Rob Shvern on Politics

There used to be an organization for people who believed in a truly limited government — limited taxes, limited spending, limited interference in individual lives and limited intervention in foreign affairs. That organization was known as the Republican Party. But the only one of those beliefs that still motivates the G.O.P. establishment is limited taxes. In 2008, people who still hold all of them joined the Ron Paul Revolution.

The real significance of the Paul campaign is not the ubiquitous bumper stickers and lawn signs or the online fund-raising records ($6 million in one day, plus another $4 million, hilariously, on Guy Fawkes Day) but the mirror Paul held up to the modern Republican Party. When his fellow candidates denounced big government, Paul was there to remind them that President Bush and the G.O.P. Congress had shattered spending records and exploded the deficit. When they hailed freedom, Paul asked why they all supported the Patriot Act and other expansions of executive power. And when they called themselves conservatives, Paul asked what was so conservative about sending thousands of young Americans to try to transform the Middle East.

Under Bush’s leadership, of course, the Republican Party has been anything but frugal and anything but isolationist. The congressional Republican revolutionaries seemed to lose their zeal for shrinking the federal government once they controlled it, which is one reason voters expelled them from power in 2006. And these days, it’s usually Democrats who call for a humbler foreign policy. Paul’s leave-us-alone libertarianism hasn’t fit in with a party anxious to read our e-mail, improve our values, assert American power abroad and subsidize friendly industries at home. The party’s recent mix of “national greatness” neoconservatives, evangelical theoconservatives and K Street careerists has had many goals, but leaving people alone hasn’t been one of them. That’s why Paul was the one getting booed at G.O.P. debates.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1724358,00.html

“If it (the nomination process) goes into the convention, don’t be surprised if someone different is at the top of the ticket,” Mahoney said.

A compromise candidate could be someone such as former vice president Al Gore, Mahoney said last week during a meeting with this news organization’s editorial board.

If either Clinton or Obama suggested to a deadlocked convention a ticket of Gore-Clinton or Gore-Obama, the Democratic Party would accept it, Mahoney said.

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2008/mar/24/mark-tomasik-dont-discount-gore-led-ticket/

On October 21, 1949 Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating Orwell on “how fine and how profoundly important the book is”. His letter to Orwell contained the prediction that: “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience”.

As the American author Neil Postman wrote in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, whereas “Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us, Huxley feared the truth would be droned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture” consumed by “an almost infinite appetite for distractions”.

In a way they were both right. Unless we tear ourselves away from our pretty toys and distractions just long enough to remove our rose-coloured specs, freedom will be obsolete except as a slogan above the gate of the Ministry of Truth.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2998.shtml