continues to receive) at the hands of the media and other Republicans.
(If Paul ever becomes a real electoral threat to his party, look for every ethics investigation, not to mention an attempt by U.S. attorneys to frame him. Being that federal criminal law is little more than a tool for politicians to eliminate their competition, I believe that if Ron’s ideas every truly catch on, the government will come after him with all guns blazing.)
In my letter to you, I am going to advise you to do something that would be unthinkable in modern politics: leave the political arena altogether. The United States no longer is salvageable, and no politician – not even Ron Paul – can save this country. The original American Experiment in limited government with constitutional boundaries is over, and has been over for many years. Like you, the Constitution could not survive the assaults that were thrown at it beginning in the early years of the Republic and continuing on to the present day.
Moreover, as John Fund so aptly noted in his recent article, the political classes have so many weapons to use against anyone who threatens them that one person cannot bust through the system. From ethics complaints to federal prosecutors looking for a Big Scalp, it is impossible today for anyone who might be seen as going against the grain.
Now, I am not saying that you were another Ron Paul. You never have articulated the kind of understanding of economics and politics that we have seen from him, and you were the running mate of a man who made sure that any public support of Paul shown at the Republican National Convention last year would be mercilessly stamped out. You seem to have some good instincts, but you don’t have the same solid compass that Paul and others of free-market orientation have, and the semi-conservative populism that you seem to have embraced easily morphs into outright tyranny. Moreover, your support for the disastrous U.S. interventions abroad demonstrates a lack of understanding of just what these wars are doing to us. READ THE REST AT LEW ROCKWELL
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