Constitution Party Nominating Convention, Scottsdale, AZ
Mr. Chairman, and everyone watching and listening today, we stand at the gateway of a new beginning for America. For now is the time we can finally break free of the shackles that have held this country in bondage for 11 score and 12 years, ever since she was rudely born on a piece of parchment in Philadelphia. Now is the time we may finally fulfill our constitutional duty and elect an actual President of these United States.
It is a time for awe, and a time for keeping it real.
Let me tell you a little something about myself. I'm 46, been married three times, have a long history of drug use, a checkered job history, no political or other accomplishments to speak of, and I'm one mortgage payment away from living in a VAN by the side of the river.
Other candidates may say that this election is about you, not them, but with me, you know it is about you, it can only be about you, because I am, let's face it, really just like you.
Can you say the same thing about my worthy opponents?
They say John McCain was a prisoner of war for six years and a congressman for 35. You would have thought he would have learned his lesson about being a captive to special interests the first time.
The wonderful media calls him an honorable man of integrity, but what eggzactly has he chosen to do with his life? Aside from crashing planes, pretending to be treated just like all the other prisoner of wars in Vietnam instead of the privileged son of an Admiral, marrying rich women, saying crude things like “Chelsea Clinton is ugly because Janet Reno was her father,” having an alarming ability to contract melanoma over and over again, having his manhood stolen from him by the sniveling weasel Karl Rove, and being a bootlicking toady for the people with all the money in this country for almost 40 years, I just don't see what all the fuss is about.
Oh yeah, that campaign finance reform law. How's that one working out?
On the other, er, side of the fence is my man Barack, the left's answer to a woman president. Needless to say, he's eminently qualified to be president. He lived in Indonesia, praise Jesus, for two years. It's not his qualifications for the office I question, but his style.
First off, he cannot open his mouth without uttering a cliché. I know, I know, it's a mental defect, he can't help it, but, you know, life is short, and I can't afford to spend the next four years of my life bored out of my mind by his endless town meetings where nothing is discussed.
The second thing, and this is pretty big, at least for me personally, is that he only talks about himself. It's like the rest of the world doesn't exist. Obama this, Obama that. He makes Oprah look like Mother Theresa.
All of that could be forgiven if he wasn't such a bully. No, I'm not talking about his posse that always shouts down anyone who asks legitimate questions like “prove you were born in America.” I'm talking about his voice.
I'm going to ask you to try a little experiment. Close your eyes during one of his speeches. I bet you'll imagine him, as I do, taking candy away from a little girl and smacking her behind with a smile as he does it.
Is this a man who's fit to walk in the shoes of the other Presidents with proud African blood, men such as Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding?
Speaking of so-called Presidents, let's talk about George W. Bush. Ah, Georgie, poor sweet hopelessly damaged Georgie, poster boy for why therapy is a good thing. When a lost boy murders 10 people, he is pronounced a psychopathic madman and put to death by an enraged society. When a lost boy whose father was President murders millions of people, he's called the first real Christian President. How could America have come to this? This is the country that brought freedom to the entire world, yet we think nothing when our leader, whose grandfather was personally responsible for the rise of Adolf Hitler, goes to Israel and calls his opponent a Nazi. We are the country whose collective brainpower brought phones, lights, movies, television, and personal computers to the world, yet our minds now seem to be controlled by a media that prefers Hollywood fantasy to fact, that would have us believe, for example, that a few cave-dwelling Arabs with box-cutters could defeat the entire military infrastructure of the United States three times in one day, oh, and, if that wasn't enough, defy the laws of PHYSICS three times on the same day!? I go could on and on with the way we are hoodwinked, double-talked, lied to, but what's the point? It's like shooting fish in a barrel. If you're not in a rigormortis state of rage, you're clearly not paying attention. And if you're not paying attention, maybe, just maybe, it's time to start, before the next vote is cast.
Let me tell you a little something about my governing philosophy. I believe the best government is the one that governs least. Thomas Jefferson said that. Obviously he couldn't get elected dogcatcher in this day and age.
Here's an idea. Let's give back everyone's Federal income tax money—make them work out their own payment plan with the Chinese themselves. Give corporations the right to decide whether they want to have their tax dollars continue to fund the military. If they want to pony up the war tax, they get a share of the profits when the war goes well (and take a loss when the war goes badly—just like in the business world!) Keep the rest of the taxes as they are so the government can continue to function as it now does. As we start to get rid of these awful federal programs that have been growing and sucking on us like lamprey eels for generations, we can start to send some of the money back to you. It's up to you. You get to make that call. There are all kinds of things you can do. If you want to improve the economy, for example, just tax the rich more, so we can pay down the debt and lower the cost of money for everyone. It worked in the 90's. Why not today?
If you, like me, are concerned about the ongoing implosion of the American capitalist system, it doesn’t make sense to, as the current Republican candidate is trying to do, merely prevent people whose homes have been foreclosed upon from voting. Nor does it make sense to, as the current Democratic candidate proposes, counter the uncountable trillions of dollars in loan guarantees and bailouts shelled out already to bail out Wall Street firms with a mere $10 billion Foreclosure Prevention Fund that would quote “provide local counseling and foreclosure mitigation services.” It makes more sense, don’t you think, to foreclose upon the palatial estates of these multi-billionaire CEOs who have delighted so in kicking grandmothers out of their homes these past few years, and let grandmothers, or whoever else has lost their homes because they can’t afford to get an MBA, to live in these.
Here are the specifics of what I propose.
I promise to give you more money, free health care, the end of wars, and no more anti-drug commercials. In return I expect you to watch my back whenever I come to your town. If I get killed, all bets are off.
I am a humble man. I don't wish to brag on myself, because people who do so usually have the self-esteem of a United Nations diplomat. But in the interest of full and honest disclosure I'll proudly state I have held no elective office of any kind [pause for effect]. I have no accomplishments [long gloat]. I have no friends, political or otherwise [triumphant smirk].
When in November you come into the voting booth, alone with your God, facing the most momentous decision of our generation, these are the qualities that you most want in your President. Other candidates may claim to have no friends or no accomplishments, but they do. News flash: politicians lie, prevaricate, dissemble, they ex-agg-er-rate.
But look at my record. I offer nothing. How could I be lying? Dig through whatever pile of garbage you want to, you will find nothing. There won't be some soon-to-be deleted tidbit on memoryhole.com about me assaulting a librarian or having my bagman killed or doing crack and the downlow at the projects back in the day. That's just not the way I roll. How many candidates can say that?
No special interests. No cottage on the Cape. No Texas billionaire who wants his Thai cabana boys delivered at nine sharp. Only the UNSEEN HAND OF PROVIDENCE ITSELF. [rock slightly back and forth in a paroxysm of ecstasy, while clutching pre-hensiley the sides of the podium, leaning down with hunched shoulders. Let front bangs cascade down with the pendent momentousness of the moment as people catch their breath]
Don't you see now that there's nothing to fear? Haven't all the demons under the bed just magically disappeared?
This is what America could look like. Think about it, friends.
You could settle for people who want to come into your bedroom and offer you pills as long as they can watch. And you're left of course two long hours later with half a tab of something that keeps you up all night and makes you forget your dog's name.
They talk about more affordable health care, cleaner wars, better jobs (like yours isn't good enough), faster moving oil pipelines, fairer taxes [drip with sarcasm], safer nuclear energy, more secure borders, more money for teachers, less ominous-looking strangers with weapons to trouble your sleep cycle, more national symposiums to discuss the intricacies of racially motivated speech patterns that go nowhere, and more talk for the next four years about the RIGHT to LIFE.
Never in all this do they promise any time to learn to play the cello. Never do they promise any kind of let-up from credit card advertisements, or free passes to the national parks, or a new holiday (after all, what good is government if they can't give you a new holiday), a weekend without sirens and screeching tires.
The no-call telemarketing rules were a good start, but we need to apply that logic to every facet of American life.
Surely somewhere in the Constitution we are allowed to cruise the freeways in the middle of the night without some inexplicable roadwork involving a fathomless detour.
Isn't that the very principle at the heart of the Constitution? That government has no right to interfere in the free exercise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
How much of this so-called road work is really necessary, who's really benefiting, and at what cost? And when are the American people let in at the table when these things are decided, BEFORE the bonds are voted on?
That time, my countrymen, is now.
We have a little thing called the Constitution of the United States, and we've been taking it for granted for far too long.
I ask each one of us to think long and hard about what's at stake in letting our basic liberties slip away from our very fingertips.
How did we let this happen, and how do we get it back?
How many politicians promise to represent you and your interests on any number of issues YOU'VE brought to their attention, only to disappear after being elected into a black hole never to be seen from or heard from again?
How many terrific-sounding ideas to improve our world are propounded only to have them when they're passed morph into the tools of our enslavement? In June of this very year, while most Americans were planning vacations with their families, George W. Bush signed in law the right for him personally to order each and every one of us off the street and imprisoned without charges and without a lawyer for as long as he wanted. He can do this for any reason he deems necessary—and he can leave you there for your entire life, if he wants. And we're not talking about fancy federal prisons here, we're talking about dank holes in the basement of huge bureaucracies where they prevent you from ever seeing any light, serve you disgusting food only when they want to, and even interfere with your sleep by continuously waking you up to songs like “Bogie and Bacall” at ear-splitting decibels.
How could such a thing happen in these United States, that makes the stalags of Stalin look like vacation destinations? By consent of both political parties of course, and the full support of both of my esteemed opponents. You may not have heard of this new law, at least not as I just described it. That's not because I'm embellishing the truth—I'm actually softening it to give you just an inkling of how truly horrifying this new law is—but because it is presented in all the polite political discourse as, get this, part of the Patriot Act, something to keep terrorists from breaking into your houses and molesting your children.
They say they would never, ever use this against honest American citizens. But, I ask you, if that were really true, why don't they put that condition in the law? Why don't they at the very least require the slightest smidgen of actual evidence that someone actually is a terrorist before locking them away in a dungeon forever? They've already locked people away under this new law. Who are they? We don't know. We don't have a right, as citizens, to know who they are and what they are accused of doing. Just like, by law, we are not allowed to know whether the food we eat is covered in radiation, or is genetically modified. It's illegal to provide this information, in fact. There are countless examples. This kind of abrogation of the basic civil rights the Constitution is supposed to provide to every one of us just goes on and on and on.
How did we get to this state of affairs?
Does the Constit-ution hold our elected officials accountable?
Do people really value their liberties?
Can people really fight to stay free?
Do they really feel they are worthy of being a full-blooded human being?
My answer is a resounding YES, and that is the reason I am in this race.
Every four years, all the same old politicians talk about the need for change. Usually this means you get one out of a million rotted apples in the barrel pulled out, sniffed with disdain, shined up, and thrown back in.
I say we go about it a whole different way. I say instead of talking about what we'd change, let's talk about what we'd keep. Surely, there are some good things the government does. The specialty stamps of the Post Office, for example. No matter what our position on giving tax breaks to corporations like Monsanto that poison infants by dumping uranium into the water supply, surely we can all feel that quiver of glee when we see, say, Judy Garland on a stamp, or Jim Brown running in the mud. And those wonderful state coins—aren't they just the purest and truest expression of being American there is?
There are many other things the government does well. Maps, for example. Or public libraries. Or those long black highways that curve forever through sunset after sunset of the most golden grass imaginable.
Or the Hoover Dam. How can you call yourself an American and not love the Hoover Dam?
This is the vow I make to you when I become President. I want everyone, right now, to make up a list of those things that we now have from the US government that you want to keep. Think as hard as you want and include as much as you like. Be careful though, not to include state government things, like the Statue of Liberty, or private things, like Disneyland and McDonalds.
After you've compiled your list, just send it in to my website coolstufftokeep.com. When we've tabulated the votes, everything that has, say, 1,000 votes, gets to stay, everything else goes.
If that means the Pentagon gets turned into a high-end shopping mall, so be it! If it means the banks have to find another source of revenue besides your tax dollars, I say “bring it on!”
Impossible, you say? No, the Greeks had a word for it. It's called Democracy.
I know I come off to some like a crazy man, with dangerous ideas. Granted, not as crazy as you typically have to be to run for President, with ideas not nearly as dangerous as the ones you need to get campaign coffers flowing. I understand that, and I expect you, unlike my opponents, to be skeptical of everything I say. I wouldn't believe, for example, that the government is actually putting one of the most toxic substances on earth, fluoride, into the water supply because some PR guy in the forties said it stopped cavities, unless I had actually witnessed it.
I don't expect you to believe anything I say. That's the American way. But I do ask you to do me just one small solid. Just keep in the back of your mind, as you hear the other candidates talk, that you get one honest statement from them before you cast your vote for them. If you do get that honest statement (and you know I don't mean technically true but miserably hateful just the same), then go ahead, vote your conscience for them, live your life free of any twinge of guilt that I ever existed. But if you can't get that one small thing, I say you owe it to yourself to seek a new way, the Constitutional Way, with William Sigler.
When it comes to the vast differences between the two political parties, the grand canyon of partisanship that keeps the two parties from getting things done, I say “cut the crap right now.”
By this I don't mean let's just get along, I mean who are they fooling thinking they actually disagree on anything?!
Oh, they posture differently, but when it comes to doing anything, do they really act differently? Has a Republican made abortion illegal? Has a Democrat trimmed any of the funding on the Iraq War? Of course not, to do so would take them off the guest list at the best Georgetown parties!
I say call them on this nonsense. We have the Republican candidate who says he knows economics and believes in fiscally responsible government, yet in the next breath says he wants to continue the Iraq war until we actually win it AND by the way lower taxes. No offense, but a five-year old child has a better grasp of economics than that. The reason food and gas cost so much is because of the money we're borrowing to fight the Iraq war. We just keep printing up dollars to pay the bills we can't pay for, and as a result, everything costs more, it's basic economics. If he said our salaries would also rise at the same time, it would still be a very bad idea but I would consider such a thing as something that may actually help the economy, because we could buy more things. Yes, inflation would get totally out of control, but it's better than not eating I say.
And on the other side, Mr. Obama also wants to lower taxes and continue wars, he just wants to pick one of the wars we're losing to fourth-world countries and stick with that. I don't mean to question his vast foreign policy expertise, but doesn't Iraq have the oil, not Afghanistan? Oh, yeah, the terrorists are holed up in the caves there, so we need to drop another million tons of expensive American death on barren mountain ranges just so we teach the bad guys a lesson. Again, not to be disrespectful, but this kind of logic would have the mouth of a six-year-old girl caught beating up her brother washed out with soap. What part of Afghanistan defeating the Persian, Indian, English and Soviet empires don't Americans understand? Haven't these horned-rim foreign policy wonks Obama employs ever played a game of Risk?
These candidates with a straight face both tell you there's these evil boogeypeople running around trying to blow us up, yet the few they actually catch and bring to trial are found innocent, while guess whose fingerprints are all over the things they blame on the “evildoers.” They say maddening things like “9/11 changed everything.” Do you know, has anyone in the media bothered to tell you what every Washington insider already knows, that the Iraq War, the Patriot Act and the 2002 and 2004 vote rigging were all planned and ready to go long before 9/11?
They actually believe Americans are gullible enough to believe them.
The difference between them and me is that I know you don't believe a word of their nonsense. You just don't know what to do about it.
The answer is simple: throw them both out. Vote for me. Just keep me alive, remember, that's all you have to do.
In a faraway time, before there were Presidents, a bunch of people just like you and I bitched and moaned about what they didn't like about King George of England, who ruled them. King George was a syphilitic, mentally feeble megalomaniac who thought God gave him the right to do whatever he wanted to the American colonists. Little by little, the colonists woke up to this, and started sharing stories. Over time, these stories evolved into a realization that it was not this madcap King that was the problem, but the whole idea of government, how it used the fear that people lacking protection naturally had to become the tyrant everyone was afraid of. By talking together, and realizing how valuable their land and their minds were, they came to the audacious conclusion that they could just get rid of the King. This was an astounding idea! No one had ever imagined such a thing could happen before. They started writing this stuff down, and, bam, cool new ideas formed, like people could listen to whatever music they wanted to, or drink beer instead of hard cider. They became so excited at this idea that they had to actually topple the King.
Today, we can still choose to listen to, say, George Clinton instead of KC and the Sunshine Band, but are we really free? Is the government any better than it was under King George? Is it [pause] worse?
As long as we know in our bones what real freedom is, we can never reach that point of abject subjugation ever again. However, we, Republicans and Democrats alike, share stories about the new madcap King George, who treats not only our physical persons with contempt, but the very system he is supposed to represent, as so originally and gloriously provided for by the founding fathers.
Unlike with the original King, however, we're not taking up arms. We are, in the words of the song, “bewitched, bothered and bewildered.” But I know there are many who can see clearly, as I believe each and every one of you can. I believe we can together be candles in the darkness to lead us out of the forest to the new age of spirit, where light and truth can live within people, and the glow not only frees our minds, it brings harmony with our brothers and sisters, and peace within and without.
Let Brother Stevie take us out [cue “Superstition”].
