The Alternative

There are few things as misleading as a raw oyster. For those who haven't had the pleasure of sampling these underwater delicacies, be warned. They look disgusting, like a...giant gray loogie, really. They FEEL disgusting; cold and slimy. However, do not let this put you off. These things taste absolutely amazing. It is difficult to describe how good they taste, other than to say that I highly recommend them.

Anyway. Disappointing news over the last several days as Congressman Ron Paul has announced his intention to begin 'winding down' his presidential campaign. Not that we really expected a dark-horse victory from a libertarian-leaning candidate, but Paul's approaching withdrawal is symbolic of what I consider to be the most worrying trend in American politics: the Republican party's rejection of true conservatism. Rather, they have embraced big-government neo-conservatism that kowtows to the religious right and flouts the Constitution.

Is it any wonder that the eventual Democratic candidate, be it Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, already has a significant advantage over John McCain? I mean, for Christ's sake, this is a guy who says that he would stay in Iraq for the next hundred years. The problem is that the average person thinks that people like McCain and Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are conservatives. It really does give us a bad name.

But that was the whole point of the Ron Paul Revolution. It was the best way to get the word out: there are still many people out there that believe in the Constitution as it was written, the free market as it was intended, and the individual rights of each person. It is unlikely that Congressman Paul will mount a third-party run as many of his supporters have hoped, but even so, the point remains that people do not necessarily have to, as Leo McGarry once so brilliantly put it, "...vote for the lesser of who-cares."