Category Archives: Ron Paul

Your Republican Reptile In Action

Ethics, Etiquette, Individual Rights, Internet, Private Property, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State

Fredrick Ray Hartman, a DC-based statist Republican, in the employ of the government, had petitioned me for Facebook Friendship (not the other way around).

On getting notice of my Facebook Policy, he writes furiously:

“don’t send people [note the royal plural] a copy of facebook policies again…you are being deleted…..i was your friend ditto… removing you from my friends list…..i tried to friend you from another wall and you had the gull [sic] to respond with a facebook policy note….you don’t know your friends i guess…..good luck”

Your Republican politician (or aspiring overlord) in action.

And OMG! What will I do without these Republican faithful “pals” of mine, of whom I have none, as they deserted me on September 19, 2002, when I wrote this op-ed for the Globe & Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers.

Let me remind Hartman and his ilk (statist, power-hungry Republicans, whom we libertarians disavow) that he was the one to petition me for Facebook Friendship, not the other way around. This statist and I (a long-time paleolibertarian) have nothing in common.

This conduct is a taste of what you should expect from your reptilian Republican in office, should you demand that he comply with YOUR rules, enacted on your turf, or property.

This is the chance of all like-minded Republicans on this Wall to join Fredrick Ray Hartman; Unfriend me please.

Ron Paul for president.

UPDATED: Putin Saves Us From Ourselves

Foreign Policy, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Ron Paul, Russia, The West, War

“Putin Saves Us From Ourselves” is my new column (front page on RT, the column was buried at the bottom of WND’s second page, where two-day-old columns go to die, so is unlikely to edify the few who might have been amenable to edification). Here’s an excerpt:

“He vetoed a draft United Nations Security Council resolution calling on President Bashar Assad to step down. Such a resolution, he argued, would serve as a ruse for the US to do a Libya in Syria.

He made the case that the “Syrian crisis would be better resolved by Syrians themselves,” and that the West should confine itself to brokering a ceasefire in that country, and encouraging dialogue between the feuding factions.

And, “Six months ago,” by the Daily Star’s telling, he “vetoed an earlier draft resolution threatening Damascus with sanctions.”

He is Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president elect. And he has done nothing that Ron Paul, president of America’s libertarians, would not have done: work to avert another ill-conceived, idiotic American intervention in a country in which it has no business, advocate for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, and oppose economic sanctions, which always and everywhere do more damage than good.

A just course of action is a just course of action irrespective of the actor.

The Sino-Russian alliance has been promoting the idea of an accord, involving “all the Syrians, the government and all opposition groups,” or so the Washington Post framed their side. NATO (nee the US) was champing at the bit to take the battle for Syria away from the Syrians and put it where they believe it belongs: the US military and its proxies.

Now, out of the blue, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is pretending that the United States and its Arab and European allies have always supported such a civilized solution in Syria, and were merely waiting on the Russians to get with the peace program. This is the same woman who came close to squatting on Gadhafi’s corpse, in honor of her country’s custom of peeing on its dead enemies.

Yes, one minute the Obama Administration and its UN and Arab-League lickspittles had been itching to oust Assad. The next, the same coalition was dusting Kofi Annan off and dispatching him, as a UN envoy, to mediate a resolution to Syria’s civil war.

What’s going on here? …

The complete column is “Putin Saves Us From Ourselves.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

UPDATE: So true, Stephen Hayes. This is why I keep at my readers to post their responses to what they read here far and wide; post them to where my columns are featured, at RT (a new audience), and WND (which buried this column on the second page, where 2-day-old columns are posted), on Amazon (where is your Cannibal review, Stephen?), and other forums. Here on BAB, you are preaching to the converted.

UPDATED: Grand Delusions of Democracy

America, Democracy, Free Speech, Government, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Ron Paul

On ‘Criminalizing Protest in the States,” RT reports: “Last month that H.R. 347, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, had overwhelmingly passed the US House of Representatives after only three lawmakers voted against it. On Thursday this week, President Obama inked his name to the legislation and authorized the government to start enforcing a law that has many Americans concerned over how the bill could bury the rights to assemble and protest as guaranteed in the US Constitution.”

Under the Trespass Bill’s latest language … someone could end up in law enforcement custody for entering an area that they don’t realize is Secret Service protected and “engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct” or “impede[s] or disrupt[s] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.”

All the while, the US preaches about the demos and its rights to the rest of the world.

At first, it was reported that, “The only members of Congress to reject this alarming evisceration of the First Amendment were two Tea Party Republicans– Reps. Justin Amash of Michigan and Paul Broun of Georgia, and GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul of Texas.”

Another later news item has it that Paul “ABSTAINED on the final vote.” Is this possible? Please find out. I am finding it hard to believe.

UPDATE: Thanks, MyRon Pauli. Dr. Paul did not let us down, after all.

UPDATED: Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam

Feminism, Gender, Liberty, Ron Paul, Socialism, Welfare

The following is excerpted from my new column, “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam”:

… As sincere as she is in her conviction that a woman’s “reproductive rights” are the responsibility of other taxpayers, Sandra Fluke is no statistical fluke.

Sisters love the state.

Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, dates the statism of American women to the 1980s, a function of “Ronald Reagan’s assertive foreign policy,” but also of the female affinity for bigger government. Kohut confirms that, “Then, as now, women [have] tended to favor a larger role for government programs than do men.”

John Derbyshire traces remarks about the ladies’ lack of proclivity for liberty to 391 B.C.

“That was the year Aristophanes staged his play ‘The Assemblywomen,’” Derbyshire documents in “We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.” “In the play, the women of Athens, disguised as men, take over the assembly and vote themselves into power. Once in charge, they institute a program of pure socialism.”

George Orwell, whose insights into these matters were very deep, also noticed this. He has Winston Smith, the protagonist of ‘1984,’ observe: ‘It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of orthodoxy’ (p. 88).

Having lived in communist China “in the years just after Mao,” Derbyshire seconds Orwell. “If you wanted to hear … utterly unreflective parroting of the Party line, a woman was always your best bet.”

Libertarians like to imagine that their constituency is differently derived than that of the Republicans. However, the fantasy that women flock to liberty is just that, a fantasy. I’ve attended those libertarian gatherings in which, after “subtracting the dragged-along wives and girlfriends from these events, the normal male-female ratio of the remainder is around ten to one” (p. 86).

Granted, among the fair sex, Rep. Ron Paul fares better than his Republican rivals—no doubt because of his trenchant opposition to the Warfare State. But Obama beats Paul handily. “Against Mr. Paul,” notes the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Obama …wins among women by 18 points and loses among men by four points.” …

The underlying truth of this very public tiff remains this: On the whole, extending the franchise to females was in furtherance of egalitarianism, not freedom. …

The complete column is “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

My book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Remember those Amazon reviews; they help the book’s mission.)

UPDATE (March 9): Myron is being cynical with his Archy Bunker comment, but is there any wonder millions of ordinary American men, who did the right thing for decades, and went to work to support their families, are no longer doing this? That white America is unraveling? They’ve been piled on as Myron has done in jest (I hope) repeatedly, called cavemen and primitives and worse by The enlightened Class, only to be replaced in the affections of their families with the state.