I am a republican and I have been for a bunch of years now. I voted for Harry Browne in 2000, I was a big Alan Keyes supporter and I couldn’t vote for GWB. In 2004, I supported the war in Iraq and I voted for President Bush because of that and the tax cuts.
I had a real eye opener when I heard about Ron Paul’s candidacy on C-Span and when I heard him in the debates. I believed Rush and Sean when they said that the liberals wanted to, “cut and run”. I still do think that much of the opposition to the war from the liberal side is aimed at the President and that a democratic President, (Clinton, Obama, Edwards etc…) would not leave Iraq. When we went to war I believed it would be a cakewalk it was predicted to be. Up until this year I believed, “stay the course” was our only option. The people who predicted easy victory now said that if we left it would be genocide and a vacuum would soon fill with Al Queda.
I decided it was high time to stop believing the people who were wrong and start believing the man who was right from the beginning, Ron Paul. What Dr. Paul has been saying since well before 9/11/2001 is that wars ought to be declared, per the constitution. The track record of our declared wars versus our undeclared wars tells the sad tale. Dr. Paul believes, and I agree, that looking for the motive for a crime is not blaming the victim but an attempt to prevent future crimes. We should remember that we once supported both Bin Laden and Saddam and we should wonder who we are supporting now that we will fight later.
While we are off nation building and intervening in the internal affairs of “certain” other nations, we should be careful to preserve our freedoms at home. What are we fighting for in Iraq if we still lose liberties at home? Ah, safety, that’s it… But is it so important to be safe? The info about the attacks of 9/11 was in our hands. The bureaucracy was too large to allow the info to get to the correct hands. What solution did we offer to make sure this wouldn’t happen again? We added a monster bureaucracy on top of the existing one in an effort to “streamline” information.
The real threat to our freedom is the idea that we should give up freedom and rights at home in order to keep us safe. By accepting this premise we forget the reasons this nation was founded. We are under a more oppressive tax system than the one that led to the Boston Tea Party. We can’t reduce these taxes without changing our welfare/warfare government policies. If the second amendment was fully honored we could have prevented the attacks of 9/11 and the VTech massacre.
“Give me liberty or give me death” has been replaced by “Take our liberty and keep us safe”. This is not American. We are throwing our rights to the government like a wallet to a mugger. The terrorists can only kill us, the government can do far worse. The Army, Navy, Air force and my fellow Marines are bravely risking their lives for our country. Let us, safe at home, have the courage to take a little less security at home and attempt to restore the republic.