Skousen: An Independent Challenge Without Ron Paul?

World Affairs Brief, February 15, 2008. Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief

AN INDEPENDENT CHALLENGE WITHOUT RON PAUL?

One thing we have learned from the current primary campaign is just how manipulable the American voter is by a media onslaught for or against various candidates. The slick campaign to eliminate Romney from the campaign, using Huckabee as the spoiler, was very revealing. So was the extreme media bias against Ron Paul. There just aren’t enough thinking people among voters to amass any more support for a principled, Constitution-based platform than 5-10%. That doesn’t bode well for a third party or independent run. The mainstream media will deny any meaningful news coverage to third parties–unless it’s one of “their” third party spoilers like Ross Perot, who collaborated with the PTB in order to get the Clintons installed in the White House. Only in those cases do they get lots of coverage and are allowed into the debates.

Without substantive media attention, within our “winner-take-all” system, a third party/independent run for the presidency is not capable of winning the election outright–though it can act as a spoiler for one party or the other. However, as I just pointed out, the PTB get their way with either the Democrat or Republican–they just get it done in a different order and slightly different time frame.

In any case, no third party or independent candidacy is going anywhere unless all the disparate parties and forces agree on supporting a single candidate–and that person is Ron Paul. He is the only candidate capable of attracting partisans across the principled political spectrum of constitutional conservatives, independents and many anti-war Democrats as well. Almost all of the small third parties would be willing to join forces if Ron Paul were the standard bearer. Such a unified coalition has not been possible in the past hundred years. Only Ron Paul is capable of engendering the necessary trust to put together this large a coalition. He says this movement is not about him, but it is, in one significant way: A proper ideology is absolutely essential, but it has to have a human being to be its champion and get elected to office. Ideas don’t get elected on their own without a person the people can rally around. No one else has the elected track record of Ron Paul. No one else has his absolute reputation for trust.

The only problem is that Paul has announced that he will not run as a third party or independent candidate–that he is staying loyal to the Republican party. He has done this not because he really thinks highly of the Republican party (that has betrayed him constantly), but simply because running as a Republican has been the only way in which he has ever won anything. He would never have won his seat in Congress as a libertarian. Only by running as a mainstream candidate do you accrue the number of unthinking voters that is necessary to win. Not only is Ron running for President but he is running concurrently for his seat in Congress as a Republican. So he is not free to switch parties without ceding the Congressional race to the other liberal Republicans who are challenging Paul in the Republican primary in his Texas district.

The ultimate question for Ron Paul is this: Is staying within the Republican’s going to continue to yield any significant benefits in terms of building the movement? It’s a tough question. He believes it will. Most of Paul’s supporters couldn’t care less about Paul staying in the Republican party–which they correctly view as part of the problem. However Ron sincerely believes he can continue to grow the movement staying in the GOP and by retaining his seat in Congress.

Certainly this year’s record run for the Presidency bears that out. Paul never would have got even a fraction of the media and debate time had he not run in the Republican primary. Even though the media purposely denied him equal coverage and equal time in the debates, still his message did get out there–with a lot of help from his supporters. Ron’s message failed to catch on in large numbers because too many voters are unthinking, taking their cues from talking heads who dismiss Paul as irrelevant, and too complacent with the status quo to feel the severity of the crisis we face. The PTB are intent on keeping people complacent, and marginalizing those that aren’t.

Has Ron’s advantage running with the Republican’s run its course? Yes and no. I don’t think he will have any more effect back in Congress than before–which was minimal. Admittedly, it has been great to have him there. He has been our watchdog on everything the Congress did wrong. He has been the conscience of the Congress for decades but, like Jiminy Cricket of Pinnochio fame, Congress isn’t listening. Ron isn’t getting any younger either but he is in good health and could still fight on for many years–at least in Congress–but probably not as president where he is quickly reaching that age limit where few would consider him a viable candidate because of age. That is why many of us felt this election was our last and best chance.

There is still, however, the possibility that some crisis may get out of hand and the PTB could come out looking very bad. From his position as a Republican member of Congress and a former Presidential candidate, his voice would have the best chance of being heard. Future crises that surely must come are what Ron Paul is hoping will give him yet another chance either before the convention, or in the next four years.

The PTB are experts at making sure dissidents don’t get the chance to build on some crisis. That is why defacto control of the media is so important. Some have hypothesized that the current economic crisis could bring this nation to its knees and finally cause people to wake up, and reject establishment fiat money policies. It could, but even then history gives us little hope that people can resist the false saviors that present themselves in a crisis to divert us from a proper solution.

For example, in 1992 the entire Italian establishment political structure was voted out of office in the famous scandal over bribery and corruption. It was discovered that all political parties were engaged in systematic kickbacks on government contracts from big corporations and the Mafia. All of those political parties reformed within six months and were back in business with new names and new faces–and the very same powerful forces were still controlling Italian politics. A similar charade deceived the whole world with the deceptive “fall of the Soviet Union.” The Communists simply went underground and created their own “reformed” communist parties with false anti-communist leaders both in Russia and in former satellite countries. Even Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Movement in Poland was a front controlled by the Communists. The whole world bought into this grand deception but Communism never died. They simply learned to do what Western globalists did–use puppets to front as conservatives and agents of change.

As bad as things are looking economically, I don’t believe the PTB will allow it to get so bad that they lose control. But if it does and the public threatens to throw the rascals out, I believe you will see the PTB engineer a false reform with fresh faces just like the Italians and the Soviets did. They’ll never let a real change agent like Paul take the lead, any more than they will ever let the real critics of the 9/11 conspiracy have a role in any new investigations.

The system is rigged in a very multi-layered and sophisticated way and it takes a great deal of expertise to see through it. But, with it all, we must keep trying to position the movement to take advantage of any faults and mistakes the powers that be might make as they conspire to take down liberty. Each succeeding conspiracy, whether it be the JFK assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, or 9/11, brings more people to greater understanding–never enough, sadly, to reverse our course, but certainly enough to constitute a worrisome resistance to those intent upon delivering us to a NWO. Building a remnant is always worth fighting for, even if we can’t save our nation temporally.