Sarah Palin: same old neoconservatism cost them election
November 11, 2008 – 12:25 am by JohnFrom an article at Politico.com, reporting on an interview that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News, we learn that Sarah Palin blames her and McCain’s defeat on the fact that their campaign represented the “status quo” and that the people wanted change—anything different from the Bush regime—and the McCain/Palin ticket seemed like more of the same:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Sunday that she and running mate John McCain lost because the Republican ticket “represented too much of the status quo.”
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“I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a $10 trillion debt in a Republican administration? How have there been blunders with war strategy under a Republican administration?” Palin said.“If we’re talking change, we want to get far away from what it was that the present administration represented, and that is to a great degree what the Republican Party at the time had been representing. So people desiring change, I think, went as far from the administration that is presently seated as they could. It’s amazing that we did as well as we did.”
The way I see it, and the way most people whose opinions I value see it, the Obama regime with a Democrat-controlled Congress will most certainly not give us any substantive change. There will still be high taxes (probably higher), bad inflation (probably worse), corporate favors and bailouts (probably more), destructive military interventions (possibly more), civil liberties violations (surely more), and restrictions on all kinds of social and economic freedoms (most definitely more). On the very issues for which the left-liberals hate the neocons the most—war, corporate favoritism, and civil liberties violations—Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel have not only explicitly stated that they concur with the neocons, they have not only stated they plan to continue neocon crimes, but they have actually acted in support of neocon crimes by voting for them and associating themselves with others who also actively support them. They are lying, manipulative, opportunistic charlatans of the worst kind. They are war criminals who belong in prison, and at the least they should have been impeached for violating their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution. As flawed as the Constitution is, if they can’t even be held to the standards of their own office in their own government, then there are apparently no standards to hold their conduct to.
The fact that they dress up their criminal complicity in heinous war crimes and civil liberties violations with fancy rhetoric, awe-inspiring optimism, and lofty promises makes them even worse than anti-intellectuals like Sarah Palin, who does not speak in Washington-speak and does not rely on chicanery to win gullible voters.
As flawed as he is and as flawed as it makes me, I, of course, supported the only politician in either major party who proposed real change, Ron Paul. (I’d say Ralph Nader probably supported some pretty substantial changes, many of which I would abhor; Justin Raimondo would disagree. Some contestants for the Libertarian Party nomination, most interestingly Mary Ruwart, also stood for real change, as did Harry Browne, but with even less exposure and less of a chance than Nader or Paul.)
Luckily for my libertarian conscience but unluckily for the real world we all live in, Ron Paul never came close to any office higher than the House of Representatives; for if he had been the GOP nominee, I would have been tempted to vote for him, as a positive protest-vote against the last 8 years of neocon rule. A protest-vote for the other Republocrat or for the Libertarian is one thing, but when your own party’s candidate leads a rebellion against your monstrous regime!… But the rest of the country didn’t want real change, or was fooled into believing an increase in the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, a continuation of the PATRIOT Act, the 2008 FISA Amendment, a monstrously relentless drug war, and Krugmanesque economic ignorance was substantially different from continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, continuing the PATRIOT Act, worsening the already-terrible FISA law, a monstrous drug war, and Krugmanesque economic ignorance.
If the rest of the country had wanted real change, Ron Paul or someone similar would have gotten the Republican nomination and I probably would have been one fifty-millionth responsible for whatever he did as president, if he had won. But, alas, if a large proportion of the population were pro-freedom and anti-State enough to support semi-libertarians for president, then voting for them wouldn’t even be necessary and my innocence could be saved, for peaceful secession and true agorism could be within our reach.
