Is it time for Liberals and Conservatives, Republicans and Democrats to re-examine their habitual allegiances?  May enemies, confronted with imperial Shrubbyism, become conditional friends?

Quoting from email:  "food for thought for all liberals & leftists

Greetings From Your Secret Allies on the Right
October 8, 2002
By Anonymous

Yes, that's right. You heard me. We are allies.

I am one of liberalism's secret new allies. There are many of us; millions of us in fact. We are denizens of the Right... the true Right - the Third Party Right. The Pat Buchanan Right..the Libertarian Right.. of half a dozen other small parties. We're not the right-wing of the neoconservative, snotty, elitist, oil-sucking Republican Party. We're the real conservatives...  and we have more in common with you now than we ever will with the loathsome imperialist jackboots who are squatting in our White House.

Most of us were Republicans once. We laughed at Clinton, a lot.  We helped demonize him in the Press. I have a confession to make:  Even though I never liked Clinton and I don't like him now, I wish he was still in office.  I miss him. No, I am not being sarcastic.

Bill Clinton was not a warmonger..he was not a second coming of Napoleon Bonaparte, minus 80 IQ points. We now have a silly, illiterate clown who rose to power through family nepotism and he's our Commander In Chief... and he is dragging us all into a Third World War. A world war that will be paid for in blood, by our children.

I, at least, have the distinction of saying that I did not vote for the clown. By the time his "election" rolled around, I had already turned on the GOP. That's how it was for many of us...we gave our last sympathy vote to Viagra Bob in 1996 - then watched in disgust as the Republican Party nominated a perfumed princeling of the Bush family dynasty. You see, most of us never even liked his Dad - that's what made an international celebrity out of yapping little Ross Perot.

There are other reasons, however, good reasons, why we broke with the Republican Party. We don't like shadow governments. We don't like any curtailments on the Bill of Rights. We don't like foreign entanglements, and we don't like the United States playing Globocop.  We don't think the men and women of our Armed Forces should become action figures for indolent, spoiled politicians to play with. We don't think national policy should be shaped by Rush Limbaugh.

What we have now in common with the Left, most of all, can be quickly encapsulated in the old phrase "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."  Remember World War II... many different kinds of folk united against a common enemy.

When the Republicans rammed through the USA-PATRIOT act, it was a formal declaration of war on the American People. Most Republican voters were not paying attention - but we were. And we are now fighting mad.

We want to join you in an effort to repeal the institutionalized fascism that has come out of the "War On Terror."  We want to castrate Big Brother.  We want to help you un-elect as many national GOP leaders as possible.  We want to end this foolish military adventurism.

So the next time you start to yell at the TV set and call Pat Buchanan a xenophobe, or call Harry Browne a dirty name, remember that people of their political sympathies are on your side - and looking forward to the downfall of the modern Republican Party.  The gauntlet has been thrown, and I can assure you... we all despise the Bushies.

We have our own agenda and you have yours, but do us all a favor and please don't lump us in with the "Springtime For Hitler" party.  If the Democrats kick GOP behinds, royally, in the next elections... we won't be out there sobbing into our Starbucks Latte, like the Ann Coulter Pin-Up Calendar crowd.

We'll be laughing.

For the sake of our country, please make it so.

We can always squabble with you later."

For more on Conservatives and Libertarians disenchanted with Shrubbyism you may want to check these sites:

http://www.cato.org/people/eland.html
http://www.libertyjournal.com/archive_article.cfm?ArticleID=49
http://www.free-market.net/spotlight/terrorism/experts/
http://www.americanpatrol.com/_SPECIAL/WORLD_TRADE_CNTR_DISASTER/WhoSaidThis010913.html
Link for above
http://www.mises.org/empire.asp  -- A quote from "War, Peace, and the State", by Joseph R. Stromberg:

Our goal is to present, in one place, a broad bibliography of works which go against conformist    "liberal-internationalist" – and now one would have to add "neo-conservative" – readings of the history of US foreign relations.

Yet, there is a necessary caution:

We know that David Duke, the Louisiana racist who was so controversial as a candidate for governor there only a few years ago has positioned himself with the opposition to Bush's form of "internationalism". Duke's anti-semitism, if unchecked, would lend credence to the false charge that opposition to Sharon in Israel and to Shrubbyist imperial policy in the Mid East  is a form of "covert or unconscious" anti Semitism.

That general problem (politics making strange bedfellows, or "the enemy of my enemy is my friend")  is discussed cogently at:
http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/left-n-fascism.html
 

For general introductions to the varieties of political orientation and the "War on Terrorism":

http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/politix.html may be of interest.

Another, more tightly structured "Introduction to Political Ideologies"  is at:
 http://www.peace.moveon.org/bulletin45.php3

Other MoveOn Peace bulletins are at:
http://www.peace.moveon.org/bulletin.php3#arch

A Libertarian "political orientation" self test, very brief and interesting, is at:
 http://www.self-gov.org/wspq.html

Excellent collections of links to "War on Terrorism" information are at:
http://yama333.tripod.com/
 http://www.peace.moveon.org/bulletin47.php3
 http://www.peace.moveon.org/bulletin16.php3
 http://www.peace.moveon.org/bulletin14.php3

"Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."
--Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819.

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for ... exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in any country."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg Trials
 
 

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