For those who consider Ron Paul (PR) a dimwit or a nut case, consider the following comparison with the current White House resident (W):

RP: born into a family of modest means, worked his way through college and medical school, requiring intelligence, self-reliance, and persistent effort.

W: born into a family that was already well-connected with the worlds of politics and big business, had an undistinguished college career.

RP: served with honor as an Air Force flight surgeon during the 1960s.

W: father got him a Vietnam-safe position with the Texas National Guard, from which he went AWOL for the last year.

RP: Started a successful private business as an obstetrician, serving the medical needs of the community.

W: Ran several businesses into the ground while indulging in cocaine and alcohol.

RP: Turned to politics as a result of his interest in reading about monetary systems and policy. Became as self-educated and articulate defender of his position on this issue.

W: Recruited into politics due to family connections and an apparent lack of any success in business. Became an inarticulate but manageable spokesperson for big business interests.

RP: Political career has been focused on using the Constitution of the United States as a tool to ensure and protect the natural rights of citizens, the sovereignty of the nation, peaceful foreign relations, and efficient government.

W: Although sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, has cynically ignored and contradicted its provisions and intent to establish a quasi-dictatorship run amok in the world, violating human rights, surrendering national sovereignty to globalist corporate capitalism, attacking other nations without provocation, and nearly doubling the national debt, giving away hundreds of billions to the already wealthy oligarchs.

In a truly sane world, which one should have been President? Will we continue to select Presidents who are the tools and lackeys of the globalist corporation elite, or will we wake up to recognize and reward true achievement, honor, intellect, and commitment by electing men and women with these characteristics to our highest office?

Does that make me a Nazi?

The registered Democrats of Connecticut rejected him as their Senatorial candidate in 2006 in favor of Ned Lamont in a democratically held election. His reaction to the election results was characteristically undemocratic "I cannot and will not let that result stand". Fine. He ran as an independent and was elected. He is an independent, unless or until the Republicans want to accept him into their party. The Democratic leadership in the Senate owes him nothing. His presence in the Democratic caucus is noxious to many members of the Democratic Party, a Party I would like to rejoin some day when it has been purged of neocon-enablers like Lieberman and Pelosi.

To criminality. I'm sorry, but the concept that Constitutional rights can be abrogated just because detainees are being held "on foreign soil" is so ethically, if not legally, wrong, it is almost beyond comprehension. The whole Guantanamo detention and trial episode concocted by the Bush Administration will forever be a stain on America's reputation in the eyes of the world, and was so from its very inception, as anyone with a historical or global perspective could have told you. The Bush/Cheney/Rove attitudes that "if America does it, it must be right" and "if the President does it, it must be legal" are at the heart of this and many other outrages. Their miscalculation about the way the world views the Guantanamo gulag is further evidence that we are ruled by idiots.

Where the businesses are all owned by the government, educational and economic policies are dictated by kommissars in Washington, where operatives of the executive branch monitor all private communications in the interests of state security, and military forces are imposed on foreign countries in order to keep them "aligned" with our style of "democracy". The Republocratic Party will continue to govern with wise policies and our "Dear Leaders" will be given immunity from prosecution for illegal activities "necessary" for our protection.

I was watching the PBS "American Experience" program on Ronald Reagan the other night and saw Governor Reagan standing up for lower taxes and smaller, more efficient government. Presumably the reason for these positions would be to allow people to live their own lives as they saw fit, without government interference. All this is very laudable, very Jeffersonian. Then he appears to rail against students at Berkeley and elsewhere in California who actually want to express themselves outside the constricted social paradigms of mid-20th century American culture. In other words, he was for freedom before he was against it. The freedom these students advocated endangered the Hamiltonian power monopoly of big corporations and arms manufacturers. (Full disclosure: both of my diplomas for bachelor's degrees at UC Berkeley are signed by Ronald Reagan as ex-officio President of the Board of Regents).

I watched a video of Herbert Hoover's address to the 1960 Republican convention in which he said pretty much the same thing: one moment he was railing against big government and the next moment he was ripping beatniks and pinkos, people who actually used our Constitutional liberties to experiment with alternate lifestyles, which, in a practical sense, why we have these liberties in the first place.

Until conservatives can decide either for or against liberty and either for or against the kind of big, invasive government that the "conservative" Bush Administration promoted, they will always be in a muddle.