The Libertarian candidate is a true Republican, unlike statemonger Bush… so why not?

What is a Republican?

Now you've seen this site argue the Republican Party is the political agency of unbridled state power, and has been since its inception in Jackson, Michigan, in 1854.

Characteristically, the Republicans:

• initiated the first national military draft in 1862
• supported entrenched northern industrial cartels through high tariffs and other government favors
• decimated the South through post Civil-War Reconstruction
• implemented the first federal morals statute (the so-called Comstock Law, 1873) criminally proscribing premarital sex, birth control, abortion, and sex information
• militarized the country via genocidal policies toward the American Indians
• set up the modern crusading hyperstate security apparatus

But there's another side to the Republican Party.  One the Leftist media doesn't let people know about, and one that Rush Limbaugh and his co-buffoon Rightwing Yakmeisters on talk radio keep bottled up in hyperventilating ignorance while they pander like circus sideshow barkers to the basest hatreds, angers, and fears of Dittohead Nation.

For one thing, many of the early supporters and ideologues behind the Republican Party were:

• opponents of slavery
• advocates of the free market and the economic interests of the little guy—one of the founders Alvan Bovay, an anti-slavery Democrat, named the group after the party of Thomas Jefferson (the Democratic-Republicans)
• opponents of government control and bureaucracy, heatedly opposed to special privileges for big business interests
• advocates of peace who relished civil liberties and the absolute right of individual conscience when it came to sex, drugs, or war

None of the spiritual descendents of these people is the stereotypical Republican we've come to know, i.e. a pontificating Puritan who, as H.L. Mencken once put it, "has the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy."

They're free enterprisers and advocates of free minds and free bodies.  And they're trapped in an unwholesome, irrevocably corrupted party of slothful-corporate hacks, led by a posturing, prevaricating, medieval simpleton.  They continue to vote Republican out of hopeless inertia, and because the Democrat this year has been hysterically painted to them, by these hacks, as the reincarnation of Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin.

But this year, the many libertarians of the Republican Party—and that is exactly what they are if they believe in economic freedom, civil liberties, and a rational/nonimperialist foreign policy—have a choice:

Vote for the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik.

George W. Bush is not your man.

He (and his contemptuously opportunistic cronies) have saddled us with an additional $2 trillion in debt, he has dramatically increased the spending of virtually every government department, he has endangered our security and killed/maimed thousands of innocent people with his delusional obsession in Iraq, he spits on the Constitution's protection of civil liberties, he opposes women's reproductive choice, and he would willingly ban therapeutic embryonic cloning and other lifesaving technologies.

What's worse is George Bush does all these horrible things posturing as an advocate of freedom and small government.  No true Republican can vote for such a man.  Send a message to the Republican Party leadership that you want change…

Vote for Michael Badnarik.

You won't have to worry about actually making a vote for liberty.  Because as the name suggests, Libertarians work tirelessly for "all your freedoms, all the time."  A substantial Libertarian vote will induce change in the Republican Party, throwing out the statists who really do not belong there.

As for the practical objection that a vote for Badnarik deprives Bush of a vote and facilitates a Kerry victory...  So friggin' what!  Worst case, Kerry remains an ordinary unimaginative mixed-economy politician and we tread water as if we lived in the current state of Massachusetts.

But we know Kerry will be smaller-government than Bush—the biggest tax-and-spend Democrats in history are not even in the same league with the prodigious numbers Dubya has wracked up—, that he will work to get us extracted from Iraq and refocused on terrorism, and that his civil liberties record will be an order of magnitude better.

Further, Kerry's feet will be held to the flame by libertarian thinkers and citizens across the country; because, unlike Bush, Kerry can read, write, and speak in complete sentences.  So chances are he'll listen.  There's a strong chance the country will actually make libertarian progress.  Which means progress for True Republicans everywhere.

This year, be a True Republican:  Vote Libertarian.