The Common Sense Libertarian

There’s times when I watch TV, I’ll wonder, “How does X affect Y? Y has no control over X.” But with political supporters, it makes sense. When candidates have classless supporters, that makes you wonder about the candidates themselves.

I understand why, during the primaries, many people were driven away from Ron Paul. At many campaign events, his candidates would attend and cause disruptions. Because of that, I was kind of put on the fence. I still supported him because I believed he was the best candidate, but his supporters that caused these disruptions made me not as open about it. I didn’t want to be grouped with these classless people.

Once it became mathematically impossible for him to win, I went ahead and decided to support Mitt Romney, all for the sake of Obama not getting re-elected. After watching the GOP Convention and seeing and reading about how the Ron Paul delegates were treated by the Pro-Romney crowd, that showed me that his supporters are no better than the Paul supporters.

Sure, I’m making judgements based on a small portion of the population of Romney supporters, but many Romney supporters did the same with Paul supporters. It’s part of being human. You judge people by the type of people they appear to attract, and the media does a good job at painting conservatives as intolerant and evil, only showing problems within the GOP, yet only showing Obama and other Democrats when there’s a lot of happiness.

Anyways, once seeing how the Paul delegates were treated by the Romney delegates, I couldn’t help but to push myself away from Romney. I guess what irks me the most is the fact that everyone already knew that Romney was going to win, so why follow Paul’s delegates out, shouting along the way? All that does is push anyone who legitimately supports Paul away from the GOP.

This election, as everyone knows, is going to be very close. The last thing you want is for your party members/supporters to run off a group of people from the same party. Now you have a bunch of pissed off Paul supporters who will either vote for Obama, in spite of the Convention, or for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate. This could very well cost Romney the election. You’re not going to get unity when you run people out of the National Convention that were elected to be there and attended out of principle, all because they don’t support your candidate, the one that’s going to win anyways.

In a nutshell, I’m saying that this fall, I’m pretty well undecided right now. I’m either going to vote for Gary Johnson out of principle, or I’m going to vote for Romney to get Obama out. And to be honest, I’m leaning towards Johnson. Why? Because Indiana is never a “key battleground state” and has only gone Democrat twice since 1940. Those two years were 1964 (Lyndon Johnon) and 2008 (Barack Obama). If you go further back, Indiana has only voted Democrat 8 times since 1840 (1876, 1884, 1892, 1912, 1932, 1936, plus the two previously mentioned).

Namely, when I said that I endorsed Mitt Romney. Don’t get me wrong, I still severely doubt that Paul will be the nominee, but I still hope. I’m sure y’all know that feeling… Knowing something you want probably won’t happen, so you accept the opposite, but still really hope that you get what you wanted.

Especially since the only person in news reporting fairly at all about Ron Paul is Rachel Maddow…

Something just isn’t right when a candidate fills stadiums and has such a high turnout for public events, but only gets 5-15% of these “votes”.

alonmg:

Addiction is a choice. Not a disease. You choose to start it. It’s your own responsibility. It’s not the governments responsibility to stop addictive drugs from being used. They tried it with alcohol and failed. When will they admit the war on drugs failed.

“Government’s Job is to protect the people, not run their lives.” - Ronald Reagan

Yet another problem I have with Republicans.. Accuse Democrats of trying to run our lives, but Republicans do it, too, only disguising it as safety.

Freedom: It would be simply defined as individual control over oneself instead of the government regulating what you can do.. Republicans campaign on the idea of freedom and are easily caught in lies over this. I’ll ask, “Do you think that a person has the right to do whatever they want in their own home, so long as they’re not endangering their neighbors?” Republicans will blindly answer “Well yes!” After which, I then ask, “Then why do you oppose legalizing marijuana?” My answers are usually studders and bumbling, yet their views remain unchanged. Then I ask about LGBT rights… I support civil unions all around, but I usually get some lecture that has something to do with this being a Christian nation and it would be against God. In that case, I remind them that this is a Christian nation in the sense that a majority of Americans are Christian. The government is secular in design, hence the freedom of religion.

Liberty: This would be independence from the government. Republicans love this, too, right? I mean, they want to cut taxes, get people off of government programs, and get the government to leave the people alone… Unless your name is Anwar Al-Awlaki. Don’t get me wrong… I’m glad he’s dead, but the government doing it was ILLEGAL. Regardless of whether a US citizen is stateside or in a foreign country, the government has to adhere to its own laws. Awlaki’s 5th and 6th amendment rights (due process and fair/speedy trial). I know, I know… This was under Obama, but many Americans, including Republicans, applauded it. If the government can kill him without regards to his rights, what do you think they can do to you?

Economics: This is a big area in which Republicans screw up in and I feel like Captain Obvious for pointing it out since it’s like a “duh” thing… They’re all about cutting taxes and cutting spending… There’s only one problem. Their idea of cutting spending is something I like to call “reallocation”. The don’t cut spending so much as cut funding for social programs, but just put it into defense spending. They don’t understand that you can’t have such low taxes, but an out of control defense budget. If spending is up, then taxes HAVE to be higher, or else, another Captain Obvious moment, you run the deficit up. It was done under Reagan and BOTH Bushes. Now I have no problem with low taxes, but spending HAS to be cut for that to work. The defense budget is the third largest area for spending, behind (you guessed it) Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security, respectively. If you want to cut those two programs, why not make cuts to Defense? Our military is over strength and it’s the most prepared military in the world. There’s tons of money that just gets wasted and even our soldiers know this. Why not make things leaner when you can?

So yeah, these are my issues with Republicans. This is why I, though a conservative, find it hard to trust them and really don’t understand their logic behind things. On the campaign trail, they talk about freedom and liberty as though they’re libertarians, but their views are just as bad as Democrats. Fucked up, wouldn’t you say?