National LP official: ‘It’s gotta be Romney, there is no choice’

By David McElroy · April 7, 2012

Cleaning out the notebook…

If you wonder why the national Libertarian Party is harder and harder to take seriously, consider this recent comment from LP National Committee member Wayne Allen Root:

“I think the important thing now is to make sure Obama is not elected,and that means in my mind, I would love for a libertarian like Gary Johnson the two-term governor of New Mexico would actually get elected President, but I think we all know that’s not going to happen so therefore it’s got to be Romney there is no choice.”

Root was the LP’s vice presidential nominee four years ago, so he’s not exactly a nobody in the party (even if he should be). He exposes the real problem with the LP. Everyone know that Libertarian Party candidates aren’t going to win, so they’re not entirely in agreement about what their purpose is. They’re schizophrenic. Are they a political party or an educational organization? Political parties exist to win elections. How many LP campaigns have you ever known of that were honestly run to win (with a halfway legit shot at winning)? I can’t think of any.

Root’s comments point to the contradiction of being a serious Libertarian if you want to make a difference in elections. If you want to influence the outcome of a campaign, about your only real option is to vote for one of the two major parties. So what good is the LP doing? I can’t figure that out. Even if I still believed in some form of limited coercive government, I don’t see any real purpose for the LP. Maybe you see one that I’m overlooking.

By the way, in a comment on a blog, Root tried to defend his advice to vote for Romney in the fall, but it still didn’t make any sense.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley has been promoting charter schools for the state lately, but his promotion effort leaves something to be desired. On a PR trip to New Orleans to visit charter schools, someone in the governor’s office apparently forgot to check the performance of the schools he was visiting. The state of Louisiana had ranked the three schools he visited with a C+, D+ and F. Oooops. Not exactly great models to emulate, it seems. Someone on the governor’s staff isn’t earning his salary by preventing him from doing stupid things.

Why do TV talking heads quote poll results as though they somehow determine truth? Have you noticed what I mean? On the occasions when I’m subjected to cable news — almost always when I’m in public — it seems as though I frequently hear reporters and newsreaders quote public opinion statistics as though they mean something. Polls can tell you something when it has to do with elections, but they’re irrelevant in determining what’s right or true. Somewhere along the way, this country fell in love with the idea of democracy so much that majority opinion is quoted as though it matters. It doesn’t. If 85 percent of the people don’t believe in gravity, so what? If 74 percent believe in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or whatever, so what? If you want to quote a statistic because it shows how absurd or crazy people are, that makes sense. To quote it respectfully — as though it means something — is insane.

After I had the April Fool’s Day piece about Mitt Romney and the Illuminati, I’ve noticed that my website is suddenly getting hits from people who are using search strings such as “mitt romney illuminati.” It’s hard to do satire when so many people already believe the parody.

A 15-year-old Amish boy and his father were in a mall. They were amazed by almost everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver walls that could move apart and then slide back together again.

The boy asked, ‘What is this, Father?’

The father (never having seen an elevator) responded, “Son, I have never seen anything like this in my life. I don’t know what it is.”

While the boy and his father were watching with amazement, a fat old lady in a wheelchair moved up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened, and the woman rolled between them into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched the small numbers above the walls light up sequentially.

They continued to watch until it reached the last number. Then the numbers began to light in the reverse order.
Finally, the walls opened up again and a gorgeous 24-year-old blond stepped out.

The father, not taking his eyes off the young woman, said quietly to his son, “Go get your mother.”

And, finally, here’s a thought I stole from Facebook friend Andy Daken. There’s a lot of truth in this:

“Education is free. Open a book at the library. Read more than a Twitter post on the internet. MIT posts all their lectures for free. Diplomas are not free. They are certifications that you jumped through enough hurdles. If you want an education, read. If you want a diploma, quit whining that it costs money. A diploma does not equal education.”

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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