Posted under Alan Keyes & Constitution Party
Here is Daniel McCarthy’s take on Alan Keyes’ defeat at the Constitution Party Convention.
The Constitution Party — back then it was the U.S. Taxpayers’ Party — was founded in the early 1990s in the hopes of getting Pat Buchanan to make a third-party run in ‘92. What liberals and others who fail to look beneath the surface rhetoric of the culture war have never understood is that while Keyes and Buchanan both speak out for traditional values, they have fundamentally different political philosophies. Keyes is an antiabortion neocon. The Constitution Party, whatever its flaws, is far from being a neocon outfit. So it has rejected Keyes and nominated instead Pastor Chuck Baldwin, a critic of the Iraq War and national-security state as well as a social conservative. The press thinks this is an upset, but anyone who knows what the Constitution Party has actually stood for will not be surprised at all.Â
roho on 28 Apr 2008 at 10:28 pm #
The MSM see’s life through a straw……..”How can one be a conservative and not be a NEOCON WARMONGER?…..It doesn’t compute in their Liberal/Conservative view of the world.
How silly of me, allowing myself to fall back into a programed thinking process. Let me correct myself:
MSM has been directed by Rupert Murdoch and the OTHER 4 major Kings of media to act “Shocked and Surprised” that an “Israel Firster and Interventionist” has been rejected by a virtually unknown party, and chosen a minister that has seen through their “Brookings Institute BS” for years!………………..The next agenda will be to paint Chuck Baldwin’s impecable credentials as a “Confused, and delusional Southern Minister that associates with trailer park tenants that have been abducted by aliens in the Gulf Breeze area of Pensacola!”{sic}………….Run Chuck Run!
They will have to smear Pastor Baldwin, as he is soooooooooooo much on top of the illusion that our Government has created!
Richard C. Green on 29 Apr 2008 at 12:56 pm #
In all truth, the Rupert Murdoch / Sumner Redstone axis of evil which holds the “high ground” in the modern mass media business of America, does not have to ‘smear’ Chuck Baldwin. They can simply inform their news crews and their news editors to focus on the latest escapades of the baby Panda bear, or the baby polar bear, or whatever comes along to be the ‘new’ darling creature of news monopoly … et cetera.
“Chuck who ??”
Nobody but nobody says no to the Bosses of the Big Bosses. And least of all do the swell-looking guys and well-dressed gals of cable news ever say NO, do they ?? !! Well, not more than once. They all know now that even the irascible Don Imus can be shot down, don’t they ?
In case you haven’t been monitoring some of the other developments, the growth of the Internet and its alliances with cable news reporting has all but killed the suburban weekly newspaper, in many parts of the country. Major city weekly papers — mostly evolved from anti-war rags and broadsheets founded back in the days of Kent State — are either all gone now or almost solely focused on providing advertising space for adult dating services and for personal networking. And dining out.
Now and again a semi-intrepid reporter will get a semi-major story set up — and it will run well in one of these weeklies … but as the price of gasoline soars these free weeklies are going to be crunched unless they can find revenue sufficient to pay their distribution costs. Nor can their route drivers — who are part-time or contract employees — afford to work for minimum wage, any more, as basic food rises in price.
The tight little poker game which is this Monopoly of the Majority’s Mainstream Media, has almost everything they need to weather the summer, if it is a hot one or a cold one or a violent one …. or not.
They can set the agenda from their hot tubs via cell phones. Done.
No smear campaign of any kind will be required to make Chuck Baldwin into “the invisible candidate”, in fact that would be counter-productive. And so, the good Pastor Baldwin will, most likely, find himself being ignored to death over the few months now remaining before election day, 2008; ignored as he seeks to run for President with no money, no secret friends, no Oprah book club members — and no fascist allies on cable TV or the broadcast network of Fox Snooze.
roho on 29 Apr 2008 at 1:26 pm #
Richard……..I agree completely with your post, and hope that as Ron Paul supports Chuck Baldwin, his $35 Million that he has raised, makes it’s way to the CP?
Richard C. Green on 29 Apr 2008 at 11:31 pm #
Thanks, roho –
Frankly I am not up on the latest configurations of the many-layered and alleged “campaign finance laws” but I would suspicion that there is little Dr. Ron Paul can do, even if he is so inclined, to help Baldwin.
Contributions to national committee organizations / party funds are apparently capped at $ 26,000 or thereabouts. Personal giving to a campaign fund are capped at $ 2300 per individual for the “presidential race” or so it says. That’s forty-six hundred bucks total for a husband and wife combination, for example. As with the previous set of limits enacted, the costs of running a campaign escalate WAY faster than do the limits, so it’s a sucker’s bet in the worst possible definition.
Party committee to party committee transfers are a different matter but it has been made ever so clear that Paul is going to stick with the GOP no matter how much they despise him, disrespect him, and so on.
Then again he’s flush with money to run for Congress again in the fall, and he trounced the faux opposition in the Texas Republican primary.
In no sense of the word do I think that Ron Paul is a “fellow traveler,” but I am concerned that the thousands upon thousands of citizens who gave him fifty, a hundred or a thousand dollars for his presidential campaign fund will now experience either contributor’s remorse or contributor fatigue. With living expenses creeping up and up, it takes a very hardy person to dig deep and come up with a sizable contribution to a campaign in the present situation. That’s not fair but it is the truth.
What I am wondering, and hopefully someone more savvy than I can tackle this question … is what are the rules for the nominated Electors themselves ?? After all, they are the ones who are actually IN THE CONTEST when it comes to the voting day, and in a big State like Texas or California, that’s a substantial number of people who ought to be empowered to campaign in their own States and on their own terms.
Electors are a curiousity, after all, and thank goodness we still have them even though they are anachronistic. The States must provide a formula for their situation and condition, not so ? Electors are citizens within their States and operate only in their own States, so how can they be controlled by any “federal” regulations ??
Someone a lot smarter than I am needs to weigh in on this subject and help us, and let us reach a nice moment of clarity.
“I’m the Elector, I’m the guy or gal who you are actually voting for !!”
Methinks the founding fathers were even smarter than we now know.