All of us
remember, if we're old enough, or if we watch Nickelodeon
on a regular basis, a young TV situation comedy character, already
dishonest and cynical at an early age, who would do anything, lie,
cheat, steal, or suck up disgustingly to the principal character's
mother and father -- "What a lovely dress you're wearing, Mrs.
Cleaver!" -- in order to get whatever it was he wanted.
Now we all
know that the actor who played that character grew up and
became something else -- a California highway patrolman, someone
told me -- but the character, Eddie Haskell, grew up and became Bill
Clinton. Which is how we find ourselves living in a "Haskellocracy"
and the reason we need to find our way back out again.
My purpose
this evening is to suggest how we're going to do that.
*****
Ladies and
gentlemen, in September of last year, when I delivered
what I sometimes refer to as my "default keynote address" to the
Libertarian Party National Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, I
tried to make my remarks the distilled essence of thirty-two years
of careful thought and hard experience in the movement.
What I
said then, in the light of what had happened just that summer,
thanks to that ciger-smoking old maid on PCP, Janet Reno, in Waco,
Texas, was that for the foreseeable future, the Libertarian Party
could do worse -- much worse -- given the direction of events and the
temper of the times, than to emphasize political issues related to the
Second Amendment -- to the individual right to own and carry
weapons -- even at the expense of all other issues combined.
I pointed
out that another well-known old maid, George Bush, had lost
the 1992 election -- exactly as I had predicted he would at the very
height of his Gulf War popularity -- by a number of votes smaller than
the number of single-issue Second Amendment voters he and his party
had chosen to betray on several occasions. I proposed that we
Libertarians pursue those single-issue voters aggressively, by the
relatively simple expedient of embracing a sufficiently principled
and progressive Second Amendment position, and do with them to the
Republicans what Socialist Norman Thomas did to the Democrats in 1928:
scare them into co-opting our position and maybe even some of our
principles.
Without
delivering the same speech here, I then defined "a sufficiently
principled and progressive Second Amendment position" by proclaiming
that we Libertarians should: (A) "outbid" the Republican Party, who
are in the process of crumpling the Second Amendment up and pitching
it in the dumpster of history along with the rest of the Bill of Rights;
and (B) "outbid" the National Rifle Association, whose principal
distinguishing characteristic, since 1934, has been a palpitatingly
spineless compulsion to surrender in the face of enemies like Diane
Feinstein, Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton -- or even Shirley Temple.
I said we
can accomplish this by promising single-issue voters not
just to resist all proposed and pending gun control
legislation -- which I referred to as "victim disarmament"
laws -- not just to repeal
or nullify every one of the twenty thousand victim disarmament laws
already on the nation's books at every level of government, but by
promising to arrest, indict, try, convict, and imprison every city
councilman, every county commissioner, every state legislator, every
U.S. Congressman, and every Senator -- past or present -- who ever
helped to write those victim disarmament laws into those books, along
with every police chief, every sheriff, every governor, and yes, every
President -- not to mention First Ladies and Attorneys General -- who
ever enforced them.
Most of us
have understood for a long time that by denying individuals
unencumbered exercise of their inherent human right to own and carry
weapons, people like Hillary and Janet are morally responsible for
atrocities like the Long Island Railway shootings. Now we'll hold
them legally responsible, as well. Never forget that we are the
good-guys, we of the American productive class, and they, the
parasitic politicians and bureaucrats, Hillary and Janet, are the
bad-guys. They are the criminals. It is against the law -- the
highest law of the land -- to enact or enforce statutes or ordinances
mandating victim disarmament, or for that matter any other breach of
the Constitution.
Along the
way I observed that this tactic, offering to jail
politicians, will work because those it addresses most directly tend
to place punishing their enemies ahead of anything else they might
achieve through the political process, and that in this instance, we
could go along with that, and remain solidly within principle.
But for us,
I concluded, we Libertarians who are "higher-minded" and
not so vindictive, having acquired the support of those single-issue
voters, we could go on to generalize the tactic into an overall
strategy both principled and pragmatic. The Bill of Rights, I
reminded my audience, is a law -- the highest law of the land -- and
it needs to be enforced. For the foreseeable future then, "Bill of
Rights enforcement" should become the Mission Statement of the
Libertarian Party.
*****
Now there's a
trick here which knowledgeable Libertarians should be
onto already: if you look at the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution,
which reads, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the
States respectively, or to the people.", or if you look at the Ninth
Amendment, which reads, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of
certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others
retained by the people.", you'll discover at least three fascinating
things:
First, that
even the Federalists, the very worst of the Founding
Fathers from a standpoint of decentralized authority and individual
freedom -- even Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and James Madison,
the villains of my books -- were rabid Libertarians, compared to any
political point of view today except our own;
I said
"at least" three fascinating things", because these Amendments
also demonstrate (parenthetically in the present context) that
the gentlemen Federalists and their colleagues and contemporaries
understood what very few, including Supreme Court nominees, appear
to understand today: that the document, the Constitution, is not the
source of rights -- they would have sneered at an idiot notion like
that -- but merely an acknowledgement of them for political purposes.
These Amendments
are also all the evidence anyone needs that the
Framers clearly understood the essentially negative character of
political rights -- "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask in
what ways it's going to leave you the hell alone" -- although I've
often wished they'd been savvy or prescient enough to drive that point
home by calling the first ten Amendments the "Bill of Limitations" (on
government power) rather than the "Bill of Rights".
Second, to
return to my original line of argument, that the
unmistakable character of the worst of the Founding Fathers, Hamilton,
Jay, and Madison, demonstrates that it is we Libertarians -- not
liberals and not conservatives -- who are the only legitimate heirs
to the intellectual and political legacy they established;
And third,
that if these two Amendments alone, the Ninth and the
Tenth, are stringently and energetically enforced, we will have the
Libertarian society that we've all been working toward for so long,
and that anything else we hope to accomplish along those lines will
amount to little more than "fine tuning".
"For the
foreseeable future, 'Bill of Rights Enforcement' should
become the Mission Statement of the Libertarian Party." Let me tell
you, that turned out to be a message more powerful than the medium
that carried it. Before I knew it, at least partly as a result of
my speech in Salt Lake City, I was being asked to talk everywhere.
Publications of both a Libertarian and non-Libertarian character
wanted me to write for them. My latest novel Pallas was selling
better than anything I'd ever written. Four of my earlier works were
suddenly about to be reprinted. My publisher and largest bookseller
were purchasing radio spots to promote my work. In fact, was offered
my own radio show.
And I was
asked again and again, by an astonishingly wide variety of
individuals, not if but when I
was going to run for a particular political office.
There are
even those who claim -- among them, a freelance columnist
now working on a story about it for the Wall Street Journal -- that my
speech has already changed the course of history, since the delegates
and leaders of one state Libertarian Party who heard it went home and
initiated a referendum on concealed weapons carry which was promptly
co-opted into law by Republicans in the legislature.
Now while
all of this good stuff was going on, I was beginning to
worry just a little bit. Here I'd spent the last fifteen years trying
to motivate people, both Libertarian and non-Libertarian alike, to
create a Libertarian society, and the appropriate method, I'd always
believed, was what Ayn Rand called "concretization": persuading
people, Libertarian and non-Libertarian alike, to envision that
Libertarian society as vividly, and in as much detail as possible.
That technique had worked quite well in my 1978 campaign for the state
house of representatives. The same technique had made my first novel,
The Probability Broach, a "cult classic" among Libertarians and their
fellow-travellers, and that, in turn had brought thousands of
individuals into the Libertarian movement.
My problem
was that the prospect of a political party willing
to punish and humiliate their enemies was not only motivating
conservatives in a new way -- that, after all, was the whole reason
I'd thought the idea up in the first place -- but its effect on my
"higher-minded" fellow Libertarians appeared to be an entire order
of magnitude greater than anything I'd ever tried on them before.
I had a long talk
with a friend of mine, that member of our movement
who has risen higher in the newspaper business than any other
individual. I asked him, are we Libertarians really as
mean, deep down inside, as conservatives?
In a movement already full of anarcho-hyphen-this and
minarcho-hypen-that, had I created a new
hyphenation: fascisto-hyphen-libertarianism? The sonofabitch
laughed at me.
Then I
recalled the light of new hope I'd seen dawning in the eyes of
my comrades when I talked with them about jailing politicians and
bureaucrats who abuse the Bill of Rights, and I recalled the tone of
voice they used when they talked with me, and I knew they weren't such
a bad lot, after all. They were responding the same way people had
when Jack Kennedy said we were going to the Moon. They weren't moved
as much by the thing itself as by what it implied; they didn't care
much about the Moon, but they had a good idea what being able to reach
it meant, for the American economy, for American technology, for
American morale.
*****
Let's take a few moments to
examine exactly what my proposed new strategy means ...
Ladies and
gentlemen, we are living today in a period of what I call
"Deplorably Solved Problems". Poverty and unemployment are a
"deplorably solved problem": all that's required is to eliminate
the taxes and regulations with which government burdens America's
productive machinery and within an amazingly short time everyone in
the country will be wealthy by today's standards. The trouble is that
politicians like Hillary don't want the problem solved, because that
would leave them without anyone to "help", and bureaucrats like Janet
don't like the solution because it leaves them without a job.
Likewise,
drugs are a "deplorably solved problem": all that's required
is to repeal the unconscionable and unconstitutional laws that turn a
nickel's worth of plant-squeezings into a hundred dollars' worth of
anti-music, crack babies, turf wars, and devastated inner cities. The
trouble is that precisely the same artificially multiplied profits
that feed the street gangs and the overseas drug lords also fund the
drug czars and whole branches of government, and, as with poverty,
none of those who profit from it want to see the problem solved.
So we come at last
to violent crime, which is another "deplorably
solved problem". The theory of an armed society which I expressed
seventeen years ago in my first novel is no longer merely a theory:
in Florida, where violent crime has plummeted forty percent since
it became easy to carry a concealed weapon, in Vermont, which was
recently declared the safest state to live in because it was always
easy to carry a concealed weapon, the theory of an armed society has
been experimentally, scientifically proven beyond the palest shadow
of a doubt.
Violent crime is a
solved problem: the solution is Bill of Rights enforcement.
I recall a
time, back in the 60s, when politicians would crow and
strut and struggle to claim credit for a statistically meaningless
fluctuation in the crime rate of only four percent. To them, to
almost anybody living at the time, an unmistakable drop of forty
percent would have appeared impossibly Utopian. Yet today, when
America has seen it happen (and more to the point, seen
what caused it to happen) what it all
means to politicians like Hillary and
bureaucrats like Janet is not the arrival of the Millennium, but an
unmitigated catastrophe: evidence that their crowing doesn't make
the sun rise; and the threat of a proportional reduction in their
budgets of forty percent.
Violent crime
is a solved problem: the solution is Bill of Rights enforcement.
And increasingly,
it's clear that rather than learning something
useful from what's happening around them, rather than learning to live
with crime as a solved problem and going on from there, politicians
and bureaucrats are willing to enlist the aid of the hopelessly,
putrescently corrupt mass media to lie and distort the truth in order
to deprive Americans of yet another peace dividend.
Violent crime is
a solved problem: the solution is Bill of Rights enforcement.
Don't talk to
me -- don't let anyone talk to you -- about
"vigilantism"; what America has now is
vigilantism. What it has now
is the Ku Klux Kops: dimwitted thugs in obsessive black nylon, running
around inflicting one perverted brutality after another on innocent
people at the behest of senile transvestites in long dresses -- what
my wife calls "the Grand Dragons of the Supreme Court". By contrast,
what we Libertarians advocate is Law and Order: abject government
compliance with the Bill of Rights -- the highest law of the land -- decent,
productive men and women of the Constitutional community
joyfully taking up the burden of their own physical security along
with that of their children.
Violent crime is a
solved problem: the solution is Bill of Rights enforcement.
We know the
solution to violent crime, and the only thing that keeps
that solution from going to work right here, right now, for each and
every of us, is Republican Senator Hank Brown, and those like him,
who have apparently discarded whatever it was they once believed in.
There are no words in the English language adequate to express the
contempt which all decent individuals must feel toward those like
Senator Brown who would rather go on seeing people die in the streets
than to relinquish the control he fondly imagines he has over their
lives.
Violent crime is a
solved problem: the solution is Bill of Rights enforcement.
The first ten amendments
to the Constitution are the exclusive
property of the American people they were written to
protect; not of the mass media,
the so-called "fourth branch of government" who
believe there's only one Amendment, the First, and that it only
applies to them, not of the executive
branch, not of the legislative
branch, certainly not of the judicial
branch of the very institution which they were written
to protect the American people from.
The Supreme
Court has been a particularly wretched custodian of the
Bill of Rights because of the inherent conflict of interest involved
in their unconstitutional monopoly on the interpretation of it, and
the fact that they haven't got a clue, and never had, regarding what
the Bill of Rights is all about.
Twenty years
ago, the Libertarian Party national platform committees
of which I was a member called for outright abolition of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, on the
grounds, among other things, that the Framers of the Constitution
never intended America to have a national police force. Naturally,
the few outside the Party who paid attention to that particular plank
thought we Libertarians were crazy, but, as usual, they were wrong
and we Libertarians were right. It is now time, in the light of the
murders Ruby Ridge and Waco, for the Libertarian Party to lead other
political parties in calling for -- in demanding -- the disarming of
all federal agencies. This time, the public will listen, and from
now on, if there's something these agencies want that can be obtained
by the legitimate application of force, let them consult local law
enforcement. If that had been the case last summer, all those people,
men, women, and little children would be alive today.
The one and only
thing left that can save the American republic from
the Democratic Party -- which is the polite euphemism we customarily
employ when we really mean "the socialists" -- is the Libertarian
Party. Likewise, the Libertarian Party is the only thing that can
save the American republic from Republicans -- which, increasingly,
is a euphemism we employ when we really mean "fascists".
*****
Case in point:
Denver radio host and columnist Ken Hamblin pleads with
his listeners not to let the issue of gun ownership and self-defense
become the "property" of Libertarians, because the Libertarian Party
will never amount to anything, since none of its candidates has ever
gotten more than five percent, and in any case, Libertarians are all
nut cases who refuse to stop at stop-signs.
The reason Hamblin
gives for his assessment of our collective sanity -- that we oppose
child labor laws -- betrays not only an embarrassing ignorance on
his part of economics and history, and an astonishing inability to
jettison the left-wing baggage he arrived on the pro-freedom scene
with so recently, but that he has rendered himself, quite as deliberately
as any "egg-sucking dog liberal" or darktown gang-banger, incapable
of further learning in this area, because the facts would only disrupt
his low-resolution picture of the world.
My guess is that
Hamblin has been commiserating with his Republican
pals in the legislature, whimpering about the pressure Libertarians
are putting on them to do the right thing, in the right way, about
gun ownership and self-defense. Of course that's our job, as a third
party out of power, and from his injured tone, it appears that we're
succeeding at it. In the long run, if the Republicans continue to
fail to perform, they'll be out and Libertarians will be in -- but
never mind all that. I also suspect that his recent, very unbecoming
hysteria over the Second Amendment rally on the capitol steps was
really about four hundred dollars he had demanded, to speak for a few
minutes, which the Libertarian rally organizers
politely -- and wisely -- forbore to pay him.
If Hamblin would
occasionally stop talking and listen for a
change -- neither of which seems to be in his job-description
or his character -- he would learn that the issue of gun
ownership and self-defense have never belonged to anybody
but Libertarians, who kept it alive all
by themselves for more than twenty years (starting when only nut cases
were interested in it, long before trendy neo-conservatives like
Hamblin decided to stick a delicate toe in) while time after time, the
NRA dullwittedly fumbled the ball and the Republicans treacherously
sold us out. When I started my first novel, back in 1977, I was the
only writer on the entire planet -- aside from one other self-designated
Libertarian, Robert A. Heinlein -- to advocate a universally armed populace.
But Hamblin won't
listen; he'd rather suck up to the boys in blue and
to Republican politicians, overlooking the fact that, if Martin Luther
King had followed his advice in the 1950s -- to avoid an independent
effort, stick with major parties, champion only "respectable" notions
regardless of the truth -- there would still be two sets of public
bathrooms and drinking fountains everywhere.
Hamblin has
come about as far, intellectually, as anyone can
reasonably expect a human being to travel in a single lifetime.
To give him his due, he managed the great leap from liberalism to
neo-conservativism, but by his own admission, he's an "old guy" and he
doesn't appear to have another leap, great or otherwise, left in him.
In many respects he remains a liberal and still "thinks" with some
internal organ other than his brain. Like Rush Limbaugh, if he used
both halves of his brain he'd be a Libertarian by now, and he knows
it, and it hurts.
To David Segal,
who organized the rally that so deeply offended
Hamblin and his sensitive listeners, I say that the only thing more
satisfying than being praised for your success is being denounced for
it; you may be uncertain as to the sincerity of the former, but never
of the latter. Robert LeFevre used to say that what we have in this
country is a choice between left-wing socialists and right-wing
socialists. More and more today it appears that Bob was wrong.
What we have is a choice between right-wing and left-wing fascists.
My advice to
Dave, and to other Colorado Libertarians is that we
waste not another moment on Ken Hamblin. He's just another fascist,
right-wing or left-wing, whose punitarian answer
to everything is to put more people in jail. He's no black
Rush Limbaugh as he claims, he's just a black Newt Gingrich.
And, as such, he's made himself a part of the problem, not a
part of the solution.
*****
We have no time
left to spend in a futile attempt to persuade those
who willfully misunderstand everything we have to say. For the most
part, hearts and minds on the other side are closed for good. Spend
your time and energy gathering up those who already agree with us, or
who already have a reason to travel with us, and we will not only win
over the formerly recalcitrant and attract new individuals willing and
eager to be of real help, we will achieve victory.
Be warned that at
the moment, many of our conservative
fellow-travellers are all but useless to
us -- and to themselves.
They can't see that the legislative fever-pitch at which things are
preceding in Washington represents desperation on the part of the
Marxist trash in the White House, who know full well that this is the
last chance in the world they're ever going to get to run things.
Our conservative
fellow-travellers would rather swap paranoid
delusions with one another about United Nations forces riding
invisible helicopters from Mars, than roll their sleeves up and do
some real work. They'd rather whine like what P.J. O'Rourke calls
"bedwetting liberals", they'd rather wring their hands and bemoan
their fate, than plan and execute a counterstrike in this culture-war
they talk about incessantly. All it seems they can do lately is
whimper about the horrible things Hillary and Janet have done to us
already; the horrible things Hillary and Janet are doing to us now;
and the horrible things Hillary and Janet are about to do to
us -- instead of concentrating on doing it back!
Perhaps we can
begin the therapy they need to get them out of this
funk by teaching them that the words "conservative" and "Republican"
are fully separable.
Don't waste too
much effort trying to explain Libertarian positions to
them on issues like abortion or the War on Drugs -- and
never make excuses or apologies.
We're right and they're wrong.
Instead, tell your
increasingly angry and disenfranchised conservative
friends that we're not asking them to marry us.
We're not asking them to have our baby.
We're not asking them to agree with us on each and every issue.
We're not asking them to become Libertarians.
We're not even asking them to join the Libertarian Party.
We're asking them
to hire us to do a job -- by consistently voting for Libertarian
candidates -- a job no other party seems willing to do: enforce the Bill of Rights.
The fact is,
our own longtime customary practice of blindly persuading
individuals to join the Libertarian Party -- or of persuading
individuals to join the Libertarian Party blindly -- without fully
understanding exactly what Libertarianism and the Libertarian Party
are all about, must be brought to an immediate halt. On at least two
occasions -- the Ed Clarke campaign and the Ron Paul campaign -- it
has come that close to destroying us as an
institution and we must now begin to repair the damage by emphasizing
"service to clients" -- that is, keeping promises to voters -- rather
than membership in a club, and by educating each and every newcomer
in what it really means to be a Libertarian.
If you want to do
something, and you're not up to public speaking
or to electoral politics, then help create a permanent system of
education internal to the Libertarian Party.
*****
It's important
to act now. Come 1996, the Republicans -- who've
gotten it right precisely once in thirty-five years, and couldn't
locate their own overly-developed posteriors with both hands and a
city block full of Klieg lights -- will trundle out the same menagerie
of drooling retards and moral cripples they've inflicted on us, and on
themselves, for so long, complacent in the false belief that Hillary
will have performed so badly by then that Bill will be a pushover.
Or is it the other way around?
In any case the
Republicans may offer us William Bennett, the most
soft-spoken and thoroughly evil figure in contemporary politics, who
consciously, deliberately, rejected Libertarianism and makes Darth
Vader seem like Barney the dinosaur.
They may offer us
Robert Dole. What is it about Bob Dole that always
makes me want to reach for a garland of garlic, a crucifix, a mallet,
and a sharpened wooden stake? Has anybody ever seen Bob Dole's
reflection in a mirror?
They may offer us
Jack Kemp, who was so determined to reverse the
years of liberal excesses and abuses within the federal Department
of Housing and Urban Development, to take everything done by his
Democratic predecessors and turn it around, that he forgot that HUD
turned around and spelled in reverse is "DUH".
They may offer
us Dick Cheney, whose only virtue is that he isn't
quite as blandly stupid as all the others.
They may
offer us Dan Quayle, whose only virtue is that he isn't quite
as blandly stupid as Dick Cheney.
It all depends on the polling data.
Libertarians
have principles; they don't do polling.
Republicans do polling, which is why they're
running away from the Second Amendment -- and from the
entire Bill of Rights -- as fast as their nasty little
legs can carry them, instead of leading the nation back to the basic
civilities afforded by the Constitution.
One great
problem Libertarians suffer is that we are often
secretly -- or not so secretly -- more willing to see Republicans elected than
Democrats. There are understandable reasons for this, philosophical,
psychological, and historic but it has to stop, for equally cogent
reasons both principled and pragmatic.
As an example,
it should be clear now that what seemed to be a
tactical victory for Libertarians in Georgia two years ago was really
a strategic loss. When Paul Coverdell, Republican candidate for the
United States Senate, was forced into a run- off with his Democratic
opponent, Wyche Fowler -- thanks to the presence of a strong
Libertarian candidate -- the Libertarian should never have endorsed
the Republican. It may have altered the course of history, but it
gained us nothing -- certainly not the gratitude of Republicans who
helped bury the truth afterward -- not at the time it happened, nor
afterward in crucial votes like the Clinton budget, the Brady Bill,
or the Feinstein amendment.
Perhaps it would
help if I listed a few anti-gun, and therefore
anti-Bill of Rights Republicans for you -- people who've recently made
statements or cast votes against the Second Amendment: late party
chairman Lee Atwater, William Bennett, Sarah and Jim Brady, William
F. Buckley, George Bush, Senator John Chaffee, William Colby of the
Nixon-era CIA, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Texas Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison, former cabinet secretary Jack Kemp, Republicans
of the New Jersey Senate, Republicans of the U.S. Senate Judiciary
Committee, Republicans of the U.S. Senate in general, Richard M.
Nixon, Edwin O. Welles, also of the Nixon-era CIA, columnist George
F. Will, California governor Pete Wilson, and New Jersey governor
Christine Todd Whitman.
Only by repeatedly
preventing the election of Republicans like these
can we Libertarians make our case for Bill of Rights enforcement; and
anyway it's better to elect the socialist scum you know than risk
another betrayal of the Constitution at the increasingly vile and
duplicitous hands of the Republican Party.
As Paul Atreides
reminds us, "The power to destroy a thing is the
power to control a thing." Presently we Libertarians will be able,
and in each and every case must prove willing, to assure the victory
of a liberal Democrat, no matter how repulsive, over a Republican, in
every single election until the Republican Party begins to straighten
up and fly right -- or becomes
as extinct as the dodo.
Tell your Republican
friends that if they truly wish to reform their
"Grand Old Party", they must be willing to punish it. Tell them that
we Libertarians are offering our services as a bludgeon -- or a rattan
cane, if you prefer. Tell them, in a phrase they understand, that if
they spare the rod, they'll spoil the child. Tell them, in a phrase
they at least claim to understand, that they must be willing to
destroy the Republican Party in order to save it.
Tell them they
must Get right with the Bill of Rights. Don't
temporize, don't euphemize, don't let them rationalize any longer.
Tell them to be real -- and be redeemed. Ask them
what ever happened to whatever it was they once believed in.
I am a Life
Member of the National Rifle Association, but not a happy
one. To that organization and its leaders, I would say, don't bargain
for us any more in Congress or the nation's legislatures; don't write
legislation you imagine isn't quite as bad as whatever the bad-guys
have in mind; don't wheel and deal for us. You're not up to it; every
time you try it, you wind up getting shafted. You wind up getting
shafted. We wind up getting shafted. Try
sticking to a principle; try sticking to the highest law of the
land, the Bill of Rights. Try being, for the first time since 1934,
what the liberal media say you are: unbending, determined, indomitable,
obdurate, persistent, resolute, stubborn, tenacious, uncompromising.
And if you don't know what any of those words mean -- past
performance implies strongly that you don't -- try looking them up.
In the meantime, don't bargain for us any more, and don't do us any favors.
To the nation's
politicians and bureaucrats, to the Pat Sullivans, the
Dottie Whams, the Regis Groffs, the Tom Nortons, the Wellington Webbs,
the Roy Romers, the Hank Browns, the Patricia Schroeders, the Bill
Bennetts, the Jack Kemps, the Janet Renos, the Hillary Clintons, and
to everyone else like them across America, I advise them to get out
their almanacs or encyclopedias right now, blow off the dust, and bone
up on the Bill of Rights. From this moment forward they're being
watched by millions of eyes, and they have vastly more at stake, here,
than simple re-election. Early in the 21st century, they may find
themselves serving time in prison for something they've already
done -- or failed to do.
Let Hillary and Janet
do the worrying, about the horrible things we're about to do to them!
"The laying of a
Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring war
against natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders
thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the concern of every Man whom
nature hath given the Power of feeling ... " So said our philosophical
ancestor, Thomas Paine, in Common Sense.
One way or another,
America is going to wind up with a political
party that will enforce the Bill of
Rights -- just as soon as the Republicans decide whether they or
we Libertarians will put Hillary and Janet and all their little
friends behind bars, not for Whitewater capers, not even for
Vincent Foster, but for "Crimes against the Constitution".
Whenever you begin to
feel discouraged, I want you to imagine an old
lady twenty years from now, tall, stoop-shouldered, wearing thick
glasses and a dikey haircut, shuffling along with a canvas bag hung
over her shoulder, one of those sticks in her hand with a nail in one
end, picking up bits of paper trash as part of her hundred thousand
hours of public service, cleaning up America's shooting ranges.
Party on, Janet!
And party on, Hillary.
America -- or at least Joe-Bob Briggs -- loves movies about "Bimbos Behind Bars".
Let's see how they like the real thing!
Back to L. Neil Smith's Speeches Page