I Must Admit ...
... that Ron Paul's candidacy somewhat appeals to me. But, I'm hung up on a couple of aspects:
(1) Don't most serious people "graduate" from libertarianism roughly about the same time they graduate from college (or, in my case, law school)? At the very least, by the time you've had your first kid, libertarianism should be nothing more than a youthful utopian fantasy you believed in back when you had no real-world responsibilities.
(2) While I am perhaps open to (I'm not saying that I accept) the notion that the jihadists hate us because we're "over there", I need some clarification from Paul that he doesn't think (a) that the international community should have just ignored Saddam's illegal invasion and annexation of Kuwait back in 1990 (I will always believe that the first Gulf War was as close to a "just war" as you can get); (b) that we should not have invaded Afghanistan and overthrown the Taliban after 9/11 (again, a "just war" if ever there was one); and (c) that the U.S. should abandon its relationship with Israel in order to avoid conflict with Islamists in the region.
If I can be satisfied that Paul doesn't think the above things and that he isn't some sort of knee-jerk pacifist, then perhaps I could support his candidacy.
As for those pundits who are doing a major-league hatchet job on Paul and who would exclude him from future debates, just what are they afraid of? That Paul's ideas hold water? This blogger speaks for me (someone who supported the Iraq War but believes it has been egregiously mismanaged) in discussing Paul and last week's debate.
And with respect to Rudy's soundbite moment during the debate in which he attacked Paul, that's the typical bullying demagoguery for which Rudy's actually quite well-known. I don't throw the term "fascist" around lightly because that term is one the left is so fond of hurling at conservatives, but I struggle to come up with a better description for what Rudy (the most liberal among the bunch) sounds like. There's no doubt about it that Rudy is trying to scare conservative voters into voting for someone they'd never otherwise consider.
Labels: Elections, Republicans
posted by Pro Ecclesia 9:17 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Sorry Jay, but I don't think Ron can explain away some of the blatant racist remarks he allowed to be published in his political newsletter and I honestly don't buy his explanation:
[Ron Paul]: "They were never my words, but I had some moral responsibility for them . . . I actually really wanted to try to explain that it doesn't come from me directly, but they campaign aides said that's too confusing. 'It appeared in your letter and your name was on that letter and therefore you have to live with it.'" It is a measure of his stubbornness, determination, and ultimately his contrarian nature that, until this surprising volte-face in our interview, he had never shared this secret. It seems, in retrospect, that it would have been far, far easier to have told the truth at the time.
Given the relative ease with which one could resolve such a situation by firing the offending staffer and issuing a general apology (as opposed to letting the comments stand for nearly a decade), I don't think he's politically viable at this point.
On Ron Paul and Iraq (from his website):
The war in Iraq was sold to us with false information. The area is more dangerous now than when we entered it. We destroyed a regime hated by our direct enemies, the jihadists, and created thousands of new recruits for them.
I don't buy the "Bush lied" explanation on Iraq, and the claim that jihadists necessarily hated Saddam is specious, given Iraq's history of supporting and harboring terrorists. Read Stephen Hayes' investigations of this very subject in the Weekly Standard.
With respect to the other blogger's observation:
Bad execution does not negate noble intentions, but noble intentions also do not negate bad execution. We should have either fought the Iraq wars to win them or stayed out. We didn’t do either, either time.
Iraq War I was mismanaged in the fact that we should have taken out Saddam -- and Bush Sr. encouraged Iraqis to revolt, promising support, and reneged at the last minute (leaving them to the slaughter). Bush Jr. fulfilled an obligation his father couldn't keep. But Iraq II was mismanaged in the fact that we did not go in with nearly enough troops as was necessary to provide stability after the war was one. (The book Cobra II is a good, fair and comparatively unbiased assessment of what went wrong) . . .
U.S. handling of both wars is frustrating in both cases, yes, but at this point I'm not sure if Ron Paul's "we have no business being over there in the first place" response is the way to go.
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