The Three Monkeys of Evil and Ron Paul

If American voters only have three choices for president, then the whole country is in for trouble.

Right now, Democratic candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) remain in a tight race. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is the presumptive Republican nominee. Voters cannot even choose the lesser of the three evils. They are all evil.

But Americans should not fear. Their votes will not be wasted on Nov. 4 if they vote for Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

A vote for Paul is a vote against the established Washington buffoonery. Moreover, it supports good, enforceable economic and health care policies and an end to the disastrous Iraq War.

Paul is a long-time advocate of abolishing income taxes and any other tax not expressly authorized by the Constitution. That means if the Founding Fathers did not write it in the body of the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights, the tax is axed.

Opponents will say that the federal government needs taxes to function. Sure, government must have its funding, too. But why not starve the bureaucratic beast just a little? Maybe such a drastic measure will shock Washington out of complacency and back toward the American people's interests.

It may sound unreasonable, but it just might work.

On health care, a hot-button issue this campaign season, Paul seems to be a modern-day trustbuster. He wants to break the collusion between politicians and big pharmaceutical companies. His first step would be to eliminate the dreaded HMO.

Paul told the blog the Muckraker Report that "… patients are better served by having an element of choice in the matter, which is why I support letting the free-market determine health care costs. This won't happen, however, until we unravel the HMO web and change the tax code to allow individuals to fully deduct health care costs from their taxes, as employers can."

Clinton continues to attempt to sell her failed 1993 universal health care plan to the American people. It did not work then, and it will not now.

Obama has more of a clue by focusing just on children needing health care. The burdens it would place on small- to medium-sized businesses, however, would cut their already paper-thin profit margins to shreds.

Paul's libertarian stance on health care mimics former President Ronald Regan's – according to the plan, government is not the solution but the problem. A true fiscal conservative is what the country needs right now. With a national debt approaching $9.3 trillion, it is time to leave the charge card at home. Making health care affordable to all Americans is the solution -- not having the federal government in charge of universal coverage.

Paul is the only candidate for president who has consistently and vehemently opposed the Iraq War. He voted against the invasion in 2002 and the recent troop surge. "A military victory in Iraq is unattainable, just as it was in the Vietnam War," he said.

Because of his opinion on the war, Paul suggests bringing troops home immediately. He told CNN, "I think we should come home as quickly as possible. There were a lot of – a lot of false information on the reasons we went in there, and there's no good reason to stay right now."

Paul's plan is bold and probably untenable, but at least he has stuck with his core beliefs about the War. Such a statement cannot be made about any other candidate who was eligible to cast a vote at the time.

Clinton pulled a John Kerry and voted for the war before she voted against it. Obama could not have opinion because he was still in the Illinois State Senate during the Iraq debates. McCain, though resolute on his pro-Iraq War stance, is delusional, thinking that victory is just around the corner. The American people heard the same line about the Vietnam War, too.

Unfortunately for McCain, there is one more choice for president, and a good one at that. Paul is the person who can lead the United States forward on the country's three most important issues: the economy, health care and the Iraq war.

Americans who want a president with a sensible platform should press, punch or tick their ballot for Ron Paul in November.