I look with wonderment at Professor Niman’s insights regarding my party (“Those Crazy Republicans,” Artvoice v9n13). Admittedly, I haven’t been altogether happy with them, but in the breadth of his knowledge, the depth and temperance of his thought, he’s set me reeling. Without the will or intellectual discipline to be a hardline lefty, he can only manage the shrillness.

Let’s overlook the fact that JFK hated socialism down to his bones. Let’s forget that Joe McCarthy and George Wallace were democrats. Never mind the Klan and Byrd. It’s only a coincidence that all of the worst shitholes in the country have been decaying under the stranglehold of Democratic organizational politics for generations.

What’s pressing now is that the builders of the superstate, and their Republican accessories, need some kind of opposition, and it’s coming only from conservatives and libertarians. It must’ve driven “progressives” crazy when so many young libs went for Ron Paul in ’08. The cumulative effect of Democratic machine politics and the RINOs is theft of choice in public policy from the voter or Albany insiderism as norm for the whole country.

We’ve been primed for this for a long time. Americans were dragged into the superpower role by Wilson and FDR. The between-the-wars joke was that a right-wing isolationist thought that the world wasn’t good enough for us, and the left-wing isolationist thought we weren’t good enough for the world. Generations of school kids never learned that the Constitution stood between citizen and arbitrary rule, so we were ripe for a president who says that it’s full of “negative rights” preventing government from taking more of a hand in things. Are any of you familiar with Hayek’s warnings about the burgeoning state’s effects on human rights, or Milton Friedman’s eloquent case for human rights and economic rights being inextricably linked? The hated capitalism elevated living standards and rights in countries around the world, while Eurotrash “isms” targeted our individual rights and open systems for obsolescence.

Americans conned by healthcare demagoguery had no idea of the hospital bed space throughout Northern states dedicated to Canadian patients, or how much greater our cancer survival rates are. The Supreme Court of Canada called their system “iniquitous,” saying basically that being on a waiting list doesn’t mean one has healthcare. Europe wanted us to do this and more for decades, to negate as much of our economic advantage as possible. Well, our government in a little over a year has obtained control over close to half of private assets in the country. Professor, wait for a lucid moment, mull that over. How do you feel about America being replaced as economic engine to the world.

Dan Hoffman, Buffalo

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