Subject peoples up front, real Americans to the peanut gallery

This just in:

“The Republican National Convention seating chart, obtained by POLITICO Sunday, shows the delegations from Nevada, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota and Oklahoma all located on the outer fringe of the convention floor. Each are states with significant Paul followings.

“The delegation for the Northern Mariana Islands, on the other hand, is right in front behind the gang from Michigan, birth state of Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Other groups with pretty good seats include those from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and American Samoa. None has electoral votes that can impact the outcome of the election.”

And none are really part of these United States of America. Instead, they are colonial possessions, part of our vast and ever-expanding overseas empire. How appropriate that Romney should give their representatives the best seats in the house – and put the real Americans, the staunchly anti-interventionist Paulians, up there in the peanut gallery. Romney isn’t running for President: he’s running for Emperor, and it’s only natural for Caesar to put his most subservient and dependent subjects up front, where their cheers can obscure the skeptics’ grumblings.

Yes, you read that right: I said real Americans. Because, you see, the inhabitants of the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Marianas aren’t Americans: they are Virgin Islanders, Puerto Ricans, Samoans. They are, in short, the remnants of conquered and colonized peoples, the casualties of Washington’s long war against the independence and integrity of indigenous peoples, including in the continental US. The tragedy is that these peoples are the worst victims of the Welfare-Warfare State, their cultures literally raped by a massive presence of the US military, and their economies so distorted by military socialism that the great majority are entirely dependent on government  largesse of one sort or another.

As conquered territories, they should be granted their independence forthwith, and paid whatever reparations are due them: decades of environmental degradation and outright military occupation ought to be worth something. The day there are no delegates to any American political convention representing territories outside the continental US is the day we’ll finally be cured of the bacillus of imperialism – and, yes, we can do without Alaska.