No Hillary, Donald et al, The President's First Job is Not to Keep Americans Safe

The Democratic debate on Saturday proved one thing: powerful interests that transcend the political parties have an agenda. That's the only explanation for the talking point mindlessly repeated by virtually all of the presidential candidates in both parties: "It is the first job of the president to keep Americans safe."

Maybe it's a slogan that's been thrown around in Council on Foreign Relations meetings or some other gathering of the wonderful people who make all the decisions for us rubes. But wherever it came from, it was certainly no coincidence Americans heard it from virtually every candidate, Democrat or Republican, during the past two debates. It would have been only slightly spookier if they heaped effusive praise on Raymond Shaw.

More important than it being creepy and patronizing is that it's completely wrong. The first job of the president is not to keep Americans safe. It is to defend their liberty.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post...

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

There is nothing new about the neoconservatives

Robert Eno of Conservative Review named Rand Paul the “standout of the night” after the December 15 Republican Presidential Debate on CNN. Eno laments that the mainstream media, including “conservative media pundits,” will proclaim Rubio the winner. Eno implies these pundits aren’t true conservatives, referring to a species of unicorn sought by millions of self-identified conservative voters.

Rand Paul himself has called out Rubio and other proponents of the U.S. military empire as failing to adhere to authentic conservative principles. The self-named “neoconservatives,” we’re told, are really progressives in Republican clothing, failing to promote the true conservative principles of small government, free markets and a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Rand is right about nonintervention, but he’s wrong about conservatism. There is nothing new about the neoconservatives. The essence of conservativism itself is belief in the need for an all-powerful government that regulates every area of life domestically and dominates every other nation in the world. This has been the conservative worldview for thousands of years. It has never changed.

Conservatives see the world as Thomas Hobbes did. Human nature is so depraved that the government must be powerful enough to “keep them in awe.” Like other enlightenment philosophers, Hobbes saw the relationship of nations to one another as virtually identical to the relationship between individual people. They are all in a de facto state of war unless one nation dominates the rest.

This explains the otherwise puzzling compulsion by generations of U.S. politicians to interfere in the affairs of destitute Third World countries thousands of miles away. Just as individual liberty within society is a threat to the commonwealth, self-determination by any individual nation is a threat to the world order. The “domino theory” offered as justification for the Korean and Viet Nam Wars was firmly rooted in Hobbesian conservatism. So was the British Empire.

Many conservatives would object and point to Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk as representing the true tenets of conservatism. There’s only one problem: Burke and Kirk agree with Hobbes on just about everything.

Read the rest at TomMullen.net...

Edward Snowden Is Still a Hero, Regardless of ISIS, San Bernardino and Paris

It's official. The terrorists are winning. They have achieved the one and only goal of terrorism itself: to achieve a political outcome based on the "terror" caused by highly publicized attacks on civilians.

Just days after Dagen McDowell of Fox Business blamed the San Bernardino shooting on Edward Snowden and the USA Freedom Act, Joe Scarborough called for "post-Edward Snowden legislation that stops this person-to-person encrypted messaging" on Morning Joe. He also said, "We're going to have to give the CIA powers to interrogate these terrorists to see where the next attack's going to come from."

As the CIA has always had the power to interrogate anyone it wishes to, this can only be code for "torture." Lest this be written off as the ravings of MSNBC's token Republican, his Democratic guest agreed wholeheartedly. Scarborough had either the audacity or the cluelessness (it's always hard to tell) to end the segment by riffing on a Bush/Cheney mantra, saying: "The world changed after Paris."

Anything both Fox and MSNBC are trumpeting in unison can reasonably be assumed to be completely wrong.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post...

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Press Release: Tom Mullen destroys conventional wisdom on American politics with new title

Contact: Tom Mullen (tom@tommullen.net)

Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness Part One available November 27, 2015

Buffalo N.Y. - Author and columnist Tom Mullen reveals the truth about the American conservative and liberal movements and their incompatibility with the American Creed – the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Contrary to conventional wisdom that Republican politicians who expand government are “RINOS” or that totalitarian Democrats aren’t “true liberals,” Mullen proves conservatism is an inherently big government philosophy, liberalism is antithetical to inalienable rights and neither inspired the founding fathers.

With in-depth analysis of seminal political thinkers, including Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke and Marx, Mullen exposes the true nature of conservatism and liberalism, proving both in their purest forms are poison to American liberty.

About the author

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America. His work has appeared in The Washington Times, The Huffington Post, Rare and numerous other publications. Tom holds a B.A. in English from Canisius College and an M.A. in English from Buffalo State College. Tom is also a singer/songwriter with several CD releases, both as a solo musician and with his band, The Skeptics. He resides with his family in Western New York. More information can be found on his website at www.tommullen.net.

Another Voice: We don’t need a federal law limiting ticket ‘bots’

Paul McCartney scheduled a visit to Buffalo for the first time in his legendary career. I am a lifelong fan who had mouse poised at the precise moment tickets went on sale. I did not get a ticket. “Scalper bots” had apparently bought them faster than virtually anyone else could click on a seat. I was disappointed.

But I’m even more disappointed to hear there is support for a federal law prohibiting these kinds of programs. Under the guise of protecting the environment (but really just more crony capitalist scams), we already have the federal government telling us what light bulbs we may use and how much water our toilets are allowed to flush. We don’t need a law telling us how to buy and sell tickets to a rock concert.

The first and foremost reason is principle. Concert tickets are private property. They belong to the promoters of the concert, who have a right to sell 100 percent of them to customers using purchasing software. They also have a right to develop software to prevent bots from buying their tickets. The government’s role in exchanges of property is to ensure these property rights are secure, not to violate them as this bill proposes to do for the convenience of those who seem to believe someone owes them a concert ticket.

Read the rest at The Buffalo News...

The Libertarian Moment Is Alive and Well, Regardless of Rand Paul's Campaign

Rand Paul's campaign reported $2.5 million in donations for the entire third quarter, a precipitous drop from his previous reports and a fraction of what rivals Ben Carson ($20 million) and Jeb Bush ($12 million) brought in. That and anemic poll numbershave inspired many to not only pronounce Paul's presidential campaign dead, but to gleefully declare the so-called "Libertarian Moment" over.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Anyone who believes the presidential election is a barometer of how libertarian America is becoming doesn't understand libertarianism and isn't paying attention to what's happening in the real world. Libertarians don't believe government solves anything, no matter who is running it. The purest libertarians refuse to vote on principle.

As radical as that might sound, almost half of all eligible American voters behave the same way, if not for the same reasons. Let's face it, most Americans couldn't name three policies held by the frontrunner in either party and couldn't explain one in detail.

This is often ridiculed in the myriad You Tube videos where men and women "on the street" are asked basic policy questions and don't have a clue what policies their candidates support. You're supposed to assume they're stupid.

For the most part, they're not stupid. They just don't care. They may say they support this or that candidate when a microphone is shoved in their face, but in reality they live their lives, do their jobs and run their businesses without giving politics a second thought. This is an inherently libertarian worldview and it's growing.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post...

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

What if school shootings are caused by drugs instead of guns?

What if the entire schooling paradigm of having children sit at a desk for 8 hours is especially unnatural for boys?

What if schools have been decreasing opportunities to release pent up energy and making boys even more repressed while participating in this compulsory institution?

What if society has responded over the past several decades by inventing new pseudo-diseases like “ADHD” to describe normal, boyish behavior and then recommended treatment of these non-diseases with psychotropic drugs whose known side effects are homicidal and suicidal thoughts?

What if these drugs succeed in keeping boys at their desks but for a small percentage result in them flipping out and acting on the homicidal and suicidal thoughts caused by the pills they are taking?

Read the rest at TomMullen.net...