WHY I'M DOING
IT
by L. Neil Smith
Special to The Libertarian Enterprise
Over the past few weeks, I've received lots of e-mail about my decision to
accept the Arizona Libertarian Party's presidential nomination, depriving Harry
Browne and his gang in the Watergate office complex of 50-state ballot status. I
was deeply moved that this embattled and heroic collection of individuals in
Arizona would honor me so. The idea of rejecting their nomination not only
wasn't an option, it never even occurred to me.
Some of that e-mail was nasty, a lot of it from what Rush Limbaugh terms
"seminar callers", Watergate partisans pretending to be my loyal
readers, threatening never to read my books again. Some came from those who --
despite 21 highly polemic and widely distributed novels, and hundreds of
speeches and Internet essays -- were curious, concerned, or confused by what I'm
doing.
It's important to know that Harry wasn't going to get 50-state ballot status,
whether I accepted the nomination or not. That was already written and I had
nothing to do with it. The ALP, the most effective state party in the nation,
was fed up with the antilibertarian tactics Harry and his minions have used to
try to bring them under control.
What was the real issue? The same as it always is with that bunch, _somebody
else's money_. They wanted a cut of Arizona's memberships -- as they've taken
from gullible morons in other state LPs -- and the ALP declined with thanks (or
something). The Watergate mob wanted the ALP to participate in a non-binding
primary (a Republican beauty contest at taxpayer expense even Democrats won't
have anything to do with) as a step toward accepting government campaign funds.
Again, the ALP, on characteristically libertarian principle, declined.
So the war was on when a Tucson lawyer and Watergate surrogate waltzed into a
bank and took the ALP's money under false pretenses (eventually he had to give
it back; I can't understand to this day why he isn't disbarred and in jail).
When that didn't work, this creature tried to turn the ALP over to the IRS. Then
he sent his cronies to the state convention with several hundred proxies
obtained from local winos -- proxies the party might have accepted even so,
except that they were turned in too late -- to try and take the party over.
I was the convention's keynote speaker and saw this left-wingish, union-style
meeting-disrupting thuggery. I was also a witness to the tremendous decency and
restraint of the ALP. When this idiot _putsch_ failed, the lawyer launched a
series of specious lawsuits, on whatever pretext he could think of, against the
ALP and its members, with the idea of destroying the ALP so somebody who'd
follow orders could be installed in its place. I wrote about the situation and
he threatened to sue me, demonstrating his regard for the First Amendment.
As a friend of mine remarked, what a litany of ugliness.
At the same convention, I watched the Watergater crowd crucify the party's
most effective candidate for her failure to tug the forelock to a gaggle of
drones and dullards unfit to launder her tennies with their tongues. Like any
Inquisition, they invented a crime to charge her with, found her guilty, and
drove her from the movement, costing us one of the few individuals who actually
knew what she was doing.
Even so, the amazing thing is that, this year, the ALP would have given Harry
the same hearing any candidate would have received, had he offered them
equivalent courtesy. Instead, he stayed home and demanded their nomination as if
by Divine Right, claiming, among other things, that his surprisingly dismal
showing in that non-binding primary (I guess the Tucson lawyer ran him) was
proof he was the legitimate candidate of a state party that refused to
participate in it -- a state party that, by now, had been disaffiliated by the
Watergate, in favor of their Tucson lawyer and his winos, who had been drubbed
ignominiously every time he dragged the ALP into court.
Although the bad guys lost at every turn, their three-year assault on the ALP
had been costly in time, energy, and money. The ALP folk were sick of it. Taking
Harry's 50-state ballot status was the only way they could protest. They'd tried
every other way, and nobody listened, preferring the Algorean sighs and lies
emanating from the Watergate.
So they asked me to be their candidate, instead.
The next question is why did I accept, forever screwing up -- in the lightly
censored words of my more excited correspondents -- their chance at ever doing
anything significant with their lives and at the same time, subjecting their
immortal souls to peril. Harry's 50-state ballot status was going to save
everything, they tell me, although he had it in 1996 and got (my fault again,
and that of _The Libertarian Enterprise_, according to a message from Harry to
somebody else I desperately wish I'd kept) a measly 400,000 votes.
Again, for those with their eyes squeezed shut and their fingers jammed in
their ears: Harry's 50-state ballot status was going to save us all in 2000,
even though he had it in 1996 and did nothing with it.
Yeah, right.
My reasons for accepting the ALP nomination fall into a small number of
categories, although what the Watergate did to my friends in the ALP would have
been reason enough.
The first is a matter of corruption: the well-documented misuse of political
contributions by Harry and his Watergate cronies. I won't reiterate them here,
except to say that less than 2% was spent on campaigning, while two thirds went
into the pockets of the usual suspects as "consulting fees". See back
issues of _The Libertarian Enterprise_ or read the later reports of Jacob
Hornberger (where were you in '96, Bumper?). These abuses were laid before the
delegates to that national convention, which nominated Harry anyway, and that's
when I decided I'd do whatever I could, whenever I could, to set things
straight.
My second reason is the broader failure of principle on the part of Harry and
his underlings, negating any reason for having organized the party in the first
place. Here is a so-called libertarian who has snottily dismissed the
Non-Aggression Principle -- the very heart and soul of political libertarianism,
and an idea I've fought for all of my adult life -- as "an undesirable
litmus test".
Here is a man who refused to my face to endorse the concept of Bill of Rights
Enforcement. Yet if he's not for enforcing the Bill of Rights, the highest law
of the land, then what the hell is he for?
Here is a man, according to a conversation I had with a flunky of his, who
"won't have a gun in his house". While I concede that this is Harry's
right, it's my right to reject a candidate who won't have a gun -- and run the
risk I do of having my door smashed in some night by Kevlar-clad, jackbooted
thugs for the "crime" of exercising my Second Amendment rights. The
flunky's claim that not owning a gun makes Harry a better spokesman for our side
is garbage. Try arguing that being white makes one a better spokesman for
blacks. That's probably why the flunky later denied having had that conversation
with me.
Add to that the shameful fact that the central focus of the '96 campaign
should have been the atrocity at Mount Carmel -- nobody else dared touch it --
but the Watergate pantywaists were afraid it might make them look like somebody
who keeps a rifle in the back window of his pickup -- like so many of my
friends. I was also disgusted at the cowardly way the Watergate disowned the
poor kids in Arizona railroaded by a crooked DA as the "Viper
Militia", and left them to swing in the wind.
Finally, after a lot of battering at my hands as well as those of people like
Rick Tompkins and Vin Suprynowicz, Harry gave the issue some lip service, just
as he was compelled to mention the Second Amendment, and (was it ever painful!)
to renounce matching campaign funds, as well as Republicanoid revenue schemes
like a flat income tax or a national sales tax. His positions on abortion,
Social Security, and national land reform are better left unmentioned.
Which brings me to my third reason. I'm tired of apologizing for, and being
embarrassed by, the Watergate's (and their predecessors') weak and stupid
campaigns. I'm fed up with the LP's nominee never getting more than 900,000
votes, and their conclusion always being that we must make the next campaign
even more flaccid and cowardly. I've had enough -- 30 years of enough -- of the
Watergate's (and their predecessors') inability and unwillingness to mount a
tough, effective, principled, uniquely libertarian campaign.
I've tried. I've talked to individuals, made speeches, written essays and
books. Principle, and the electoral success it guarantees, is dead inside the
Watergate party. I ran for office in 1978 on principle and got wonderful
results, only to see them alibied away by dimwitted party functionaries who
couldn't get themselves elected as cesspool cleaners. This -- accepting the ALP
nomination -- is the only argument I have left.
I'm human enough to have a few personal reasons, too. Like the way one of the
Watergate's Internet orcs tried to smear me as a right-wing crazy because I live
in the same state as Focus on the Family -- some 150 miles away. Another is the
way the Watergate's Minister of Truth told people who wanted me to appear at
their state convention that I'm unfit to speak to any libertarian audience. I
wonder if he thinks it was worth it now.
Yet another is the way Harry's primary mouthpiece (or the real brains behind
him) tried to counter my ideas by publicly belittling my trade as a science
fiction writer, as if that made me, _prima facie_, some kind of lunatic. Yet if
this movement was founded on any one thing, it was the science fiction of Ayn
Rand, Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, and others. It's the only literature of
ideas left. Of course there's no room for ideas at the Watergate any more and
hasn't been for a long while. They get in the way of fundraising.
But those are personal reasons, as I said, and you're welcome to think me
petty for having them. Just remember that there are other reasons, too.
Since accepting the ALP nomination, I've been bitterly criticized for my
"lack of loyalty" to the party. I'll remind you that party loyalty,
especially in the face of the corruption and incompetence that characterize its
leadership today, is _collectivism_, the very thing we're all supposed to be
against. That crap is for Republicans and Democrats, for socialists and
fascists, for cretins and villains, not libertarians.
I am and always have been loyal (embarrassingly so for some people) to the
_ideas_ that gave birth to the LP in the first place, ideas to which the current
leadership is as alien as if they'd just landed in a flying saucer.
That's why the Watergate's claim that the _party_ is on the ballot in all 50
states is pure Clintonian excrement. Its more principled _opponents_, those they
disaffiliated, are on the ballot. Likewise, it can take its ludicrous advice to
Arizonans to vote for me (while pathetically pretending not to understand why
all this is happening) -- in order to add whatever numbers I get to theirs --
and shove it.
Let me make this as clear as possible: the Watergate is in no way on the
ballot in all 50 states, because it is not on the ballot in Arizona -- not on
its own and not through an affiliate. It failed to get its candidate on, even as
an independent. The Watergaters are, once again, simply, grotesquely, lying.
I swear it's some kind of disease; they're as bad with other people's votes
as they are with other people's money (I wonder what Latin for "sticky
fingers" is). I will not concede a single vote in Arizona to anybody but
the people of the ALP who made it possible. On the contrary, any vote I win will
be _against_ the Watergate and the pack of fools and charlatans who infest it.
Now let's talk about some real issues ...
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