Break out the fiddle...

Today, the raging fire that will eventually burn America to the ground has officially been sparked off. There were so many people who knew exactly what was going on, that it wasn't even funny. Sadly, in a nation of a few hundred million people, we represent a minority.

We are known by many names. "Moonbats", "Paulbots", "Tin-Foil Hatters", "Nutjobs", "America-haters", and the list goes on and on.

We're called these names by the sheep that simply couldn't wake up and smell the shitstorm that is brewing all around us. We're the ones who hated Bush's policies and Obama's policies equally. We're the ones who still opposed the wars in 2010, just as we did in 2004. We're the crazy guys who eat organic food, know that flouridated water is toxic, and know how to start a camp fire in hurricane-force winds. We're those "crazy" people who stockpiled bullets, beans, and band-aids.

They all laughed when we spoke of media blackouts across the country, regarding Dr. Ron Paul's huge following during the last election. During this election, some of them started noticing.

A huge grass-roots uprising took place in American politics over the past six months. Throughout each and every state primary, massive evidence of fraud and "vote count manipulation" was seen by anyone bothering to pay attention, yet somehow slipped through both the state and federal election officials who are supposed to be fighting this sort of thing.

Today, in Tampa, we saw several changes to official RNC rules that were specifically designed to ensure that Dr. Paul would lose to Mitt Romney. The RNC pushed through a change of the date historically known to be for the official nominating vote. The RNC sued to block several Paul delegates from being recognized by the RNC in accordance with its pre-established rules, taking away delegate plurality in several states. The RNC changed rules regarding a "guaranteed" speaking slot, requiring more plurality-state victories than would have been necessary, resulting in Dr. Paul being forced to either capitulate to a pre-vetted pro-Romney speech and endorsement or being denied a chance to speak at the convention. Paul, of course, would have none of it. While several of these rules were being voted on by the rules committee (in votes requiring a 75% majority of present committee members), a bus transporting pro-Paul committee members was re-routed for over 46 minutes in a loop around Tampa by RNC officials so they could not be present during the vote.

So, here's my take on it. Even if state and/or federal elections officials get involved to investigate the obvious fraud, it will more than likely be whitewashed into oblivion by the same people who perpetrated it in the first place. If these people can rig election laws in their favor (and for that matter, even the elections themselves) at a party primary or convention level, it should stand to reason that they can do it in a general election as well.

The fact of the matter remains, of course, that both Romney and Obama have been bought by the very same campaign contributors. They are both members of the party of the bankers, war profiteers, and the politically corrupt.

After the first few debates, I held little hope that Dr. Paul would ever secure a political victory. The prison industry, the military industry, the pharmaceutical/medical industry, the oil industry, and the financial industry simply wouldn't allow it. These five sectors of our government have combined with private corporations, and they are all in collusion.

Prison/LE lobbies (both private and public sector) spend a ridiculous amount of money ensuring that we are the most imprisoned nation on earth, incarcerating more people per-capita and in sheer numbers than any other nation on this planet. The military industry leads us to wars around the globe, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the conflicts. The pharmaceutical industry keeps ups prisoners within our own bodies and minds, and the banking industry does nothing but sit back and look for new ways to skim its cut off the top when taxpayers end up footing the bill for all of the wonderful new ideas the other industries have to offer.

Romney and Obama share almost identical views on damned near every issue of importance, and refer to these ideas as "American values". Dr. Paul saw the situation for what it was and still is, and did his best to wake everyone up. In that respect, he's already won. It is not his presidency, but rather, his actions backing up his rhetoric, that got people to open their eyes. He said the things that would make a great many "sheeple" think he was totally unhinged...and yet, he had an impressive voting record spanning a few decades, that flew in the face of his detractors.

He's been called damned near every detractive name in the book, but the worst dirt anyone could dig up on him was the racist ramblings that someone else wrote in a newsletter that bore his name. What they hated about him, of course, was exactly that. They couldn't dig up any real dirt about him. He always took the high road in everything he did. He voted against things that went against his conscience, as an American, as a freedom-lover, and as a human being.

Above and beyond all else, he got a great many otherwise "average" Americans talking about a great many very important issues that no one else was willing to discuss. Strangely, this led a lot of his former supporters to the point of abandoning the political system altogether in favor of "anarchy", "voluntaryism", "agorism", or whatever other name you wanted to give it...but, for lack of a better description, it was an abandonment of government after seeing what it was.

I am one of these people. Back in high school, I was an anarchist of a "fuck you, don't tell me what to do!" type. A short time after that, I discovered Dr. Paul. Bear in mind, I'm 33 years old, so the internet wasn't something readily available to me at the time. I used it at school, and occasionally at home, but the internet of 1999 is nothing of what the internet of today happens to be. It took me a great while to discover the works of Thomas Paine, Lysander Spooner, and so many other great minds who wrote about the idea of freedom.

Today, I consider myself a firm believer in the non-aggression principle, because the idea of freedom cannot be boiled down any simpler than that...or, it can't be, from what I've seen in the past several years. I do my best to live by such a philosophy.

As such, the only reason I have bothered to vote in the past few elections have been to see Dr. Paul get re-elected to his office as congressman and to attempt to see him become president. I didn't do this for the reason of thinking that he had some great plan to make government start doing things "the right way". I voted for him, and supported him, because I knew some of his first actions would be dismantling a lot of government programs I disagree with.

Sadly, a lot of people see the action of government as the only "legitimate" way of getting things accomplished. Personally, I see simply ignoring the actions of government as a far more effective and legitimate method of doing things. Unfortunately, a lot of people will agree with me that a particular piece of legislation has no business being "on the books", let alone be responsible for the arrest and/or imprisonment of a person...but refuse to act upon this belief, because it is still considered "illegal". This would change, however, if they were to live in an era where a man in the executive office were to actively nullify or veto legislation disallowing the offensive acts of government. Essentially, it would be as if government were rotting itself from the inside out.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, the game is completely rigged to a degree many of us had never even come close to imagining. Most of us knew there were powerful people at work. We just had no clue they'd have the balls (or the ability) to do it right in front of everyone's noses.

Now here comes the dilemma for people like me. Do we give a write-in for Ron Paul? Do we shift our vote and throw it to Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party? Do we sit on our asses and eat cheetos, drink beer, and watch South Park reruns?

When I was a kid, MTV told me to "rock the vote". Today, I mock the vote. A write-in for Dr. Paul is as pointless as a vote for Gary Johnson, Mickey Mouse, or Gary Coleman. I hate to sound like a "conspiracy theorist", but if the Powers That Be are going to blatantly and publicly rob a legitimate candidate of the nomination of his party, what's going to stop them from robbing an election from anyone else? Furthermore, if there are enough sheep in this country that are willing to NOT raise holy hell because they won't turn off the television long enough to see that something improper is going on, what's to stop them from legitimately voting for the scumbag who stole the nomination?

For this reason, I've given up all hope for America. I'll sit back quietly and watch it burn. Where's my fiddle?