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11A118
The Failure to Think
by Jim Davies, 5/14/2011
Yesterday Ron Paul announced his interest in being elected President, and at once the mainstream media sprang to the defense of the Establishment by belittling him - and in so doing, gave a back-handed but convincing endorsement both to the view that liberty cannot be obtained by voting for it, and to the fact that it will be obtained only by a program of universal re-education as outlined in this ZGBlog. Paul comes with strengths and weaknesses, like all of us. The former include the fact that he centers his platform on abolition of the Federal Reserve and on terminating all foreign military entanglements. If he were elected, with sufficient Congressional support, those two reforms on their own would make America a vastly more agreeable place to live while awaiting the total dissolution of all govermment - for they above all others have caused all the anguish and misery of the present tyranny and recession. For good measure he's also made it clear that government has no business regulating whom we sleep with or what we ingest, and termination of the "drug war" would bring another huge benefit to this country and to its Southern neighbors. His primary weakness is that as a long-serving Congressman he evidently believes that government has some valid role in human affairs, whereas there is not a shred of rational support for that ridiculous fiction. While its reporter clearly had little appreciation of the importance of what Paul was saying, coverage by the local seacoastonline.com was far more favorable than that delivered by the national media, which clearly identifies them all as resolute enemies of freedom. Even their sober standard, PBS News Hour, ignored those heavyweight features of Paul's platform and tagged him with ridicule: "the hooker and heroin candidate" according to Michael Gerson, a fellow Republican. Gerson is a Washington Post reporter, a senior journalist, so we must assume he knew exactly what he was doing: his best, to ensure that Paul is marginalized. These people are evidently determined, even as the ship of state is sinking fast, to stay very much on board and inhibit the launching of any lifeboat. Probably, the tag will stick and Paul will (as Mark Shields predicted in the same program) be neither nominated nor elected, and so America will be much the poorer; and that's because the great bulk of the population including almost all who vote are presently incapable of rational thought. If it were otherwise, ears would immediately tune to what Paul is saying: What? - the Fed has flooded society with paper money, so triggering the housing bubble and recession it is pretending to cure? What? - there is no need (or even authority in the Constitution) for American soldiers to die overseas by the thousand, while fostering hatred there for everything we hold dear? What? - the drug war is a devastating failure and fraud and needs to be ended? Those are all massive thought-provokers (at the very least) but what's been called Boobus Americanus fails to give them his or her attention. He does not react, the mechanism in his brain for responding and being provoked has been anesthetized. Until it is systematically reawakened by education, there is no hope whatever. Paul is the best of the government bunch, and his announcement and the mainstream reaction to it therefore amounts to a ringing endorsement of the logic presented in the preceding ZGBlog about how to obtain a free society. Liberty will come when people engage their brains again, and no sooner.
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