🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 29 Oct 1996 21:35:19 -0500 Ray Fournier
<r_fournier@conknet.com> wrote in az.general:
 
  > To all the libertarians, Perot supporters and all other
  > supporters of honorable well intentioned candidates, come on 
  > over and join us at the  republican tent.   . . .

Quoting from several messages I've posted to the FidoNet International
DEBATE Echo Conference:

Why elect a pale shadow when we already have the better liar sitting
in the White House?  If you truly want to register your protest vote,
this is a good year to vote for a minor party candidate.  It's the
only way Republicans have for, to borrow a term much in use lately,
sending a message to the party that the likes of Dole won't do.

Frankly, it is more important that Dole be defeated than that Clinton
win.  And if one really wants to register that disgust with Dole while
affirming one's position, one should vote for Harry Browne.  Since we
appear to be in a message-sending mode these days, that would be the
best way of sending the Republican party a message.  It will also help
expose the vacuity of the religious right's claim that it  represents
the Republican party.  Why shucky darn, that'll be two of their
anti-abortion boys down in flames in two national elections.  Maybe
they'll go back to playing like Elmer Gantry.

Curiously (or, perhaps, not so curiously), many of those self same
Republicans who claim to want to return authority to the states
continue to support the increase of federal power over an ever growing
list of crimes, especially expanding those punishable by the death
penalty; they continue to support federal intrusion in a woman's right
to decide for herself whether or not to have an abortion (their
fondness for the 10th Amendment evaporates when they discuss abortion
-- eg., even on their own terms there is no rationale why "killing
children" should be a federal rather than a state crime); they
continue to support the federal power to censor (the CDA for example).

In fact the Republican claim to support the return of power to the
states is little more than a mask for restricting federal government
action in areas of their own preference while at the same time
improperly supporting the expansion of federal power over the states
in areas they want restricted irrespective of whether that restriction
properly belongs at the federal, state, or local level.  In sum these
self-same Republicans have no principled position whatsoever.  The
good news is that Bob Dole will lose in no small part because the
voters sense this hypocrisy, the bad news is, of course, that Clinton
will be reelected.

 -={lsg}=-