I was going to continue in this editorial with my theme of Barack Obama as the African-American Mikhail Gorbachev, but a certain metaphysical urgency obliges me to again, for the fifth time in 10 years, reiterate my intention to run for the Presidency of the United States in 2008 on a third-party ticket – REALISTS 2008. A recent book on Vancouver celebrities cited my repeated announcement to run for the highest office as an example of how "out of touch with reality" I am. Well, at least I’m keeping my word and living up to my promises, deluded as they might be.

Every reporter who writes a story about me mentions that I’ve announced my intention to run for Mayor of Halifax, Calgary and Vancouver. I am the honorary mayor of Winnipeg. Former Mayor Glenn Murray awarded that title to me personally. Hmm… he’s homosexual, isn’t he? Yes – and that didn’t seem to bother me. I’ve shared stages and screens with so many alternate lifestyles, some of which have not been lived as honestly and openly as Murray, that I was honored to accept this title from an honest man.

My honorary citation as Mayor of Winnipeg is somewhere back in Halifax with my third wife Suzana Cabrita. My marital situation will have to be explained before I can sit down with the post-primary candidates for President but… oh well, all in good time. What needs to be revealed is why in hell I would continue with this promise that, according to some gentlemen of the press, keeps me out of touch with reality. Come to think of it, how do I dare to call my party the Realists?

I hem and haw occasionally. It’s kind of a Jimmy Stewart thing. He was the actor who said he’d have taken a bullet for Ronald Reagan. Even as a conservative, I wish he’d been there to take one for John F. Kennedy. Those feelings are not because I had at one dark time been a Liberal, but because I’m Irish-American. That’s only one of the reasons my AKA now has an Irish surname: Ryan. The main reason for my political pen name is the fully fleshed-out prophecy by another Irish-American – Tom Clancy, the novelist. Yes, his books, particularly Debt of Honor and Executive Orders, create a President John Patrick Ryan, who is very badly needed these days. He’s John F. Kennedy with Winston Churchill’s invulnerability. They call him Jack because… well, he’s almost a Kennedy. The novels are set in a terrorist’s era with massive CIA deployment of agents and operatives worldwide and a largely Irish-influenced intelligence corps of heroes. Jack Ryan is a dream President with all the romantic aura of Camelot.

My name really is Moriarty. It’s not a stage name with a cool sound to mask another ethnic origin. So we’ve not only got Tom Clancy, but a writer named Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the mix. When will this Irish literary mania stop? The coming on of Dublin and Belfast will only end when we from the Emerald Isle give up our only real victory over the British Empire: speaking the English language better than the English do. We still haven’t given up the notion that Shakespeare could well have been an Irish Catholic.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – how Irish can you get? – has the title of a knight, but was a best-selling author within the pantheon of literary giants of Victorian England. His legendary creation Sherlock Holmes was in essence a violin-playing, pipe-smoking, drug-addicted George Bernard Shaw – a genius, of course, but a confoundingly socialist one.

Holmes’ nemesis was the Napoleon of Crime – Professor Moriarty. It’s not without significance that my father George Moriarty was a Detroit surgeon. His first name makes him an Irish George Washington. His first and last name belonged to my grandfather, who was a lifetime veteran of the American Baseball League – a third baseman for the Detroit Tigers, its manager in the early 1920s, an umpire for 25 years (he refereed five World Series) and a talent scout for the Tigers.

It’s quite a male line, the Moriartys, leading all the way back to County Kerry’s fabled response to the Potato Famine: go west, young Yeats! William Butler, however, remained at home to warn us, in his Second Coming, that the Beast is on its way, slouching towards Bethlehem. If you’re a Moriarty of any self-respecting notoriety, the Beast is socialism and its intellectual leadership the likes of Shaw and America’s very own Edmund Wilson. These names will pop up frequently in my campaign for President, because the final evidence that I must run for the White House comes from novels and not approval ratings.

What will be the main planks of my Realists’ platform?

1. End the Bush/Clinton Empire and its ability to play volleyball with the Oval Office for over 17 years.
2. Overturn Roe v. Wade if Congress hasn’t succeeded in dismantling it by 2008.
3. Give America its first Domestic Aid Program via a tax amnesty for all American tax debtors. After bailing out the Third World for more than a century, I think it’s time to bring such charity home.
4. Create an American Rainbow, Middle-class Family Counter-Revolution to defeat the efforts of the United Nations to swallow the United States up into its socialist worldwide federation and turn America into Canada South.
5. Prevent the Liberal side of Congress from sending the bill for Bush father and son’s two Persian Gulf adventures to the middle class. Send the invoice to the Saudis, who hired a Pentagon Paladin through the Bush Security Services, and to the war profiteers, whose names are laid out by Bob Baer in his book Sleeping with the Devil.
6. Dismantle the UN Building in Manhattan, tear down Paris’ Arc de Triomphe (a tribute to Emperor Napoleon) and replace it with the Socialist Napoleonic Temple of the UN.
7. On July 4, 2009, naturalize the Statue of Liberty, France’s Trojan Horse, and dub her The American Queen and, with sufficient pomp and circumstance, exorcise the ghosts of the French Revolution from her inner crevices.
8. Maintain the status quo in the U.S. and wait out the inevitable fall of the worldwide socialist federations. It will take seven years for the European Union to admit that a federation of countries the likes of Italy, Germany and France is beyond impossible. Scratch a Canadian and you’ll find a North American, but scratch an Italian or Czech or Dutchman and you won’t find a European. You’ll find a deeper Italian or Czech or Netherlander. Europe will only work as a Republic. Jacques Chirac’s idea of a Republic is no more Republican than the Republic of China, which is a totalitarian socialist federation under martial law.
9. Make election year 2008 a Waterloo for the Napoleonic dreams of its new Secretary General, remind New York that her mayor is not William Clinton and her city hall is not the United Nations Building.

10 - Remind Senators and representatives that the only substantive debate across the aisle on almost every issue and crisis is whether the solutions fall under federal or state jurisdiction. When a true federalist party arrives, without propagating a socialist economic policy that necessitates a federalist’s mega-monopoly of all power, and that party deals with an authentic Republican Party and not a deal-making, nouveau-riche contingent out of Wall Street that makes deals with Liberals, then America will have returned home to the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.

That’s enough to keep me busy for my first term. If all is well in 2012, I should have another four years to see that by 2016 the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem is opened and the feet that pass through it are those of a rainbow family of children who will most certainly carry the spirit of Reverend Martin Luther King’s Lord into the future.

Oh, by the way, read the aforementioned Jack Ryan novels. If you suspect I’m short on the fictional Ryan’s military background, I’ll simply hire Tom Clancy as an adviser to the President.