Electile Dysfunction
by L. Neil Smith
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Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise
Is anybody else out there in Readerland as thoroughly sick and tired of this frigging election year—it feels a lot more like a century, now, doesn't it?—as I am? Does anybody doubt, any more than I do, that it will eventually arrive at some fair, legal, and quite properly democratic conclusion?
"I'm sorry—we are not programmed to respond in that area."
For all of my life—depressingly close to seven decades, now—there has never been any good political news, most particularly coming out of our highly-vaunted electoral system, which, for its entire history, seems to have attracted—and to have unerringly elevated—the very worst among us all, the most stultifyingly dumb-assed, the most terrifyingly insane, and the most bone-chillingly evil mutated specimens that the human species is capable of producing.
Your mileage may vary, but Hitler and his Nazi minions were the merest pikers, alongside this bloody-handed bunch. Richard Nixon was a Muppet, compared to what we've seen lately.
Consider Alexander Hamilton, America's original crony capitalist, who thought of the new nation he'd helped to establish as his own personal piggybank. Think of Grenville Dodge and George Armstrong Custer, consolidating the Lincolnian Empire in the South and expanding it into the West, carving, as Firesign Theater put it, a glorious future out of the American Indian. Remember Madeleine Albright, cheerfully reflecting on deliberately starving half a million Iraqi children to death. Remember Janet Reno talking blithely about having murdered the Branch Davidians.
This election year, they all appear—each of the sixteen or seventeen Republicanoids, half a dozen Democrats and a single, worn-out, threadbare socialist—to have suddenly poured out of a comical little car at the Barnum and Bailey circus. They all beg, each and every one of them, through their obscenely brainless behavior and their ridiculously surrealistic rhetoric, to be outfitted with big red noses, exactly like the characters on Big Comfy Couch.
"Clowns" is the only proper word for this bunch, although "killer clowns" might be more accurate and appropriate.
Unlike a lot of libertarians—unlike Robert LeFevre, for example, and my own daughter—I have never said there was anything inherently wrong with voting (LeFevre used to compare it to pulling a trigger.) It is possible to vote defensively, and remain within principle; any vote against Hillary Clinton, or one of the Bushes, is a good thing. The fact that there is nobody to vote for is a different matter. As Tammany Hall's Boss Tweed put it, "I don't give a damn who does the voting, as long as I get to do the nominating."
I recently saw former Congressman Ron Paul, the sweet, kindly old baby-doctor himself, the one and only politician actually qualified to have run for President in the 21st century, and to occupy the Oval Office, being quoted by one of the lunkheadedest right-wing media, saying that we ought to have a "None of the Above" alternative on every ballot and voting machine, as if that were some kind of new and startlingly revolutionary idea. Of course Ron would never make such an idiotic claim; genuine libertarians have been demanding that choice since their party was founded, forty-odd years ago. But what if real individualists, fed up to gagging with all the 2016 anti-abortion womb-slavery blather, all the Globular Warmuling guilt-mongery, could tell politicians, in effect, "Shut up, you religious cooties! None of you is fit to mow my lawn, let alone run a country!"?
A lot of truly great things begin with saying "What if?".
Just a few short weeks ago, I officially endorsed the colorful software pioneer and billionaire John McAfee as my candidate for President. He's running as a libertarian, and everything I've seen from and about him is admirably principled.
Also, he has that attractive quality of flamboyance that LP candidates have uniformly lacked over four decades. However, it now appears that the libertarian Party is going to have its usual embarrassingly stupid difficulty nominating and running anybody who is actually a libertarian. There are reasons for this, and a cure, which I will be happy to share provided that they pay me enough money. I have done it for free—and been ignored—long enough.
I didn't think so.
Here's a hint: devising a "libertarian tax program" isn't libertarian, any more than a proposed "libertarian Final Solution" would be. True adherence to fundamental principles demands that we strive to abolish all taxes, forever. If it was good enough for Queen Isabella at the tail-end of the 15th century, it oughta be good enough for us.
Taxation is theft.
Taxation is slavery.
Taxation is the fuel of war.
And now, at last, it all boils down to having to choose between an insanely murderous pathological liar, an ancient, out-of-the-closet commie, America's noisiest and flashiest flim-flam man, and a hypocritical religious prig. Do you remember that old Peggy Lee song, Is That All There Is?
It ain't gonna get any better. It can't, not in a society where the former inmates, the pathetically ignorant victims, of the public child-indoctrination system, are permitted—encouraged—to vote. As Robert A. Heinlein put it, vox populi, vox dei usually means "How the hell did we get into this mess?" This unspeakable disaster was the outcome intended from its very beginnings. We could burn the schools down, I suppose, but it's basically too late.
Thus I have reluctantly come to the following decision: in the absence of John McAfee's illustrious name on the November ballot, I suggest that everyone determined to vote take a pen or pencil to the polls, and write in "None of the Above". That's always been my wife's favorite choice. Sure, I know perfectly well that it's a futile gesture—the putrescently corrupt electoral system will not count protest votes unless they're authorized protest votes—but haven't things pretty much been arranged—pardon me, "rigged" so that futility is a feature of voting in general?
If not, point me to a pro-freedom candidate I can vote for.
