United Liberty

Joe Scarborough, a former Republican Congressman and current host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, explained yesterday in his column at Politico that he couldn’t bear the thought of casting his ballot for Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum, so he voted instead for Ron Paul:

I operate on instinct. So I should not have been surprised by my own gut reaction to the absentee ballot that lay before me on the kitchen table.

I scanned the list for Republican primary candidates and let instinct take over.

Mitt Romney? Not on your life. A big government Republican who will say anything to get elected.

Rick Santorum? No way. A pro-life statist who helped George W. Bush double the national debt.

Newt Gingrich? Ideologically unmoored. A champion of liberty one day, a central planner the next.

Ron Paul? Yep. I quickly checked his name and moved on to a far more complex task: fixing my daughter a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

After spending six months analyzing each candidate’s every move for three hours a day, five days a week, it never occurred to me that my decision to vote for the quirky congressman from Texas would happen as fast as a tornado whipping through an Amarillo parking lot. After all, who would vote for a candidate that criticized the killing of Osama bin Laden, blamed U.S. foreign policy for Sept. 11 and wants to abolish Social Security?

But I also would never vote for a GOP candidate who was the godfather of Obamacare, or another who added $7 trillion to Medicare’s debt or yet another who bashed Paul Ryan one week and venture capital the next. Faced with this truckload of big government Republicans, I cast my vote for the only candidate who spent his entire public career standing athwart history yelling “stop” to an ever-expanding centralized state.