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Day of the Dogwhistle
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

It is ironic, to say the least, that for the last couple of decades, so many people have been worried about "Global Warming", or alternatively, a new Ice Age, when all that time, the real threat to the survival of our species is that North America will soon be buried, assuming it hasn't been already, under a layer, two miles thick, of stupidity.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the build-up (or maybe more appropriately, the "dig-down") to the 2012 Presidential election. It's definitely bottom-of-the-barrel time for a civilization closer to political, economic, and moral collapse than at any other time in its history.

I could easily spend the rest of this article—and many others—writing about the Obama Administration, a regime that consists of nothing but shortcomings. Never has America been burdened with a gang more criminally vicious, brutal, poorly-informed, incompetent, and corrupt. The constituency that Obama and his orcish minions actually represent—George Soros and the other would-be elite world-rulers behind the scheming United Nations—have nothing in mind for this country's Productive Class but poverty, enslavement, and eventual genocide.

Republicans, who could have ridden in as champions and heroes, have turned out—as always—to be nothing but a gaggle of smarmy dodgers, their minimal cognitive abilities suicidally focused on trivialities that will ultimately cost them the election—and our civilization.

Let's start at the top of the barrel, with the scum—as someone once said about Teddy Kennedy—that keeps even worse things from floating to the surface. As of this moment, I no longer consider myself a friend or an ally of Congressman Ron Paul, who on June 14, put his signature to a scurrilous and disgusting pledge that makes us political enemies—and will eventually cost him millions of votes in a nation that happens to stand equally divided on the issue that it concerns.

Find it here.

The pledge, a product of something calling itself the Susan B. Anthony List, consists of four paragraphs, two of which are actually acceptable to real libertarians. The first is a promise to appoint only strict constructionists to the Supreme Court and the federal bench.

The third is a promise to cut all taxpayer funding for abortions, and for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that facilitate abortions. Real libertarians, whether they favor abortion or not, have advocated this very reform for nearly four decades, on the grounds that (A) abortion—like medicine in general—is nothing that government should concern itself with, and (B) it is wrong to use money coerced from taxpayers to finance an activity they may morally oppose.

The second paragraph is ominous, committing the signatory to "select pro-life appointees for relevant Cabinet and Executive Branch positions, in particular the head of National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health & Human Services, and the Department of Justice".

In what way this differs from the faux President's apparently grim determination to appoint only Marxists or Marxoids to those and other positions—something that absolutely outrages conservatives—is difficult to determine. (Obama sucker-fish like Van Jones and Mao admirer Anita Dunn must be unspeakably dense—or unbelievably ignorant of 20th century history—not to realize that they would be the first victims of any dictatorship of the proletariat they helped establish.)

But as is often the case, I have digressed.

Mention of the Department of Justice in this paragraph of the pledge clearly indicates that I have been right all along about how an anti-abortion regime would operate. Anything that the Department of Homeland Security or the Transportation Safety Administration do now to Americans is small potatoes, compared to what a Department of Justice anti-abortion "task force" would end up doing to American women.

For a glimpse of that particularly nasty future, see this exerpt from Hope, a novel I wrote some years ago with Aaron Zelman, in which a congressman pretty transparently based on Paul confronts President Alexander Hope, a Roman Catholic who personally opposes abortion, but refuses to impose a gynecological police state on America.

See: http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle485-20080921-02.html

On many levels, the fourth and final paragraph of this galloping travesty is the worst, because it obliges the successful candidate to "advance and sign into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion".

One hardly knows where to begin. Is the implication here—that children who can't feel pain don't deserve to live—one that Paul wants to defend, over and over and over again on the campaign trail? How about his earlier promise that, since abortion isn't a matter of federal concern, we shouldn't worry about his opposition to it? Or the fact that forbidding abortions is a power mentioned nowhere in the Constitution?

Or is that just a damned piece of paper?

And while we're at it, precisely when does an "unborn child" ordinarily become capable of feeling pain—or is this just another rubber yardstick or elastic tape measure, like the ones the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and all their favorite presstitutes use to define, and redefine, and reredefine "assault rifles"?

Shall we experiment, possibly by poking fetuses with needles and recording their reactions? Or would that be illegal, too? And what about other mammals—like the rat, rabbit, dog, and cat fetuses that abortion foes couldn't tell from human fetuses if they were cornered? Presumably at some point, they become capable of feeling pain, as well. Will that come to mean that unborn animals have rights of some kind?

I'm going to miss my veal Marsala.

Susan B. Anthony's reported opposition to abortion—over which there is apparently considerable academic dispute—is as insanely contradictory as the current women's movement's prissy distaste for weapons of self-defense. Her primacy in the "temperance" movement— advocating alcohol prohibition, which has never seemed particularly temperate to me—clearly reveals her actual attitude toward human rights.

I have long been convinced that opposition to abortion springs from one of two sources—and sometimes both at once. The first is religious faith, a fraudulent epistemology with no place whatever in any intellectual debate, especially over matters of public policy, where—despite conservatives who twist it the same way liberals twist the Second Amendment—it is essentially forbidden by the First Amendment.

The other source of anti-abortion sentiment (and that's all it is) is weak or sloppy thinking about what defines a human being, and where human rights come from. Anti-abortion arguments characteristically mistake actualities for unrealized potentials, or they define "human" in a way that (inadvertently, one assumes) confers human rights on fingernail parings or amputated limbs. I once respected Dr. Paul. For me, his signature on that pledge is a matter of sad disappointment, and proof, regrettably, that, despite his credentials as a freedom fighter and physician, the man can't think his way out of a wet paper bag.

On the bright side, we now know what the term "libertarian-leaning conservative" really means. It means a Republican politician who will gladly use libertarians, their principled commitment to individual liberty and the Bill of Rights—and above and beyond all other considerations, their money—as a stepping stone, until they become inconvenient.

Which brings up, in a perverse way, the subject of Congressperson Michelle Bachmann. Nobody, especially after this week, would ever accuse her of being libertarian-leaning, not after she signed another pledge—"The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family," a four-page item (with footnotes) extruded by "prominent Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats"—according to Salon.com, among others, attempting to usurp and redefine the human institution of marriage (which predates Christianity by several thousand years) strictly as fundamentalists prefer to think of it, and adding an interesting terror-twist by inserting Sharia law and the subject of polygamistic Islamic marriage customs into what passes for the "conversation".

Here it is, at [this link]

"But wait," as Ron Popeil used to tell us, "there's more!"

The signatory has to strive for "Humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy—our next generation of American children—from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion and other types of coercion or stolen innocence."

Let's pull on our rubber gloves and gumboots, pick up pitchforks, and rake through this pile of manure a little. First of all, "humane protection of women" is the very thing that "saved" them for so long from getting decent jobs at decent rates, and that the women's movement has been struggling against for years. Moreover, passing laws to achieve this goal is a blatant violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Second, employing a purple phrase like "the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy" when you mean "children" is pure and simple flim-flammery.

Third, while I agree that human trafficking and sexual slavery are vile crimes necessarily involving kidnapping, coercion, and rape— forms of initiated force—for which those who are guilty ought to be taken out back, made to kneel down in a barrow ditch, and shot in the back of the head, they are not equivalent to some other items on that list.

"Seduction into promiscuity" is a good example. If such a law were actually passed, the irrational and predatory way that cops and judges interpret such things these days, every teenage boy in the Western world worth his salt could be locked away until he couldn't get it up any more, and the species would die out. The alternative is to reverse over a century of social progress and individual liberty, declare a Sexual Counter-Revolution, get those kids out of the Volvo, and return "courting" to the parlor, under the baleful glare of Papa and Mama Grundy.

I've heard conservatives claim that the First Amendment was only written to protect political speech, and that it doesn't protect whatever they consider obscene. (The left has effectively removed First Amendment protection from what they call "commercial speech", but that's equally bogus.) Specious arguments like this are exactly like those of liberals who try to weasel-word their way around the Second Amendment. My understanding of the Founding Fathers, especially James Madison who wrote the Bill of Rights, and Thomas Jefferson, whom the Bill of Rights was written to appease, is that, if they had meant the protection to be limited to political speech, they would have said so.

It is not my purpose here to debate the merits or demerits of pornography. It's purely a matter of choice, and it is my absolute and unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make that choice for myself—exactly as it is the choice of those who generally enjoy their work, to create and distribute pornography— without asking anyone else's permission. Any idiotic and naive attempt to "child-proof" the world can only end in tyranny and bloodshed. The decent, rational, Constitutional alternative is to "world-proof" your children.

So here's the big question: why should I support a conservative politician whose demonstrated contempt for the First Amendment is an exact mirror image of the average liberal's contempt for the Second Amendment?

As for prostitution, this country is finally beginning to get a handle, ethically speaking, on "the world's oldest profession" (unless you want to count the Serpent as a politician, which I do, sort of). It disgusts me that anyone—including Michelle Bachmann and the dogwhistle who wrote the pledge she signed—would stoop to deprive some lonely soul of the moment's comfort and satisfaction that it provides.

By the way, A "dogwhistle", in case you're curious, at least according to the weird and wonderful movie Strange Days, is someone whose ass is so tight that when he (or she) farts, only dogs can hear it.

Finally, define "stolen innocence". You mean the way I had to explain to my six-year-old what Bill and Monica were doing to stain her infamous blue dress? You mean the way Republicans (no different from Democrats in this regard) from Warren Harding to Harold Carswell to Dan Crane to Ken Calvert to Robert Packwood to Newt Gingrich, among many, many more, disgraced themselves to a public that had trusted them? Or do you mean what happened to young men who were forced to bleed and die and kill in two unecessary world wars and countless other faraway dungheaps? Or are you talking about something else altogether?

So who does that leave? Last time, Republicans ran what somebody called "an unwrapped mummy". This time, the media are trying to jam a buttoned-down mummy down our throats, Mitt Romney, one of the walking dead who has no ideas that would help get America out of this mess, a notorious betrayer of the Second Amendment, and a proven medical Marxist.

If the Libertarian Party stays true to form, they will labor to bring forth some shabby, weak, timid, compromising, gradualist, faux Republican who will disappear from public view they day after he is nominated.

It's what they do.

It's all they do.

And while Republicans play mumbly-peg with one another and focus on the trivial and irrelevant, instead of the imminent takeover of this country by lunatics and ecofascists who want to reduce the human population by ninety percent, the candidate from Kenya stands in the wings.

Laughing.

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