The Real Deal
by Vern Trumbly
vertru@gmail.com

Credit The Libertarian Enterprise

The title of this article is the my campaign slogan as, you see, I've decided to run for Prez in '08. What the heck, couldn't do any worse than the (Rword) currently defaming (or is that defecating on ) that office and filling the shoes of lesser beings who've gone before. Okay, before this turns into a rant, let me tell you why I have decided to run for Prez. A few days ago I was having an interesting and far ranging conversation with a friend who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty since it was his/her idea in the first place. We were talking about how the Department of Health and Human Services has developed a new recommendation of abstinence in lieu of real sex education and/or contraceptive use to avoid STD's and unwanted pregnancy; for every unmarried person under the age of thirty. Just one more nail in the coffin of our gooferment, placed there by religious right wing fanatics. As an aside, I often wonder how those people actually manage to breed. There seems no end of them, so they must, but being so anal about sex and such, it just stands to reason they don't know what goes in whose ear. So anyway, back to the conversation we were having: I told the old joke about (Rwords) wanting to take all the fun out of things and (Dwords) just wanting to tax it. We rambled on from there for a bit and the rest of the conversation went something like this:

Vern: I'd rather abstain from paying taxes and just have lots of sex instead.

Friend: Run for President, I'll vote for you. I like your platform.

Vern: I wouldn't want the job, I'd be in too much trouble all the time from telling small countries to get off their butts and do it the way the rest of the world did, the hard way. Look at the Russians, they have a revolution every fifty or a hundred years, kill their leaders on a regular basis, and they're still a strong country. Then again, I'd go diligently about firing 99.999% of the gooferment employees, dismantle the gooferment, turn all the ships and tanks over to NG and Reserve units, shut down the Pentagon and lease it out as a giant haunted/fun house, then turn the rest of Washington into a theme park dedicated to the folly of gooferment.

Hey, I think I like that platform.

Friend: Me too, I could easily support that; you could call it the "Real Deal".

So there ya have it. I will be starting a committee soon to study the feasibility of raising the two hundred millions of hard earned American dollars to run a proper campaign, hire and fire several campaign managers, tell all pollsters to attempt an aerial congress with a motivated circular pastry, and spend lots of time interviewing applicants for the Prez's pool parties. Hey, it worked for Jack Kennedy didn't it?

Okay, so maybe I can't be Prez, but it is a cool dream. The truth of the matter is we need someone who is a lot stronger than I've ever been to lead the country out of the dark ages of political folly and into a new era of proper gooferment, i e none. Maybe just a token like L. Neil Smith envisioned in some of his wonderful books. As for me, I'm just a dreamer who sits about thinking up weird scenarios to make life mildly more interesting and fun for my friends and me. I come up with odd little things like this headline:

For many years now I have wondered what was wrong in our nation's capitol and why the gooferment just couldn't get it right. Now, keep in mind that I'm a Vietnam war era veteran of the Hair Farce, in which I served eight years, two months, and five days (not that I was counting toward the end, it just says so on my discharge papers). I got out because I saw the military turning into what I had always thought of as the worst possible parody of gooferment service. It seemed it was becoming what I had always thought the other branches of gooferment were probably like. Then one day it hit me that it was just like the other branches and agencies. The only difference was that we had had a very important job to do in keeping the world safe for democracy by battling those awful commies in the jungles of a nation too small to really worry about. But that was a few years in the past and I decided it was time to pull the plug.

My real epiphany, though, came recently. I'm a slow learner, I suppose, but it only took me about twenty-three years to figure out that the problem with gooferment wasn't the bureaucraps working for it, but rather the gooferment itself. It had become so corrupt, so bloated and self-important that the phrase "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help" had become a standing joke in so many sectors of society it was no longer funny. I started talking with others and learning about libertarianism, and came to understand why the gooferment doesn't work, and that is because it is a self-defeating mechanism with only one goal, to deprive its citizens of their money and redistribute said earnings as its managers see fit. In other words, there can never be a benign gooferment, because it always takes over. Furthermore anarchy can be managed despite what the alarmists would have us believe. All you have to do is arm the citizens and poof: no more anarchy.

Then I had to witness the 2006 elections. I had moved recently enough and didn't register in time to be eligible to vote here. I got my voter registration card the day after the election. So, I truly witnessed the election as a non-participant for the first time I can recall since I moved shortly before Slick Willy kicked George II out of office by out-slicking the old man. Damn shame, that, I thought at the time. For quite a few years folks tried to convince me that Silly Willy was doing a good/bad/great/awful/wonderful/wrecking-the-country job. Then I voted for George III (or is that IV, depends on how you look at it I suppose). I'm no expert on politics by any means, never even took a Poli-Sci class in college (which I never finished anyway), however I have learned enough over the past five and a half decades to know when I'm being lied to. And the standing joke about how to know when a politician is lying has also become seriously un-funny of late.

So now we have the other half of the political juggernaut, laughingly referred to as our two-party political system, in power, at least in the legislative branch, and what do we get? Flying pigs, I tell ya. No kidding. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker Apparent and whoever (I've lost track without my scorecard) becomes Prez pro tem of the Senate, have made it clear they will make sweeping changes in Washington District of Columbia. I believe those statements almost as much as that there will soon be bacon and roast pig raining on the capitol building as all those flying pigs are shot down by SAM's, the nation's capitol being restricted airspace and all.

I guess I'm just not as gullible as I once was. Damn shame, don't you think? I mean really; I used to believe that Ronald Reagan was good for the country, and George II (III?) would be just as good, if not better since he was younger, almost of my generation. When George III (IV?) finally appeared to get his head out of his backside after 9/ll I actually thought "Gee whiz, now we have a Prez who can act decisively." Then I watched him lie about program after policy after intelligence estimate, and, along with his (well paid-off) colleagues (co-conspirators?) in the capitol, sell us and the few rights we had remaining to the highest bidder and turn a once semi-free nation, a once and future good idea, fully into a huge slave labor market. So now I'm wondering what the hell happened, and getting an answer I don't like. I voted for the (expletive deleted in favor of good taste) both times, and for several of his co-conspirators, and never realized there was another answer. So maybe until recently I was as gullible as I didn't think I was.

One of the tenets I'm trying hard to put across here is that WE THE PEOPLE are responsible for this mess, well, us and our ancestors who keep voting for the bums we should have thrown out two hundred plus years ago. We have been misled by our so-called leaders, we have been lied to by our so-called teachers, we have been treated like sheeple all of our lives, and yet we continue to vote these bums into office so they can give us the reaming we seem to deserve for it. I, along with other people certainly more learned and eloquent than me, call for the nation, for the world, to cry "foul". I wonder what would happen if we all decided to literally throw the bums out. Do you think it is possible for us, the libertarians of the world to stand up for what's right, to carry our message to enough people, to convince enough "voters" that what is needed is to throw the bums out every time? I think a ground swell of sufficiently pissed off voters, people who could and would listen to the arguments of people like the esteemed Mr. Smith, and many others does exist. I believe that it would be possible to keep un-electing political hacks often enough that sooner or later they'd get the message that running for office in this country is not profitable.

As so many people have said so well, L. Neil in particular, gooferment just does not work. It only makes things worse. I'm a man of simplicity, and it has always been my bent to look for the simplest possible solution to whatever problem crops up. So that is my way of saying, lets all be responsible for the mess created here in the US of A (and in other countries containing sufficient libertarians to do so) and throw the bums out; every election. Maybe, in that way, we can eventually shrink gooferment to the size it should be, that is to say non-existent. I'd much rather live in a world like that so interestingly portrayed in The Probability Broach and The American Zone myself. I'd also rather live in a world where the money I earn isn't used to kill other people of the world, and a little of the rest gets doled back to me in dribs and drabs.

I feel the time has come libertarians to stand up and fight in the only way we can, to bring in the voting public who lies dormant for the most part, and fight off the gooferment. Let's throw the bums out wholesale, each and every time. Let's use the power of the voting booth the way it was meant to be, and take back the country. I would never foment or condone violence in any form so that leaves, in my mind, only one way to get rid of that which we do not want or need: a hugely bloated and grossly interfering gooferment which has done nothing but make the world dangerous for everyone and essentially removed all of the rights we once enjoyed. That, in case you didn't know, was under the Articles of Confederation.

Okay then, I'm abandoning my run for Prez, melting all my campaign buttons down to make pens, and advocating that we do something better: throw out the garbage, reject the status quo, and make the world safe for people. See, I told you I was a dreamer.

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