Ron Paul: In a race of his own

  While the front runners carefully craft shifts in message to attempt to cannibalize votes off each other, and the tailchasers are watching for the exit door that will benefit them the most, Ron Paul blithely continues on his course of action.  He doesn’t make semantic comments foreshadowing a seachange in policy positions, but rather sticks to the deceptively simplistic messsage that placed him here.

    Ron Paul has it good.  He isn’t running against seven other people whose viewpoints are similar to his own.  He doesn’t have to form study groups to see which words make his position sound the best to the voter, and what Mitt Romney says on any given day has no effect on what Ron Paul will do.  He isn’t running against Mitt.  He isn’t running against Rudy, or John or the not running yet Fred.  He is running against voter apathy, public ignorance, and an ingrained, almost slavish tendency to accept the status quo, and only the status quo.

   For Ron Paul to succeed he doesn’t have to combat the others, but rather society in general.  Months into the quest for the White House people have still never heard of Ron Paul. Contrary to the popular misconception applied by his followers, this isn’t because the mainstream media ignores him.  It’s because the largest voting demographic right now is the”I don’t know and I don’t care” majority.  It’s early, and most people would rather wait and pick between less candidates.  It’s easier for their :I need my life to be easy” minds to comprehend.  He and his campaign has to get these people to listen, and shy of promising free lottery tickets, sex, and beer I don’t know how he can do that, other than to just continue being Ron Paul.

  Then you come to the message issue.  He has to convince undertaxed rich folk,  a downsized middle class, and an entitlement oriented impoverished multitude to want his vision of a constitutional government.  His ideas on the surface have merit, but people tend to shy away from you taking something from them that they are used to getting.  I can’t picture big business accepting anything like fair taxation.  Nor can I picture the impoverished masses giving up their state sanctioned freebies.  The middle class might be his best hope, but even they have to question where his economic theories might lead.

   The matter of his current camp followers is something he can control, and has apparently decided not to.  Everything he says is taken as being written on stone tablets, so he needs to convince them that his message is enough to carry the nomination.  So far the trend toward blog-sponsored heathenism is only an irritation, but when people really start paying attention he needs to convince his fringe elements to exercise the flipside to the right to free speech, and convince them to practice the right to shut up.

   So its all about Ron.  Can he convince America that his far reaching ideals will fix whats broken, or will they continue to seek security through stupidity?  It’s easy to convince yourself that everythings not so bad, when the option you have is an all or nothing gamble with your future on the line.

  

The illinois straw poll; Ron Paul and Mitt Romney win again

They rolled out the carpet at the Illinois state fair.  They had none of the pomp and ceremony that was in Iowa, so it’s probably a more accurate measure of polularity if nothing else.  No matter what the numbers mean, I’d rather have Illinois votes than Iowa.  Nothing personal, but Illinois makes election noise based on population.  Iowa does it based on tradition.

Mitt Romney: 373 votes (40.35 percent)

Fred Thompson: 184 votes (19.96 percent)

Ron Paul: 174 votes (18.87 percent)

Rudy Giuliani: 107 votes (11.61 percent)

John McCain: 38 votes (4.12 percent)

Mike Huckabee: 28 votes (3.04 percent)

Sam Brownback: 10 votes (1.08 percent)

Duncan Hunter: 6 votes (0.65 percent)

Tom Tancredo: 2 votes (0.33 percent

I don’t count Fred because he isn’t a candidate yet, but even if I did I’d still say Ron Paul beat him.   18.1% shows that people are starting to grasp who he is, and the competition mano a mano isn’t all that important to him.  Fred Thompson on the other hand has to beat Mitt.  Not right now, but he has it to do.  Ron Paul has to beat public opinion and obscurity.  He is starting to do that, but may well run out of time.

   Mitt’s 40% shows he is the leading candidate.  It doesn’t look like anyone put any national level work in here, and the vote was only about 1000 people.   He took 40% of that, and more than the two closest competitors combined.

  The bottom 5 should just throw in the towel.  Including Huckabee.  He doesn’t have the cash to work like he did in Iowa, so that was maybe his last good showing.  McCain on down drew less than 40 out of 1000 and Tancredo and Hunter  didn’t manage 1 percent.

vote counts credit goes to http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2007/08/grasping_at_il_straws.html

The best reason I’ve seen to vote Ron Paul

   If there is one thing you should know by now, its that rats will leave a sinking ship rather than go down with it.  That’s what you are seeing in the halls of congress, as one after another the Republicans decide they don’t wish to run again.  Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) and Deborah Pryce (R-OH) are both calling it quits, and they’ve held their seats forever.  Hastert was the longest ever speaker of the house from the Republican party, and won’t even say that he’ll finish his current term.

  What this tells me boys and girls is that people who should know are not expecting good things this election cycle, and have no desire to keep playing the game if they are in the minority.  Based on these two powerful congressperson’s decisions I would have to guess that they expect to lose seats, not gain them, and don’t wish to be part of a rubberstamp congress for a democratic president.

   So why are they sure enough to be quitting already?  Because the top ranking Republican candidates are all unacceptable.  They don’t offer a different enough agenda to matter.  They are big business Republicans, and while certainly none of them are the second coming of George Bush, they are all just more of almost the same, as it were.

  So that leaves us with Ron Paul or a Democratic President.  I’m for either.  Doesn’t really matter.  I’m tired of the same old mistakes, and a new set of mistake makers would make me a very happy fellow.  Ron Paul is certainly a lot of fun to watch, and I think observing him trying to get his agenda past a predominantly  hostile congress would be more fun than watching the chickenhawk try to take out Foghorn leghorn.  As far as the democrats go, any of them will do.  Liberal presidents have always worked under the motto “hire the handicapped, they’re so much fun to watch.”

More road rage stories

    There was a great road rage incident today out by the airport.  I wasn’t in it, but had the good fortune of being right behind it.  It’s kind of a funny road.  It’s a T with a split in it, and it carries 3 lanes of traffic that split again about 1/2 a block north.  The cars come together there all the time, but I’ve yet to be stopped by an accident.  On the way to work two cars did the swerve thing, and came close enough together that they both ended stalled right in the middle of the road.  This incredibly stout woman in the passenger seat of the one car screams out the window “you should learn how to drive.”  In the other car is a runtish man of about 90 that can probably see just a  little between the top of the steering wheel and the dashboard.  The litte guy had moxie though, and he yelled back ” you should learn to shut your coc&$ucker.”

   Well I was just tickled as shit.  The mornings have been rough lately, and entertainment on the way to work is a good thing.  I’ve been scowling a lot lately, and a nice little altercation between inept motorists was just what the doctor ordered.

It gets better.   This woman gets beet red, and lumbers out of her car.  She struggles to achieve a totally erect position, but I have to tell you she was as imposing as a grizzly when she did.   So I’m thinking “this is to good to be true…I’m going to get to watch a little old man get the supreme crap kicked out of him by a semiambulatory behemoth of a woman.”  So,  I shut the car off, and I pull a Dew out of the cooler.  Then this crazy wench does the strangest thing…

   She reaches in between the two largest breasts  I’ve ever seen.  I’m almost sure they had their own gravity and were orbiting around her.  She pulls out this gargantuan crucifix and starts praying for the dude.

  If she prayed for him to start his car up and drive away while calling her a “loony B1tch” her prayers were answered.  I’m not so much for the praying, but if divine intervention placed me right there, right then, I’ll happily kiss gods ass for at least a month of sundays.

Why I’m ok with Hate Speech

    I know, I know, now you don’t like me.  If you don’t, you’re not the sort of person I wish to know anyway, so, “darn it.”

     I am ok with it.  Hate speech I mean.  The first amendment grants the right, and I’m afraid that when we start limiting hate speech we set an awful precendent.  Also, hate crimes being punished more severely than other crimes is absolutely unamerican.

     Part of growing older is hopefully becoming wiser.  I haven’t hated anyone or anything in a long time, and I’ve had some run of the mill heinous shit happen to me in my lifetime.  Nothing others haven’t gone through and survived.  No being dipped into a vat of sulphuric acid by Columbian Drug lords high on crack and bored out of their skulls or anything.

     This absence of malice does not however keep me from picking on hillbillies, republicans, liberals, and almost every other socially defineable group at one time or another.  For delivery purposes sometimes it sounds absolutely hateful.  I could be punished I suppose, and if you happen to know a leggy blonde about so tall with legs up to here let her know I’ve been a bad boy if you would please.

   I’m rambling.  Surprised?  Not if you’ve been here before you aren’t.  What I’m working my way around to is hate speech is a good thing.  It’s honest, heartfelt, emotion, vociferously delivered in a manner that allows the rest of us to know just what a sorry assed human the speaker is.  

     An example of this would be poor old George.  The hate speech directed at him is as voluminous and colorful as that directed at any president since Truman.  It’s not only vitriolic, but as often as not totally untrue, but fortunately protected by the first Amendment.  Same goes for the trash falling out of Baracks mouth lately.  This is obviously a man in search of a crusade that can make him seem like the rest of the big kids.  All it’s shown is that he is bigoted against mass quantities of the human race, and probably is justified in his feelings.  To deny him the right to express it would be as wrong as shutting down Daily Kos or White Noise Insanity.  They have almost nothing of value to impart to the conversation, but at least they allow us to know who they are.

   Just so you don’t think I’m picking on liberals,  I read Ann Coulters column today, and while clever, informative, and well written as always, it was just more hate speech spewing from the mouth of an overpublicized pundit.  Same goes for the nonsense coming out of O’reilly, Hannity, and the list continues almost forever.

   The reason we need hate speech should be obvious.  Our nation would stop communicating altogether if we were not allowed charachter assassination and verbal evisceration.  Republicans bashing gays, and gays bashing neo-cons.  Liberals screaming vitriolic antiwar rhetoric into microphones and besmirching the military, and the military vilifying the lefties.  Capitol hill would be the quietest place on the planet.  Quieter than an integrated prison, which would be silent as a church mouse.

   You see, the truth is we’re not all that gifted individually.  Check out the blogworld.  How often do you find a post you are really consumed by?   Almost never.  Hateful is usually more interesting than the sycophantic bullshit, but both forms of insidous stupidity are easy to remove from your daily reading.  I for one wish to hell I had a blogroll for work.  Just put on the people worth listening to, and be able to not even notice the braindead trogs that are so common.  I don’t, so what I do is not converse with those I find repugnant, and that’s the option we all have.

What we do, is hate…either publically or in little private enclaves, we hate each other, and its a beautiful thing.  Because that notwithstanding, as a society we remain incredibly successful.  All the things that make human beings better than shit tossing monkeys (now the animal lovers hate me) continue to flourish in the midst of all this ire.  As we age, for the most part, the hate will go away for most of us.  What will be left is maybe a little guilt, and a lot of wisdom about how the rest of society thinks.  So if you have it to say, say it.  You can start with me.  I’d prefer you do it intelligently, but if all you can come up with is honkie, or cracker, or whitey, or whatever the hell…run with it.  i don’t mind at all.