Paul Gottfried has a new article up at The American Conservative about Republican efforts to deny the Constitution Party ballot access.
I am fully aware of the arguments that local GOP flacks are pulling out on behalf of their party’s Stalinist tactics. It is apparently necessary for all non-leftists to get behind Romney, so that we can oust from office the Evil One, who is denounced daily in the neocon-GOP media. Any other party on the right, Republicans are made to believe, is in league with Bam and should be viewed as an instrument designed to get a leftist president reelected. But (alas) the socially traditional and foreign-war-averse right has absolutely no place to go in this election, unless it can vote for a suitable third party. Neither Romney nor Obama stands for this option. If the GOP presidential candidate represents any right, it is only because media noisemakers tell us he does.
There is nothing Romney has said that would suggest he’s significantly different from Obama on social issues, and there’s plenty to suggest he’d be a lot worse in dealing with our “antidemocratic” enemies worldwide. Do we really want to see the neocons put back in charge of American foreign policy, with a candidate who is offering at best an extension of W’s presidency? These are the points that CP presidential candidate Virgil Goode and his running mate Jim Clymer have been making. And though Goode as a congressman from Virginia voted for the Patriot Act and W’s other war measures, he seems to have developed more gravitas in the intervening time. To Goode’s credit, I haven’t noticed John Bolton or Robert Kagan turning up in his retinue, which can’t be said for Romney.