It doesn’t matter if I think the current Iraq war is justified – if I had achieved the signature goal and was able to continue campaigning, it would not have been up to me to decide at which target or if I would have deployed our military. I think that there were reasons to have animosity against Iraq, especially in the Bush administration, but I think that if the decision had been legally and rightly up to me, I would have done things differently.

It has been said time and time again that you have to let the generals of a country play war with their army at least once every 7-10 years, not in training exercises, but for real, or the military minded leaders begin to get antsy and they start looking for trouble where it doesn’t really exist. I think that is a sad reason to go to war (to maintain readiness) and a sad way to begin to move away from war as a solution to political problems. But I also know that it is a very real situation, and that the military leadership can be very persuasive when they want to be.

That is why the power to declare war rests on the representative Congress. Congress, working properly, only declares war when the citizens accept and agree that war is the right and proper way to do things. The President only commands military attacks after the declaration of war is made. We should not have the ability to grant the Executive the power to begin military campaigns without a formal declaration of war against an identified enemy. And if we do not have an enemy we can identify, we should not be allowed to launch full-scale military campaigns at all.

So no, I don’t think the actions of 9-11 justify full-scale war in a situation where we cannot even identify the enemy. I also don’t think that we have the right to continue to fight in a manner that is supposed to create something for the people who aren’t willing to fight in mass for those changes – it is impossible to achieve that goal. Sure, even during our revolution, only about 30% of the people actually wanted to split from England. But the majority of the rest were not against it, they were just unwilling to be involved. And the 30% that saw the value were willing to fight as a group, to take up arms and to die, to assure the sovereignty and freedom of the citizens. Only when you have that kind of action in a nation can you lend help with some reasonable expectation of success.

But it would not be my call – I would not have been elected as a person to abdicate responsibility and decisions to. It would be the call of the people. But one thing I know for sure. If we were going to war to retaliate against actions taken against our country and to insure that such actions would be far less likely to reoccur, then the war would have been prosecuted to it’s fullest, the ‘enemy’ decimated, and the world would have known that we as a nation were not people who would sit by and do a half-assed job dealing with those who would threaten us. It would not be a humanitarian war, it would not be a war we started for the liberation of another nation’s citizens. It would have been a full-on, every reasonable weapon and tactic desployed reign of destruction. fully funded. Because there is no other reasonable outcome when you go somewhere else to retailiate against a large-scale attack on our country.

War is not civil, it cannot be made so. War in that part of the world cannot be waged on a person-by-person basis. So if we are there, or if we find justification to be anywhere else, we need to stop playing around and get the job done, save the lives of our own, make sure that those who threaten us cannot do so again (hey, they have already proven that they are willing to kill us or we would not be there, so what is holding us back?) and get the life and livelihoods of our citizens back to normal as fast as possible. That is the requirement the government must have for defending the nation, not some trumped-up humanitarian cause.

You are right. But you have to realize that a whole lot of people have built their life philosophy on ‘the bottom line is all that matters to me’. You cannot change that approach through legislation, if it is going to change it must change through natural pressures of the environment. The only way to change that kind of person (and it is not ‘that kind of corporation, corporations aren’t people, they don’t have rights, they don’t have morals, it is the people who run them that you need to address) is to hit them where it counts, to show them that by doing an unpopular thing, you will not succeed at getting what you most wildly desire.

Remember the key theme of this campaign – a government that is allowed to address and fix the things one person wants fixed is a government that has the authority to fix the problems each person wants fixed, and one of those people’s problems might be you, you liberty, your prosperity. Government is limited in our system at each level for good reason, and the Federal Government is not the bread-basket overflowing with the power to solve all woes. The Government is for, by and of the people – the Federal level of our Government can only do a bit, the people must do the rest. But only once the Government gets out of their way. Allow the people to be active in helping eliminate the drain of illegal immigrants, don’t put up roadblocks to their doing so. When Government creates an environment where the people can achieve their desired results (mostly by getting out of the way and letting folks do what they know they have to) then those results happen. You can never legislate a real turn-around in a situation. So many times we have tried (Prohibition, for example) and failed, only to have legislation repealed because it did not match with the outcome the people desired.

You cannot do something to change or fix every problem, especially if you are the Federal Government. How do I intend to stop corporate America from taking advantage of the system for a profit? I don’t, and it is not my place to do so. I can help create clear and concise regulations to limit the circumstances under which an immigrant can be in the U.S., and I can provide stiff consequences for those who ignore those regulations. But I cannot change corporate America, because I cannot change the life philosophy of people in power. Only by providing natural pressures that reward the desired activities and punish the undesired ones can we make a change – and that change is not accomplished by an overwhelming government prone to bribes and kickbacks and ‘playing the game’ in the words of Harry Reid trying to inflict punishments that do not affect the bottom line.

All I can attempt to do is to limit the size of the worker pool that is drawn on by making sure that business doesn’t provide incentives for Government to look the other way. By making the path of prosecuting illegal immigrants the path of success, instead of making the path of ignoring them, you eliminate a large part of the problem. People will say ‘but you will cause a witch hunt if you do that.’ Perhaps a bit, there has never been a time in human history where we have begun to turn a system on it’s ear and we have ended up at the perfect balance point right away. And there will be no solution except voluntary full compliance (all illegal immigrants leave, all corporations stop hiring them, and that is not going to happen) that will not have its problems as well. But you need to begin to address a problem like this by applying a reasonable solution, looking carefully for the trouble potential in that situation and how it plays out, and crafting thoughtful solutions to address those problems. Being so afraid of the problems of developing a workable solution that you allow the problem to continue even when you have the power to try to address it is not the answer. And I believe the Constitution provides the power to regulate immigration to the federal Government, but restricts the manner in which the Federal Government can interfere to regulate.

Get government out of the business of controlling the punishments given to businesses, get government out of the way of orchestrating contracts that bypass the consumer market, force the government to refuse government entities the right to purchase product from corporations who have been found guilty of breaking immigration laws, and get government out of the business of over-regulating competition out of existence, give the people the ability to control the market, and you will see that when people demand something, and the profit is in meeting that demand, business will migrate to the demand. And if you think a company like Tyson will simply fold up and close it’s doors if we put more pressure on them to comply you might be right. But America will still want it’s chicken, and if Tyson throws a fit and closes up, there will be someone to fill that market niche, and they will likely do so following the pressures more closely.

What about employers who exploit illegal immigrants, making them work for less than minimum wage? Who do you think is washing dishes at the local restaurant or bussing the tables? Who do you think is working in the chicken factories? Some of these people are actually bussed in by big business.

Do you think the illegal alien will complain about working for less than minimum wage or in poor working conditions? Hell no! They do that and it’s a one-way bus ticket back to Mexico.

I know of an employee who complained to the manager about how they were treated. A week later, Immigration showed up and took them away.

How do you intend to stop corporate America from importing and exploiting illegals?