Barney Frank Opposed for Re-Election by Gambling Foe
Politics in the United States have gotten so turned around that Barney Frank, a liberal Democrat and career politician, often viewed in the recent past as a tax-and-spend advocate of big government, has become the representative of libertarianism in the House.
Even more outrageous is that the very issues on which Frank is willing to fight to prevent government fascism, like online gambling, have become the issues on which Republican opposition attempts to attack Frank in his re-election campaign. It is ironic how the Republican Party, which was once fully behind Ronald Reagan's famous quote at his first inauguration that "Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem," now seeks to spend billions controlling the choices of citizens.
Frank faces a challenge in this election from Earl Sholley, a retired landscaper who is running as a social (and supposedly fiscal) conservative. He asserts that Frank's stance on gambling is wrong, in that he doesn't believe that "government should promote vice." Yet he is willing to spend massive amounts to promote his concept of virtue, which may not be a shared one.
What Sholley is missing is that government should not be determining what is vice, nor enforcing that upon its citizenry; whatever minute role government may have in that regard must be played on the smallest of stages, woven into community ethics which may vary greatly across the country.
Sholley also sees Frank's proposal decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana as a waste of Congressional time. “I think that shows how Frank’s priorities are,” Sholley said of Frank’s support for decriminalization. “We have serious problems in this country and he has time to support (this bill)."
Yet, isn't the overcrowding of jails and the ruination of lives through arrests and felony convictions an important matter? Don't the people of this country deserve the right to choose their own fate, rather than have decisions made for them by those who believe they are smarter than the rest? Online gambling, marijuana, cigarettes, very soon fried foods, eating meat, cursing, reading literature containing radical ideas, disagreeing in any way with the politically correct...it used to be Republicans that abhorred the idea of Big Brother, but if Barney Frank wants to be the standard-bearer, let us draw the line at online gambling and fight the fight to protect freedom, here and now.
