The American Spectator

Political Hay

"Stan Jones, a Montana libertarian widely known for his peculiar blue skin, can arguably be said to have recast the political complexion of the U.S. Senate, turning it from Republican red to the same color as his face," reported the Washington Post after the election.

Running as the most anti-government candidate in the field in the race for the U.S. Senate, Libertarian Party candidate Jones received 10,324 votes while Republican candidate Conrad Burns lost to Democrat Jon Tester by just 2,565 votes.

Jones, a bit on the crazy side, once turned himself blue by sticking some electric wires into his drinking water to ward off the oncoming calamities of a predicted Y2K collapse. Now he's turned the Senate blue.

Based on the theory that real libertarian candidates pull more votes away from libertarian-talking Republicans than from big-government, high-taxing, income-redistributing Democrats, Mr. Burns would still have his job and the Republicans wouldn't have lost the Senate if Stan Jones hadn't tossed his hat into the ring.

That's an assumption that seems to be especially valid with Jones, "a quirkily conservative kind of libertarian," as the Post describes him, "opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage" -- positions that play well with wide segments of the GOP.

During the senatorial debate on October 9, Jones warned that a conspiracy by "the secret organizations of the world power elite" was leading the United States into a "one-world communist government" where we'll have "a new Constitution modeled after the Soviet Union's Constitution." Again, that's a position that rings true with certain elements in the Republican Party.

As far as the blue face, a shade described by Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden as "an ashen blue-gray, a flesh tone more suited to the undertaker's slab than the politician's stump," the change in complexion came about as Jones "accidentally turned his skin blue by drinking a homemade antibiotic laced with silver."

Jones blames the move from Seattle to Bozeman, Montana, after his divorce for causing his skin to turn blue. He says he had no trouble when he was using Seattle's tap water to make his "colloidal silver" antibiotic by charging two silver wires in a glass of water with an electric current.

In Bozeman, where the mineral content of the tap water is significantly higher, the silver in the wires bonded with other elements in the water, producing a brew that gave Jones argyria, a rare condition that permanently stained his skin.

Jones drank his first homemade potion in 1999 in fearful anticipation that the ball falling that year on New Year's Eve in Times Square would be accompanied by crashing computers, increased terrorism and disease, and a shortage of prescribed antibiotics.

Jones granted an interview to the Post at the Academy of Cosmetology, a place for cheap haircuts where "the fluorescent lighting brings out the blue in his face." A student at the academy, Jessica Wagner, recalled that the first time she approached Jones to cut his hair, she caught a glimpse of him in a barber's chair and thought, 'Oh, my God, he's dead,'" reports Harden.

Now, blue or not, Jones is happy, referring to himself as "the guy who changed the country." And there appears to be no guilt about being the spoiler, the guy who put the traditionally big-government, non-libertarian politicians back in power. "Republicans spend and borrow, Democrats tax and spend," he says. "Whoever is in there, the government grows and grows."

He's got that right. The national debt was about $4 trillion when the "Republican revolution" started in 1994. By the time of Bush's first inauguration in 2001, after six years of Republicans running the spending in Congress, the national debt had climbed to nearly $6 trillion. By the time of Bush's second inauguration in 2005, the national debt had increased to $7.6 trillion. On the day of this year's midterm elections, the debt was up to $8.6 trillion.

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a physician who was the Libertarian Party's candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1988, warns that current trends aren't sustainable: "If present trends continue, by 2040 the entire federal budget will be consumed by Social Security and Medicare. The only options for balancing the budget would be cutting total federal spending by about 60 percent or doubling federal taxes."

By then, tons of people will be sticking wires in their water.

topics:
Taxes, Federal Budget, Social Security, Abortion, Constitution, NATO, Oil, Medicare