This is going to become my stock libertarian photo.  Hey, it’s better than Bob Barr!

As I have mentioned on my blog previously (see here), I was a victim of backstabbing by a college arm of the Democratic Party.  I don’t know the exact reasons, but judging from the little bit I do know, I have always felt that I was targeted for my refusal to blindly submit to the party.  For God’s sake, as far as Dems go, I’m Team Kucinich all the way.  (Btdubs, the only way I’d vote for Ron Paul is if it were a Kucinich-Paul [or, sigh, even Paul-Kucinich] ticket.)

I have never really meshed up with the Democrats on a lot of issues.  I could enumerate them at length here, but if you’ve been reading my blog, then you’re really well aware of my political beliefs.  (Although perhaps I should post an “in a nutshell” list.  Maybe another day.)  Given that I held a position that was a clusterfuck, did a great deal of work, cleaning up messes, and putting out fires for the president of the organization, and also doubled to tripled membership, I thought I was a shoe-in for the position of president.  As it turned out, there was a drawn out, concerted effort to oust me and destroy any of my credibility whatsoever within that group.  The position went to another woman (one whose political positions and opinions were not terribly well known before she was handed the position) and I essentially washed my hands of the organization.

For the past year and a half, I’ve just always dismissed that incident as something that one particularly scummy friend and several scummy acquaintances had cooked up together; I always chalked up to a one-time thing, and used it as a learning opportunity to realize that I wasn’t cut out for major party politics.  Politically, I began to map out my own path, really think about how I felt on various issues, read more, etc., before deciding to slap on some Docs and let loose with some feminist rage within the Libertarian Party.

However, this all changed within the past few days.  A friend of mine (whom I’ve referenced before) was running the LGBT group on campus.  He, for a lot of reasons, recently broke with the DNC.  His reasons for this break are irrelevant.  He remained a dedicated LGBT activist; as a gay man, it’s not shocking that he would still be active in the community and in its activism circles.  The problem is that he was beginning to criticize the God-King’s Administration.

I think we see where this is going.

The problem with the major party system is that there is such a huge fear that someone who has rejected it might actually make some headway.  No, scratch that.  Democrats in my state (Pennsylvania) worked to keep Carl Romanelli (Green) off the ballot during the 2006 Senatorial race.  (Mr. Romanelli was later fined $80,000 to reimburse Democrats who had challenged petitions. Or, if you’re third party, you know the real reason he was fined: because he had the fucking audacity to run for public office.  What an asshole!)  They claimed he would siphon votes from Bob Casey Jr. and would be a huge threat to the Democratic Party ticket.  Given that third party candidates rarely, if ever, get enough of the vote to actually make a difference in an election (and there has been speculation as to whether third party voters would even bother voting in elections that were limited to only Democratic and Republican candidates), it seems to me that there is one logical conclusion.

Really?  Do I need to spell it out for you?

Okay, fine: the obvious conclusion is that major parties simply want to throw anyone off the ballot as a means of asserting their own power and maintaining the status quo.

Now, I’m guessing you can probably see the connections here between state and national level politics, and the political bullshit that goes on in a student group at a third rate state university.  These various individuals who want to make their big splash in politics after they complete their worthless Political Science degrees look at college not only as a place where many of us learned to take wicked bong rips, or do kegstands, or the miracle of Plan B, but also as their first introduction to making alliances, building your following, and squashing dissidence the first time it rears its ugly head.

And you wonder why libertarians hate the system and hate the state so much.  Neither of the major parties care about your rights or your freedoms, and if you can’t see that, the you probably wonder why libertarians are such confrontational assholes.  If given the choice, I’d much rather be the confrontational asshole who tries to promote an alternate perspective over allowing former friends and “colleagues” the ability to use non-partisan organizations as thinly veiled shills for major party politics.

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If you’re reading this from my Facebook notes, please go to the original blog post (located here) to comment.

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