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Additionally, staying out of foreign entanglements is now almost impossible, since we rely on foreigners for oil and strategic minerals.

Well, the recent ANWR vote sure made certain that would continue, no? I am of a mind myself that, while we ought never to just up and meddle in another country's affairs, we should certainly, within reasonable and realistic means, aid any country whom we deem friendly if - big "if" - they ask our help. We would do very well to adjust our stance appropriately, that we say, "Isn't it better to have a friend who minds his own business, tends his own affairs, leaves you to tend your affairs so long as you hurt or impose upon no other country, and stands by ever ready to help you if you ask, not when we arbitrarily decide when and how to help?" The friendship of the United States should never mean little more than just another country asking "Which pot?" when King Washington D.C. commands, "Sh@t!"

As far as protest votes go, I voted for Keyes in the '96 primary, even though I knew he couldn't win. A great candidate? Maybe not. Better than Clinton? Yep.

I can't help thinking that that doesn't say much for Mr. Keyes, calling him better than nothing... ;)

At the least, he would have stirred up a good stink in Washington, exactly what those dweebs need. So, I'm not entirely off-base with you.

Unfortunately, the only big stink in Washington these days emits any time a politician opens his or her mouth. Because something stinks, all right.

We're stuck voting for the lesser of two evils. There are probably many great candidates who will never see the light of day, due to the good ol' boy system. How to overcome that, I don't know. It would take a lot more anger in the populace. Cheers.

I suppose those who wish it arduously enough will get a candidate beyond such a system - it has been done before, and at various levels of government. I drew this point a few months back, on another thread, when I posited that the grave mistake the Libertarian Party in hindsight seems to have made as a party was not modeling its methodology upon such as the Conservative Party in New York - you know, serving as a philosophical/ideological pressure point upon the Major Parties (the Conservative Party was formed to do that to the Rockefellerised Republicans in 1962), endorsing Major Party candidates on a basis that they came the absolute closest to holding positions with which the party would customarily concur or press, nominating its own candidates for various offices only after finding no such endorsable candidate among the Majors, an approach which within eight years had sent a primarily Conservative candidate (he entered and won the Republican primary only after he had secured the Conservative nomination) to the U.S. Senate, future federal judge James L. Buckley.

I am convinced that had the Libertarians taken an approach along that line, they might well have proven more solidified and impressed people who might otherwise support a preponderance of their positions as a serious enough entry. (They have this much else in common with the New York Conservative Party: they formed in explicit response to a liberal inclination in a purportedly Republican President, to wit: Nixon's wage and price controls policy.) Considering that Libertarians are proving as capable of voting with their feet as other parties' members, the LP will have to think very hard, I believe, about considering such an approach as just described, or settling for the same old crap of trying to spin dwindling vote numbers as great moral victories...