Marcy,
Me too, and I appreciate your encouraging people to attend our
conventions, as well as Phil's sharing his spot-on correspondence with
W.A.R. As we saw in 2008, it doesn't take that many votes to affect
the outcome in big ways! As few as a dozen more votes and we could
have had Mary Ruwart as our presidential nominee instead of Bob Barr.
So by all means plan to go and be a delegate if you can!
I don't know whether W.A.R. will try to run again in 2012 -- he seems
to want to have it both ways -- but if he does, I sure hope we have
enough committed libertarians showing up at the convention to stop him.
The irony that jumped out at me from this latest W.A.R. column is his
complaint about the protesters allegedly valuing winning over
principle: "By the way, would anyone be protesting, crying, chanting,
or rioting in the name of a losing football coach? So this is about
winning. If you win football games, anything goes? Even the cover-up
of child rape is okay?"
Yet W.A.R.'s own history in the Libertarian Party has consistently
been one of elevating winning while downplaying principle. In fact he
returns to this theme in the very first sentences of his reply to
Phil: "LP needs to learn from me. I'm a Libertarian who also thinks
like mainstream American voters... and understands their fears,
desires, concerns. If you don't understand middle America...you can
never win more than 1% of the vote."
At a time when government persecution of people as "sex offenders" is
out of control, convicts who have served their entire sentences remain
forcibly incarcerated, and those who have been released are so
severely regulated as to where they can legally reside that many are
forced to live on the streets, writing a column that fans the flames
of public hysteria around the topic of children and sexuality is bad
enough. But to jump on this bandwagon not because one is afflicted by
moral panic oneself, but because one perceives that the panic is
*popular among voters*, is truly shameful.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))