printDON’T GET YOUR HOPES UP. In this week’s WND.COM column I write:
“… Palin was clucking over the merits of the two-party cartel. We are a two-party system, she told Glenn Beck. ‘The Republican Party, the planks in our platform are, are the best, strongest planks upon which to build a great state, Alaska, a great country.’ And while Palin confessed to being tempted to flee the duopoly, she vowed to remain a Republican.
BECK: Does that rule out third party for you — not saying a run — would you support a third party?
PALIN: I don’t think that there is that need for a third party if Republicans get back to what the planks say
Palin’s assertion is pie-in-the-sky; not pragmatism but falsehood. The Democratic and Republican parties—each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one entity to the other.
The standstill state-of-affairs hinges on bamboozling party supporters. As my WND colleague Vox Day has observed, no sooner do the Republicans come to power, than they move to the left. When they get their turn, Democrats shuffle to the right.
At some point, McCain reaches across the aisle and the creeps converge.
The Constitution the colluding quislings only ever conjure as a weapon against the opposing, fleetingly dethroned faction.
If only Sarah Palin recognized and acted on this intractable reality.
Read the complete column, “A Palin Third-Party?”
And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.
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Another bulls eye column. We are locked in a battle for our national soul and all the experts are focused on “D’s and R’s. The two party system is no longer a fight between Democrats and Republicans.
This fight is between the governing and the governed, and the prize is central control of the country versus individual liberty.
The reality is you can throw out the old labels because D’s and R’s are “so last century”. Washington is full of P’s and everyone else is a U.
The real party system is Politicians and Us.
Until most of the U’s decide enough is enough the P’s will win every battle unopposed.
If anybody out there has paid any attention to my rants they probably know I don’t support third parties. Not because I love the Republicans but because third parties guarantee a Democrat victory. At this point I see this anti Democrat ground swell of support. But, support of what? The Republicans, except for a few individuals, act like they’re afraid to risk upsetting the status quo. At this point I’m ready for a third party, if it’s legit. Of course it won’t win but if it’s strong enough maybe it will lay the groungwork for the future. Maybe it would even cause the Republicans to grow some cajones and actually fight for this country.
Legal definition of Third Party: A generic legal term for any individual who does not have a direct connection with a legal transaction but who might be affected by it.
That be us. And we may not have won squat, but have helped change election outcomes since the revolution; especially the last 100 years from Teddy’s Bull Moose, to Strom Thurmond’s States Rights party (in 1948, I believe), Wallace in 1968, to John B. Anderson in 1980, to Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, and Ralph Nader in 2000.
Sister Sarah is “whistling past the graveyard” if she thinks “the planks in our platform are, are the best, strongest planks upon which to build a great state, Alaska, a great country.” Whatever the heck that idiom, or her statement, means. She would do to note that such Reaganesque quotes could lead her to “walk the plank” should she only talk the talk.
Denis Dedirot once blathered something like: “History makes for a bad novel because history is written by men and men lie and omit.” Huh?
Sister Sarah’s run will be better suited by understanding my poor remembrance of that silly maxim also. No, not the trashy men’s magazine, I mean the tenet. No, not the 9/11, CIA moron either.
About third parties. A bit of history. From a Time Magazine Article on George Wallace:
By 1968, Wallace was a true national figure who had become the leading spokesman of forces opposed to civil rights. As a third party candidate, he opposed Republican Richard M. Nixon and Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey in the general election, maintaining that there was not a “dime’s worth of difference” between the two.
And for those who comment (on probably the best weblog, and to the best pundit, on the Internet or elsewhere) and find Wallace “mean spirited,” or some such talking-points nonsense, remember this:
Wallace was a true advocate for civil rights, and integration I might add, as far back as the 40s!
From a PBS biography on George Wallace:
(Circa 1940s). . . Back in Montgomery, Wallace obtained a job as assistant attorney general. Just three months later he launched his political career with a bid for a seat in the state legislature. He was elected in 1947 and earned a reputation as a “dangerous liberal” at the capitol. In 1953 Wallace won election to a circuit judgeship that he held for six years. The same year Wallace began managing part of Governor “Big Jim” Folsom’s re-election campaign. Folsom, a largely colorblind progressive, was to become Wallace’s political mentor.
However, times would change, and what had worked for Folsom would fail Wallace.
In 1958 Wallace entered the race for governor. Wallace thought he could remain a “moderate” on segregation and win. His opponent in the Democratic primary, Attorney General John Patterson, promoted segregation and anti-African-American policies and received the support of the Ku Klux Klan, while Wallace received the endorsement of the NAACP. Patterson defeated Wallace in a landslide.
The lesson that Wallace took away from his drubbing was that he would not be able to advance his career in Alabama without taking a hard line on race relations. In 1962 Wallace’s new ideology carried him to victory; he received the largest vote of any gubernatorial candidate in Alabama’s history.
Get it?
Wallace WAS a social liberal, including pro-integration, until he figured out he would NEVER be elected governor of the state of Alabama. Once Dick Gephardt (aka, the biggest Dick in Misery) was pro-life until he figured out he would not get far in the democratic party. Even Pat Buchanan and Ronald Reagan were once ardent, pro-union democrats.
From that 1962 election Wallace went on to use that new plank to gain national prominence. In 1968 he got 10,000,000 votes for president. Thereby costing that idiotic, knee-jerk, mix-up, Minnesoooooda, minion Humphrey the election because Wallace won the lion’s share of the solid-south, yellow-dog, democratic vote.
Sister Sarah need be reminded of that since she has now crossed the political Rubicon and exposed her pro-union globalism planks.
Remember how she denied supporting Pat Buchanan for Steve Forbes?
And lastly, Sister Sarah is already doublespeak-kowtowing in order to appease: 1) the liberal, fifth-column, bottom-feeding neocons; 2) the more patent social moderates of this now ruined party; and most importantly, 3) her new boss: the town-criers at FOXNEWS. C.L. Burke
You are right on every count..and on the same page as I am..blessings Kim
“Palin will be headlining the First National Tea Party Convention, in Nashville, Tenn., scheduled for February. She’ll be joined by Michele Bachmann” Since Palin wants to reform the GOP, this means the GOP will take over the Tea Party and politics will return to normal. No surprise.
Palin is a pretty version of Shabbetai Zvi (a false messiah) who can dress a moose.
I’m perfectly content with someone who would compromise for lower government … OK, you can inspect meat if you get us out of Afghanistan – or deliver mail but eliminate government health care – or run Amtrak but end the war on drugs. Cut $ 1 Trillion and you can spend $ 100 Billion! Heck, the Eisenhower administration looks like an Anarchist’s Utopia compared to our current Welfare-Warfare State.
BUT these “conservatives” like Palin are PRO-GOVERNMENT. They might cut taxes only to fund bigger government with debt and inflation. When did Sarah Palin or any of these conservatives ever propose a real CUT in a government program?? … Not the old nostrum about “waste” and “efficiency”! Or cheap non-cutting gimmicks like “line item vetoes” and “term limits” which rearrange the deck chairs on our Deficit Titanic.
Sarah was BOLD AND ROGUE to challenge the Corrupt Murkowski Dynasty in 2006 just like Obama was BOLD AND ROGUE to challenge the Corrupt Clinton Dynasty in 2008. Other than that, they are charismatic mainstream political hacks.
When I look through lists of Obama appointees in significant positions, cabinet secretaries, undersecretaries, special advisors, etc., I notice a bevy of East Coast, Ivy League academics. I wonder what in Heaven’s name these highly educated, sophisticated, cultured people might have toward solve pressing national problems that is any better than what might be offered by a hockey mom from Alaska who’s lived a typical American life, who’s had to stick to a budget with no bailouts, who didn’t come from a privileged background, and whose everyday challenges are somewhat like mine. I want that hockey mom to be my hero, I want her to form the core of a viable third party, and I want Sarah Palin to fill that role.
But those are just my wishes, speculations, not realities. Palin is just another politican, looking for the best angle to propel her star higher up in the political firmament. She was never serious about a third party; more likely, she is positioning herself astutely to rise to the top of the Republican heap. She’s an outsider only as much as that serves toward getting to the top on the inside. She is not (as I believe Myron Pauli noted months ago) an individual around whom to base a movement.
I second everything Myron Pauli wrote above, and I’d like to take this one step further.
Politics won’t save us from being swept over Niagra Falls, a quarter mile downstream. Infrequently, mass political protests bring “The Process” to a screeching halt. But mostly, politicians go right on restricting our freedom and inflating and taxing us into poverty.
As Ayn Rand explained years ago, there is a basic reason that political crusading can’t prevent this–at least in our times. Political movements catch fire when they express widely shared beliefs about ethics and politics. But such beliefs do not spring from nothing; they are the logical extension of prior philosophical ideas concerning the nature of existence, of knowledge and of man. When false philosophical ideas become deeply embedded in the culture, an unjust and oppresive political ethos is the inevitable consequence.
This idea always sounds pompous and brooding, so here’s an example. Keynesian economics dominates thinking about economics around the world, although it is riddled with glaring misconceptions and logical absurdities. The flaws of Keynesianism have been demonstrated again and again by brilliant economists, from Ricardo, James Mill and Jean Baptiste Say to Mises, Hayek, George Reisman, and many others.
Yet all prominent economists and their followers choose to ignore carefully reasoned refutations of Keynesian fallacies. Why? Because they have accepted, uncritically, ideas from philosophy that denigrate the reliability of reason, and that uphold the “virtue” of political collectivism.
This is a big sibject, of course–one that can’t be properly addressed here. But it explains why we’re sailing into the falls, regardless of who runs for office on what ticket.