My Thoughts on the Election: The Devil You Know

Politics is the entertainment branch of the Military-Industrial Complex.
– Frank Zappa

Democracies die behind closed doors.
– Judge Damon J. Keith

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.
-Picasso.

My Thoughts on the Election: The Devil You Know
Regular readers know that I voted for the Libertarian candidate for President, former Governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson.  I outlined my reasons for this choice in several posts, most definitively in my piece Meet Gary Johnson: The Libertarian for President Polling at 7% in Colorado.  While I was already excited for my first act of Presidential civil disobedience, I didn’t realize how truly liberating it would feel until the next morning.  Many Americans voted for “the lesser of two evils” and were disappointed in the result.  This must have been an emotional double whammy in the sense that not only did the guy you disliked so much that you were willing to vote for a candidate you didn’t like win, but you didn’t vote your conscience.  Personally, I didn’t have to deal with either emotion because I voted for the person I liked the most despite residing in a swing state.  What allowed me to do this was the complete and total recognition that under both major candidates America loses.  My major issues are:

1) The Federal Reserve scam and Wall Street theft.
2) Civil liberties and the destruction of the Constitution.
3) Our aggressive foreign policy and imperial wars abroad that help only the oligarchs and impoverish the masses.

On these three issues, Mitt Romney would have been as bad if not worse than Obama and that is why Mitt Romney lost.  There has been a lot of talk in the past few days about the future of the Republican Party and rightly so.  The strange genius of Obama’s first term was that it was a perfect continuation of the disastrous policies of George W. Bush, and he was able to get away with it because of the “left cover” that the brainwashed fake liberal class in America provided him.  This left the Republican establishment desperate and confused and this came through crystal clear in Romney’s Presidential run.  Unless the Republican Party rids itself of the chicken-hawk, neo-con, warmongering contingency that seems to have a peculiar obsession with the female gender’s reproductive habits, they are doomed to disappear.  It is so out of step with the growing political awakening in America it’s not even funny.  Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has basically become the Republican party under George W. Bush with the exception that they support abortion and gay marriage.  Politics is becoming very interesting indeed.

I have to admit that I was much less irritated by Obama’s victory on Wednesday morning than I expected to be.  There are several reasons for this.  First of all, he is the devil we know.  By this I mean that the resistance to Obama and his crony-capitalist, fascist policies is reasonably well advanced.  Obama spent his entire first term blaming his predecessor for the crappy economy.  He will have no one to blame but himself in the collapse that is coming.  This is good and will allow people to finally focus on some real issues.  Furthermore, there are many prominent progressive journalists and activists that held his feet to the fire throughout his first term and will continue to make the arguments in the second.  On the other side of the political spectrum, although Gary Johnson received a disappointing 1% of the popular vote, he still did get 1.1 million votes and the Libertarian movement is strongest with the youth, which is of course the future.  While still only a bud barely breaking the surface of the soil, the Liberty Movement is alive and well and will only grow in the years ahead, as power is transitioned from the baby boomers and their tired ideas to a new generation that sees the world very differently from their parents.

I believe that had Romney won, the fight to really change things would have been delayed.  His supporters would have held back criticism for a while as they “hoped” that he would make it all better.  It would have take a little while for them to realize that he is just another crony capitalist oligarch puppet.  Based on his comments and Wall Street backing, there is no doubt that he would never have done absolutely zero in the realm of structural reform.  The country has cancer, not a common cold, and our response therefore must be much more serious than either of these corporate candidates are willing to commit to.  We know that such legitimate change will not come from the political class and Gary Johnson’s disappointing result proves to me that things will have to get ten times worse before the public gets the joke.  Unfortunately, it will get ten times worse in the coming years, and I strongly believe that 2013-2016 will be a historic period in the political transformation of the United States.  The show is over.  It’s time to buckle up.

Peace and wisdom,
Mike

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18 thoughts on “My Thoughts on the Election: The Devil You Know”

  1. If you and everyone like you had voted for the lesser of two evils instead of the guy who had NO CHANCE of winning, and Romney/Ryan were elected, we might still have our 2nd ammendment rights at the end of the next four years. Damn you and everyone who voted for the unelectables for wasting your votes.

    Reply
    • Rj, do the math. Obama had almost 3.5 million more votes than Romney. Gary Johnson only had 1.2 million votes. Even if you add in all the other 3rd party candidates you still don’t get 3.5 million. That’s assuming they all would have voted for Romney which obviously isn’t true.

    • You didnt know the outcome when you were actually voting tho did you. So i still blame you for being a stupid voter. I blame all the idiots who decided to not vote at all too. Number? Who knows.

  2. Michael: I couldn;t agree more. Now is the time to build up a strong Libertarian party. Realizing that the bulk of the population is moderately conservative (emphasis on the word moderate) and realizing that fiscal conservatism can come with some more liberal views on social issues, the task is not impossible. Libertarians can be as socially liberal as needed as we can espouse complete government divorce from many of the more “liberal” social issues. I enjoy your writing. Please keep going. Bob

    Reply
  3. “…I believe that had Romney won, the fight to really change things would have been delayed…”

    I agree. The only thing that stands between a full takeover of the USSA by militarized police and Federal, UN, and military thugs is our gun owners. The gun owners would have gone back to sleep if Romney was elected. I am happy that Obama won (I wrote in Ron Paul, as I did in ’08), and that the gun owners are on their toes.

    Reply
  4. I don’t disagree with any of the foregoing, but the utility of the conversation rests on the integrity of the elections. The likelihood of fraud in key contests is being under-reported.
    Look, our would-be controllers don’t care about 90% of our political activity, but the 10% they do care about they WILL see go their way. Prop 37 in CA was one; key counties in Ohio were another. Both did, with “interesting” results that deserve a look. It’s a crime the Press was given constitutional protection from Government, only to be bought by corporations doing the bidding of other corporations to more easily manipulate the people it was protected to be able to inform.

    Reply
  5. I was going to post on my website saying almost the exact same thing (obviously worded a little differently). Needless to say, I think you are dead on. I just hope when the crash comes the general public turns toward the liberty movement instead of towards further tyranny.

    Reply
  6. The old saying not to let the perfect get in the way of the good applies here. Romney wasn’t perfect but he had a sensible plan to address the country’s deficit/debt problem. Four more years of $ Trillion annual deficits will put us in a Greece like position. Without a good/better economy, all the good things you wish for will not happen. It is foolish to think that anyone will be spared the pain of a deteriorating economy. Wasting a vote on the unelectable shows indifference to the plight of the American people!

    Reply
    • Like MapQuest, the faceless interests that control BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties are wise enough to offer two routes to the same destination.

  7. Some good points in the article. Something not talked about as much, but very important, is to take a longer term view of this.
    It doesn’t matter if Romney had won, the same disaster thats going to happen would still happen. Argueit if you like, but Romney was not different enough to generate any meaningful change. He would have just kept bandaiding the problems.

    During the depression of the 1930’s capitalism got blamed and the result was 3 terms for FDR and the country moved towards socialism, which it is still doing today.

    Now, with Obama’s win, when the disaster strikes sometime between now and 2016, socialism will take a hit and get the blame and the country will revert back to real capitalism.

    Had Romney won, it may not have played out the same way. We would still have the disaster but it would likely have kept socialism alive and well.

    This is a long term view, but the future of the US actually should be brighter now due to Obamas win, not because of anything positive Obama will do, but because it should initiate the decline of socialism in the US and create a new awakening. The Libertarians should gather strength from this.

    Reply
    • Couldn’t agree more. With the financial probems and the likely collapse of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency during the next four years, Libertarians have a huge opportunity to grow into a major political party. I would caution on the side of moderation in terms of how we frame social issues. Downsizing government can be shown to be supportive of many social issues which gave democrates an edge this last election. Fiscal responsibility picks up many of the disappointed republicans. Basic freedom should remain attractive to the self reliant among us. The government reliant people will be disappointed as funds run out for their support. some will survive to be reliant people, many others will feel abandoned by the democrates. While not pandering to replace democratic and socialist like programs we might pick up votes there as well. In my opinion we need to be more inclusive and less rigid as this is what it will take to get the votes needed to make the shift away from total government control.

  8. As a strong supporter of Ron Paul, I find your endorsement for Gary Johnson offensive. We are talking about a man who never succeded in pretty much anything he attempted. We are talking about a man who was a *strong* supporter of extending the death penalty to minors (admittedly he has now changed his views, but that’s a 360 degrees change). Again, this man is currently opposing network neutrality, leaving ISPs to remove the competition at their will, at the expenses of their clients. Gary Johnson has a few interesting political positions that are worthy of a libertarian, but he’s far and way to be considered one.

    Reply

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