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  • As the Miller told his tale

    As the Miller told his tale


    http://knappster.blogspot.com/2006/0...-his-tale.html
    http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...6706#post16706
    http://christian-identity.net/forum/...6706#post16706


    Interesting situation here in Missouri. Keith's laid out some of the details, but I've been following things myself. Some thoughts:

    For more than 100 years, American political parties picked their own candidates -- and they picked them using whatever methods they wanted to use. Matter of fact, the government didn't even print election ballots: When you voted, you either wrote your own ballot or, if you wanted to vote "straight ticket," took one printed by one of the parties. There were no "ballot access" laws. There were no laws to force parties to let non-members run for office on their tickets, or to let non-members decide who would run on their tickets.

    That's the way it ought to be -- and the way it would still be if the Democratic and Republican parties hadn't had the pants scared off of them by various third parties and decided to "protect the public" from having real choices with ballot access laws that, in some states, are more restrictive than Iran's.

    Anyway, in 1992, the Libertarian Party made it over those hurdles in Missouri and, ever since, has been an "established" political party with "automatic" ballot access. Since that time, our understanding of the ballot access laws has been that anyone can run for the Libertarian Party's nomination to any office in a "public" primary, and that we have to accept them, and to accept the primary's results. Thus, we've had real libertarians run (sometimes expensive, and sometimes losing) primary campaigns to keep assorted racist morons, convicted violent criminals, etc., off our ballot line.

    Last week, we found out that we were apparently wrong: The Democratic Party returned the filing fee paid by the candidate mentioned above, and said they weren't interested in having him on their ballot line. After that it gets a little fuzzy, but it looks like the GOP did the same thing. So, he's filed to contest the Libertarian Party's primary ... and tonight, the state executive committee will take up the matter.

    If the Democrats' interpretation of the law is correct, then we've wasted time and money in the past, and I'm glad to see that we have the option of no longer doing so. Glenn Miller is obviously not a partisan Libertarian -- he's apparently tried to file for office twice in the last week on other parties' tickets, and he maintains a web site for yet another party of his own. He's just making up his partisan affiliation as he goes along, and neither the parties involved, nor the public, are well-served by enabling his fictionalization of that affiliation -- only he is, and it's not our job to feed his appetite for self-aggrandizement at everyone else's expense.

    If Miller wants to run for Congress, he's free to do so. Let his "White Patriot Party," or himself as an individual, meet the (admittedly bogus) ballot access laws (by gathering signatures) just like everyone else, instead of trying to hijack the efforts, and the ballot lines, of others who want nothing to do with him.



    SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2006

    UncleTom Jewdass Knapp

  • #2
    But seriously, folks . . . What in jewdass Knapp's pea-LibberToon brain makes for a "serious" candidate, cum-cum, cum-cum!!!

    But seriously, folks

    What in jewdass Knapp's pea-LibberToon brain makes for a "serious" candidate, cum-cum, cum-cum!!!


    http://knappster.blogspot.com/2006/0...sly-folks.html
    http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...6709#post16709
    http://christian-identity.net/forum/...6709#post16709

    I love it when one of the guys over at Hit and Run links to something I've written -- traffic goes through the roof, and so does useful input.

    Among the useful inputs this time were some comments that made it clear I need to discuss the concept of the "serious candidate" in the context of Libertarian Party campaigns.

    There are, of course, different kinds of "candidate seriousness." For example, candidates who wear suits, chew with their mouths closed at press luncheons, and speak in complete sentences versus candidates who wear red contact lenses, rave about the Federal Reserve being run by alien robots, and deliver a credible impression of Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

    That's not the kind of seriousness I'm worried about, because I think most of us recognize the distinction and act as best we can to promote the one versus the other (for example, I now eschew running for office myself, because there's just no getting around the fact that I'm weird -- I work the back office, where I can be useful, instead now).

    When I talk about "serious" candidates, I'm referring to a distinction between candidates who run real campaigns and candidates do not.

    Most Libertarian Parties around the US run a lot of "paper" candidates -- people who are willing to pay the filing fee and perhaps do a candidate interview/forum or two, but who have no intention of letting their lives revolve around politics 24/7 for months on end. I don't have anything against "paper" candidates, and they can be useful in some ways (making it look like the Libertarians are running a "full slate," conditioning voters to seeing Libertarian candidates on their ballots, etc.). However, "paper" candidacies are never going to deliver serious numbers of elected Libertarians, or even move us toward that goal.

    A "serious" candidate may or may not be running in a winnable race, but he or she is running in a race where it seems possible to accomplish something worthwhile -- preserve the party's ballot access, bring voter pressure on one or both "major" party candidates to move in a libertarian direction on one or more issues, or whatever.

    A "serious" candidate is willing to set goals, figure out what it will take to possibly accomplish those goals, and do those things.

    In other words, a "serious" candidate is willing to knock on doors, shake hands at the county fair, ask for votes, recruit and utilize volunteers, raise funds, advertise, make himself or herself very accessible to the media (they work on their terms, not ours), communicate politely with interest groups, complete and return questionnaires, and generally "run to win" whether it is possible to win or not.

    A serious candidate may or may not run "full-time" -- taking a sabbatical from the day job or whatever -- but he or she will evaluate the time commitment required to achieve the campaign's goals, make that commitment and deliver on it.

    Not every "serious" candidate will be a winning candidate ... but few, if any, "non-serious" candidates will be.

    For my "laboratory precincts" proposal (see link above), "serious" candidates are required. A "paper" candidate, by definition, is someone who won't be walking precincts, showing up at supporter coffees, or working the polling place on Election Day. I'm interested in what it takes to make the transition from "serious" candidate to "winning" candidate on the Libertarian ballot line; that transition is a transition, and the "laboratory precincts" experiment is intended to help map the route.



    WEDNESDAY, MARCH 08, 2006

    UncleTom Jewdass Knapp

    Comment


    • #3
      Another side of seriousness OR -- Why jewdass Knapp & Professional LibberToons get to decide who to run and not the voters, cum-cum, cum-cum!!!

      Another side of seriousness

      OR -- Why jewdass Knapp & Professional LibberToons get to decide who to run and not the voters, cum-cum, cum-cum!!!



      http://knappster.blogspot.com/2006/0...usness_16.html
      http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...3593#post13593
      http://christian-identity.net/forum/...3590#post13590


      In my last article on realpolitik, I defined "serious" candidates along the axis of activity and effort rather than character and presentation. At that time, I declined to discuss the weirdo/nutjob factor, figuring that a good showcase opportunity would come along soon enough. It was a short wait.

      On this side of seriousness, there are several factors to look at:

      - If someone wants to represent a political party as its candidate, it only makes sense that he or she (I'll use "he" from here on out to refer to candidates of both genders) should know what that party stands for -- and that that party should look at prospective candidates for agreement with the party's agenda, at least on broad principles and major policy items.

      - If someone wants to represent a political party as its candidate, it only makes sense that he should bring things to the campaign that are advantageous to himself and to the party -- that make him an attractive candidate to the voters and an asset to the party he's chosen to affiliate with. It also makes sense that the party should look at prospective candidates and judge whether or not they reflect the image that the party wants to project.

      While I find the "white nationalism" of Glenn Miller extremely disagreeable, I didn't really have to reach that issue to conclude that he was not the kind of candidate the Missouri Libertarian Party wanted on its ballot:

      - He had no idea of what the party stands for. The best he could come up with by way of description, prior to attempting to hijack our ballot line, was that we have an "anything goes" platform, which he interpreted as meaning that we should welcome him with open arms if we weren't hypocrites. It wouldn't have been difficult for him to hit Google and find out what L/libertarians believe in, but he apparently couldn't be bothered to do so.

      - He had no idea that the image he wants to project is wildly incompatible with the image that we want to project. The nutshell version that finally seemed to get through to him was when I pointed out that he was running on an "anti-Jewish" platform ... and that he was attempting to do so on the ticket of the party whose 1972 vice-presidential candidate, Toni Nathan, was the first Jew (and the first woman) to receive an electoral vote in a US presidential election.

      - He seemed to have no idea that, as a candidate, he offers the party no advantage. Nor, for that matter, did he seem to care -- he comes off as nothing more or less than a political welfare queen who thinks that it's our job to provide him with something he'd otherwise have to work to get for himself.

      For someone whose entire philosophy is based on the hypothesis that mutually exclusive "racial" groups exist and are locked in eternal struggle with each other for control of earth, Miller seems to have a really hard time grokking the notion that mutually exclusive political groups also exist, that they too are locked in struggle against each other, and that his enemies don't owe him the use of their resources to their own disadvantage.

      There is, of course, the weirdo/nutjob factor, which shouldn't be minimized. Miller is bizarre in terms of both ideas and behavior. If you want to see how bizarre (and if you have a strong stomach), check out his online hangouts: His campaign site, the site of his "party" [link defunct](since he has one of his own, what need does he have to hijack ours?), or the forum he posts frequently on (I participate in threads here and here if you're interested in libertarian v. "white nationalist" cage matches and such).

      My summary judgment of Mr. Miller is that Libertarians are very fortunate to have him shilling for other ideas rather than for ours, and that we would have been stump-stupid to acquiesce in his attempt to adopt our ballot line as a flag of convenience. Of course, he is not the first enemy of liberty to attempt that, nor will he be the last.

      The Libertarian Party is in a very dangerous phase of its existence: Large enough to present a juicy target for hijackers, small enough that it sometimes has difficulty defending itself against them. Fortunately, Mr. Miller's competence doesn't rise to the level of his ambition, and fending him off has not been, and is not likely to become, a difficult task ... but there will be others like him. Some of them will be smoother. Some of them will be smarter. Our best defense against them is to become more successful, more quickly, and even that doesn't confer any kind of real "immunity" (ask the Republicans about David Duke, who was elected to Louisiana's state legislature on their ticket, ran for Senate on their ticket and, last time I heard, still served as a GOP committeeman). Eternal vigilance, as Jefferson said, is the price of liberty.



      THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 2006

      UncleTom Jewdass Knapp

      Comment


      • #4



        http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...866#post138566
        http://christian-identity.net/forum/...3866#post13866



        UncleTom Jewdass Knapp

        Comment

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