A few days ago
Alan Abramowitz said he thought the greatest threat to John McCain was not the conservatives who have opposed him but the moderate-to-liberal Republicans. I thought at the time he was leaving out another important group - the libertarians and paleocons. Few on the left have been more critical of the Bush Administration and the Iraq war than the old right. Their critiques can be found at
The American Conservative,
Cato At Liberty and
LewRockwell.com. With the Quixotesque campaign of Ron Paul finished where would the Libertarians turn?
Justin Raimondo for one has become an "Obama Cultist".
Obama kept mentioning the war – you know, the one we were lied into on phony "evidence" of a nonexistent nuclear program. Not only that, but he kept reminding Hillary we should never had launched it in the first place: he needled her until she visibly squirmed. That was the hook, the lure that drew me ineluctably into the Obama cult.
Okay, let's admit this, too: it is a cult, i.e. a group centered around a single leader, whose pronouncements and personality form the basis of belief. With Obama, the clincher is that distinctly presidential air he carries with such alacrity: he acts and speaks as if he's already the President, and is merely waiting to be officially elected out of simple courtesy and respect for tradition.
Obama-mania is indeed a cult, but that's okay: after all, I'm a longtime Ron Paul fan, too – my enthusiasms are strictly non-partisan – and so idealism doesn't scare me, I think it's a rare and good thing in politics, and in life. After all, Christianity, when it began, was a cult, and yet now we have presidential candidates chasing after the Christian constituency, no matter how wacky some of their leaders may be.
I have to say that the turning point, for me, was when Rep. Paul's presidential campaign seemed to go into suspended animation. An attempt to derail the Revolution by challenging Paul in the GOP congressional primary necessitated a tactical shift, and Chris Peden, the challenger, was crushed, 70-30. Oh, it was a great day: you could practically hear Roger L Simon sobbing and I'll be damned if I didn't hear the faint echoes of Jamie Kirchick's furious shrieks ("I'm melting! Melting!").
With the GOP presidential sweepstakes over, the antiwar voter – that is, the single-issue voter who conditions his support on the candidate's generally pro-peace foreign policy stance – was left with a single choice, and that is Obama.
Raimondo has made it clear that he won't vote for Hillary Clinton but he fears the establishment will shoot down Obama in favor of the hawkish Hillary.
Hillary the hawk shrieks, and strikes – but, on second thought, she's more like a shrike, a fierce bird that seems to take a perverse pleasure in impaling its victims on thorns, perhaps as a display to frighten its enemies. Our Democratic war-birds have always ruled the party's nest, and the Clintons won't hesitate to push Obama and his supporters to the forest floor, if they have to.
At this point, neither candidate has enough pledged delegates to win, and neither is likely to acquire that magic number. Therefore, in the end, it will be the super-delegates – the party Establishment – who will pick the nominee. A few hundred party insiders – now that's American democracy in action. Keep this in mind the next time the US government takes, say, Russia to task for supposedly veering off he road to democracy.
A vote for a saner if not sane American foreign policy is a vote for Obama not the neocon Hillary.
