Could you give one good reason to vote for Romney without using the word "Obama"? (I didn't think so)
I voted for Johnson. I don't like his position on abortion, but I agree with most everything else -- but the main reason I voted for him was to help him try to get 5% of the vote (an impossible task with the barriers the D's and R's and the media have put up) so the Libertarian Party will be guaranteed access to ballots next cycle.
I'm not responsible for your vote, or anybody else's, and I resent the notion that Romney was *entitled* to my vote because I registered as a R (to participate in the delegate process.) And if that really were the case, they should have run Ron Paul and then you and all the other crybabies would be obligated to vote for him.
This, a billion freaking times.
Well, the fact remains that he did just that,
wait ROMNEY did all that? how? was romney running the convention? party?
yet again it becomes clear how a revolution dies aborning
If you need me to explain to you that "he", in this context, includes his organization (especially when he himself clearly benefited from it via the silencing of voices with different points of view, and he himself said NOTHING about the underhanded acts involved in preventing Paul's earned delegates from participating), then I'm not sure there's a whole lot of point in continuing to spar with you, because you'll just continue to misconstrue everything I post. If I want to continue tilting at windmills, there are much better targets out there than you. Besides, my donkey's getting a little tired, and wants a break.
So. Ron Paul supporters are butt hurt that they didn't get the attention they think they deserved and in turn helped give the election to Obama. Hmm. Like I have said to numerous third party supporters in the past, "it ain't gonna happen all at once and all during a presidential election". Not. A. Chance. Now I support a creation of a third party. But you have to start local and build it. That will take years if not decades. This election was "get Obama and his ilk as far the *expletive deleted* away from DC as possible. Thanks for the help.
Nope. ROMNEY (and his campaign and his party, to head off CSD's next objection) failed to act in a manner to attract a voting bloc which might have helped put him over the top, and in fact deliberately acted to alienate them by insulting that bloc and keeping them from having their earned place and voice "within the system". HE failed, and thus handed the election to Obama.
Saying that RP supporters and libertarians gave it to Obama puts the blame in the wrong place. Romney failed to EARN our votes, so he didn't GET them. It's a simple notion, and one which has been stated repeatedly before. I'm pretty sure that Paul's supporters would have been just fine with not being insulted by "the establishment" for months, with having the delegates they EARNED seated at the table during the convention (knowing that those few delegates would not have resulted in Paul's winning the primary) - without those insults, I'd wager that a lot of them would not have "defected" to either write-in votes for Paul or to the Libertarian Party. That a lot of them would have then answered Romney's desperate pleas for their votes. Once again, the failure here is not on the part of RP and libertarian supporters. It's Romney's and the Republican Party's. If they can't learn from their failures, then perhaps the Republican Party needs to die and make room for someone else.
Oh, and "building" a third party? The LP's been around since 19-freakin'-71 - it wasn't exactly born yesterday. It's the largest third party we have, and has elected hundreds of lower-level candidates over the last 4 decades. When are they "entitled" to choose to run for national office, anyways?
Perhaps if the two wings of our Modern American Political Machine weren't so afraid of being supplanted that they rigged the system against anyone daring to try to offer another viewpoint by preventing them from participating in the process (making them fight to get on the ballots, locking them out of debates, and so forth), and followed that up with spurious ballot-access challenges to make the LP spend even more of their comparatively-meager resources on nonsense rather than on getting the word on their position out to the public, they might actually be able to get the attention they deserve. It's not that they are not or have not been working for it, for the past 40 years.
Though more and more, I'm thinking that Ron (upthread here, not Ron Paul) has the right of it.
The only way to get elected president in the USA these days is forsake liberty and embrace some form of statism.
It is what the people demand.
Which is an awfully depressing notion.
