In your heart you know he's right. If you've been reading my blog, cruising around the political discussions on the internet, or watched any of the Republican presidential debates [if not, here's an amusing endorsement], and care about electing honest, pro-life, pro-peace, economically informed individuals to send to Washington, you know the man that best deserves your vote in the primary tomorrow. I speak not so much to my compatriots in any of the twenty states across America that will hold G.O.P. primaries tomorrow, although they certainly can hear me, but in those of us lucky enough to carry the blue blood of Massachusetts in our veins [okay- though I was born and raised here, my family is from New York]. Although we generally hate the baseball club with the same name, we are Yankees. Unfortunately, in the eyes of the sentinels for freedom at LewRockwell.com, we Yankees have quite the poor reputation. Even those who disagree with the historical criticisms of Yankees and the North in general will surely share the shame I feel for being in the backyard of neoconservatism's home turf, New York City. Indeed, whenever I read up on the MassGOP, it becomes clearer that the statist, law-and-order crowd dominates the miniscule state Party. Just remember Kerry Healey, our 2006 gubernatorial candidate and Giuliani clone (minus that she didn't pretend to be Catholic). [As for the Bay State's Democrats, who have done very much in the last forty-five years to dissolve our traditional Puritanical/Irish Catholic morality, their admirable grassroots opposition to the Iraq War didn't quite filter through to the national level, as we will remember from 2002, when Senator Kerry voted for what was obviously the course to war. You need to work on your game, too.] But tomorrow, we're in luck-- we have an opportunity to buck the dubious choice between the flip-flop, the statist evangelical, and the Lieberman-endorsed superhawk the Old Media wants us to begrudgingly make, and choose a real and principled conservative, Dr. Ron Paul, in our primary, thus buffing up our tarnished Yankee image.

Even if none of that elongated locker room speech inspired you, it will do us all well to remember that we must vote on principle, and not from a pragmatic perspective (or worse yet- some people actually have admitted this to me- voting in a way that will make us seem "normal"). Yea, if we don't work for justice and righteousness in every way available to us in our Republic, can we expect to be let off easy when we must answer to our Lord at Judgment?

On a different note, here's a poem I whipped up over the last few days, and which has already undergone a few revisions. Hopefully, by now, it is satisfactory.

The Grand Monarchy

I took a walk in the garden at eight
On a blue and windless day. Mother said
That the beasts without were inconsolate:
Night's end had swept their dens of darkness bred
After the leave of the past eve's last light,
Which the creatures rejoined with revelries
And delight. But the heavens did requite
Her many prayers and her multiplied pleas,
And the sun once again resurrected,
Blinding the beasts in the boughs. They withdrew
To the gray glens' furrows, down, dejected.
That my path might be safe, and pleasant too,
She pointed to a nearby vale and led
My sight to a leaf-bottomed vernal pool
And its buoyant resident. Mother said,
"The swan bathing there awaited the rule
Of the promised springtime all the hours
In the dusk, through midnight, brooking the stare
Of the cold sky through the strongest showers.
Now, nearly alone, she receives the glare
From the heavens with favor. Talk to her."
For each footstep less that there was to take,
The swan became less carefree. Still closer,
I saw there was a silence I must break.









Touching one knee to the green, I beckoned.
Craning her neck, the bird thought me a jay.
I called less quietly the next second.
The fowl was flushed, and she flew away.

The title is from the Catholic eschatological concept/prophecy of the Grand or Great Monarch that will rule the entire world before the advent of the Antichrist; I imagine the Grand Monarchy will be a happier era than our own. I was inspired by the title of the BackStreet Boys album, Millenium, whose title apparently has some relation to the Protestant idea of the Millenium, according to the lyrics booklet- naturally, though, I couldn't name a poem after bad theology, and so it was "The Grand Monarchy".