Across the nation, Democrats and Progressives rejoice over
this week's election results while Republicans attempt to alleviate their shock
and disappointment. Democrats compile their victories in lists including pot
legalization in Colorado and Washington
state, marriage equality in Maine , Maryland , and Washington ,
and Democrat gains in the US Senate, not to mention President Obama winning a
second term. Republicans from the Fox News base blame their failed
campaign on “fables that are recycled by [Obama’s] White House at taxpayer
expense” (Michelle Malkin), morosely declared that “the white establishment is
now the minority” (Bill O'Reilly), wondered “how we will survive…a deal with
the devil [who will put] religion under attack” and said the only solution was
to “get away from the East…and get grandfathered into the second amendment and
don’t forget ammunition” (Glenn Beck). There was, as John Stewart so aptly put it, an avalanche on Bullshit
Mountain
Democrats celebrating President Obama’s victory and
marijuana’s legalization in the same breath perhaps suffer from short term
memory loss. During the President’s first term, his administration cracked down
on medical marijuana facilities and prosecuted the War on Drugs with a fervor
surpassing even GW Bush’s administration’s. Obama largely remained silent on
this topic, saying only that “what I specifically said was that we were not
going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana…I
never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to
large-scale producers and operators of marijuana." Romney’s position
was hardly challenged; being an authoritarian Republican, he was expected to
adopt the party’s anti-pot stance. Sadly, the lack of scrutiny for either
candidate’s extremely authoritarian, conservative stance merely belied the
power of big pharmaceutical corporations’ hold on these elections and the media.
Mark Levin, a popular conservative radio show host, laments that "conservatives are called purists. The very people who keep
nominating moderates now call us purists the way the left calls us purists.
Yeah, things like liberty, and property rights, individual sovereignty, and the
Constitution, and capitalism." Oh, please, cry me a river.
Obama isn't much more left than Romney, and to call Romney a centrist is a
joke. Both candidates belong to their respective (and often the very same) corporate
donors. And both candidates were/are rather shockingly and similarly
Authoritarian/conservative on most issues.
Romney also supported Bush’s Patriot Act, a law that revokes
any individual rights granted in the Constitution in the name of an already
unconstitutional War on Terror. So to argue that Romney even gave one pretense
of caring about the Constitution or individual freedom/sovereignty indicates a
marijuana high whose changes of legality have suddenly become greater.
First-term President Obama strengthened government’s chokehold on individual
freedom by extending and intensifying the Patriot Act each time he saw the
bill: roving wiretaps, unrestricted access to records, and conducting surveillance on anyone suspected of terrorism. And in spite of 2008
Senator Obama’s campaign promises to legalize marijuana on the federal level
and let states decide for themselves, President Obama has since then enabled and
ordered over 1.7 million drug arrests and a nationwide increase in raids on
medical marijuana dispensaries. Subsequent legislation including anti-protesting bills,
extensions on US occupation
of Iraq and Afghanistan , as well as a brand new
presidentially-initiated War on Libya
firmly cemented President Obama’s opposition to individual sovereignty, support
of preemptive war, and opposition to the Constitution.
The Republican Party mysteriously supported Mitt Romney in
spite of his complete reversal in almost every popular social position and
suddenly vague economic plans. If Republicans wanted someone unabashedly more
conservative Christian than President Bush, they had no further to look than
Virgil Goode. Ironically, his policies simply and succinctly compiled
Romney’s and the Fox-driven Republican Party’s, the Christian Right’s, and
Obama’s actual decisions.
Among the few differences between President Obama and the
Republican Party is marriage equality. Kudos to the President for vocally
supporting LGBT+ rights, but perhaps his position still misses the point. It’s
not government’s job to determine the morality of any of our choices, let alone
marriage. The political discussion should revolve around taxes and
discrimination. Government should put a stop to its discrimination and treat
people as individuals instead of trying to place them into categories and deal with us as groups. Our Constitutional rights (should) force the government to protect
our individual rights and freedom.
Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson and Gary Johnson remain more
centrist than either mainstream candidate, and they're miles away from the Obama/Romney
false dichotomy we were peddled. They actually believe in freedom, the
Constitution, individual sovereignty, and decent foreign policy. Sadly, the
media, the presidential debate organizers, and their corporate owners prevented these other
legitimate options from seeing the light of public discourse. America ’s
corporate oligopoly systematically cuts off the speech of anyone who refuses to
buy into their power paradigm. They successfully quashed any benefits from either capitalism
or socialism by protecting their own interests at any cost, by buying
elections, and by suppressing opposing ideas and free speech.
Contrary to both Democrats’ and Republicans’ assessments, our
nation will not crumble because our citizens retain their individual freedoms. As
the wars on drugs, Iraq , Afghanistan , Libya ,
and soon Iran
cost us billions of tax dollars, trillions in debt, and far too many soldiers’
and civilians’ lives, we must ask tough questions of each politician. We cannot
afford to pander to corporations’ control and an illogically-constructed false
choice between two strikingly similar ‘options’. We, the People, must demand
freedom, refusing to sacrifice freedom for security, or we will end up with
neither.
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