United Liberty

This weekend, the Taliban killed five members of an American delegation with a roadside bomb – including a young diplomat, 25-year old Anne Smedinghoff – while the delegation was en route to deliver donated textbooks to schoolchildren to inaugurate a new school in rural Afghanistan.

Secretary of State John Kerry eulogized Ms. Smedinghoff while justifying our presence there:

“Our State Department family is grieving over the loss of one of our own, an exceptional young Foreign Service Officer, killed today in an IED attack in Zabul province, along with service members, a Department of Defense civilian, and Afghan civilians..

“Just last week in Kabul, I met our fallen officer when she was selected to support me during my visit to Afghanistan. She was everything a Foreign Service Officer should be: smart, capable, eager to serve, and deeply committed to our country and the difference she was making for the Afghan people. She tragically gave her young life working to give young Afghans the opportunity to have a better future.”

Scotland holds a very special place in my heart as it always does for anyone who has had the pleasure to travel there.  My wife and I lived in Scotland while I was at the University of Glasgow, and our time spent amongst those charming, funny, witty, spirited people will never be forgotten.  I still enjoy all things Scottish and look forward to my future visits to that amazing country.  It is because of my admiration for both the Scottish people and succession movements in general that I have been closely watching the Scottish independence movement and am eagerly awaiting the upcoming referendum.  I’d love to see a truly free Scotland loosened from the socialist, statist, bureaucratic chains of the United Kingdom.  I get goosebumps at the very thought.

We all know the fighting spirit of William Wallace who proclaimed that the enemies of Scotland may take their lives but never their freedom.  Statism and state-dependency have taken both from today’s Scotland.  As shown on the Drudge Report this week, Mrs. Ruth Davidson of the Tory party recently got into hot water by drawing attention to the fact that nine out of ten Scottish households take more from the government than they pay in.  In her words they are “living off of the patronage of the state.”  This should shame those nine out of ten households, but it won’t.  For the European lefty political class, there is no such thing as shame and they have passed this mentality onto their constituents.

I’m told there was a NATO summit in Chicago over the weekend (as well as a historic G8 summit at Camp David at about the same time.) I’m also told that there were a lot of protests which got violent.

The main reason that people seem to be protesting the NATO summit is that it’s somehow a tool of the 1% to continue to oppress the 99%. While I agree with the dislike of NATO, that’s a bad argument to be using. NATO is not economic; it is military and foreign policy oriented.

As much as it puts a bad taste in my mouth, though, I will agree with these anti-NATO types on one thing: at a minimum, the United States should not be in NATO; and at the far end, NATO itself should be dismantled.

The explicit reason for NATO’s existence was to combat the Soviets, after Stalin and his minions drew the Iron Curtain around Eastern Europe and began the Cold War. It’s right there in its name: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It’s original mission, as defined by its first General Secretary, was to “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

That was in 1949. It’s 2012 right now. The entire geopolitical structure has changed. There’s no need to keep the Germans down; there’s no Americans to keep in; and while Russia is still run by a bunch of jerks, they’re hardly the Communist country they used to be. Indeed, it is telling that the first action that NATO engaged in had nothing to do with its original purpose, and did not even take place in Europe, or the North Atlantic, but rather in Afghanistan.

Our U.S. Constitution is a remarkably efficient document. It is our only founding charter. Many times changed, rendered, adumbrated. But it’s essence is unshakable. Written in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting, edited against his will, pored over, discussed, hushed about, while it lay about some small wooden tables in independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Americans believe, that the Constitution is the link between our government and our lives. Congress and the Executive, can not overstep the harmony that exists, by each American following his path of liberty. Unfortunately, too many harmful minds, want too much power in this country. Power never vested in the Constitution. Power never meant to be handled by bureaucrats or officials or committees. We need to change all this. The oath of office should be sworn on the Constitution. In the Capital Rotunda. Among the historicity of remains from past great ages of the United States.

Drones in our night skies. Unelected lawyers interpreting the U.S. Constition. Surveillance. Internet spying. Blackouts and Stasi-like encroachements. Torturing. Deaths and internment of American citizens. Socialization of medicare for the elderly, and healthcare for those in mid-age. Food stamps and deductibles for people who do not work. Taxation over representation. Data-accumulation. Groping at airports. Fumbling and nefarious Justice Department officials. Cronies. Welfare abuses. War and destruction as an industry, like Hollywood and Corporate America! Blame-games. Undermining of basic civil rights. Monetarism-mongering! Unaccountability and state-sponsored fear. Campaigns of division. Solutions disguised for self-created problems.

Republican voters are being put through the pincers. We are back to 2008. Heaps of strong candidates, but no consensus. Great speeches, but no substance. PAC money spent by the millions, but no conclusive results. GOP candidates are even welcoming Democratic voters, to smear each other, to add to their victories, or to just plainly embitter each other. The Republican race is not going to get any more civil. Once, we see these subterfuges, we can ask the real questions: what will it take to unseat Obama in November, and who can best do this?

In America the conservative movement has been changing. Neo-conservatives, who had for roughly two decades (1980-2000) held the strongarm of the party, are gone with the Bush Administration’s doctrine of “pre-emptive strike” and the PATRIOT ACT. We are in the midst of the dregs. Still trying to find out which direction this country will spill it’s spirit of changelessness.

For all his grandeur, Mitt Romney just has not taken his campaign to the next level. Rick Santorum has peaked, but more likely will not hold his miniscule leads. Newt Gingrinch’s populism and Ron Paul’s constitutionalism, so similar to each other, are self-negating. None is in charge. Marginal candidates can’t win delegates, nor the RNC party’s nomination. Mitt Romney, the ever-chameleon like business mogul, can’t strike a human touch to save his life and political prospects.

If Mitt Romney is the front runner of the wolves, ready to flay Obama; what is his version of the American Dream? How does he see this country, through which prism? Is it a legalistic, rigidly technocratic, institutional approach? It seems, his advantage is not his base, his character, anything as much as his warchest. He won’t run out of steam. Even if the delegate count gets close in Tampa, FL this spring; he’ll be able to resurrect himself, make the necessary promises and sail away with the nomination.

Let us make fresh.

The reason why Rick Santorum would not oust Barack Obama in November, is not his faith. It is simply that he is running a ‘social message’ of uniform decency against a ‘social message’ of uniform healthcare. Plainly, Obama’s health plan, is vital: but not more pressing than the economic calamity of bailouts, frauds, money-laundering, spending and public debt. These are focal issues of the 2012 election.

Santorum is the politician everyone can super-impose themselves on. He’s no CEO like Mitt Romney, no renowned speaker like Newt Gingrich, not intellectual like Ron Paul. No, he is a regular Pennsylvania lawyer, who argued some weird World Wrestling Federation cases. Somehow he is unspectacular enough, that he could almost be your town butcher, postal deliverer or stockyard piler. You would think this is a strength. But it is not.

Eventually, while trying to keep your political pronunciations to a minimum, to correspond to the widest social base possible, you hit a tollboth going 160 mph. Santorum is earnest, he surely is: means well to families and the elderly, but he has yet to prove his salt. His record is plain: he has taken massive amounts of Washington D.C. beltway funding, voted to raise the debt ceiling, is in cahoots with the (so-called) ‘military industrial complex’  and dislikes many anomalies of our population: young pregnants, migrant-labor, jobless, gays, blacks. He has been able to entrench his campaign in an atmosphere of rustic humbleness and simpletonness.