We Can Do It

Ron is right when it comes to Iraq. (I was especially impressed by his response to the fatuous question posed by the Fox reporter, " So Congressman Paul, you're basically saying that we should take our marching orders from al Qaeda?")

I'm not so sure, though, about his approach to other issues.

PS: After hearing Huckabee's pandering response ("We have to be one nation, under God.") I'm reminded how refreshing it is that Dr. Paul -- at least, to my knowledge -- refuses to use God as a kind of bargaining chip in his campaign.)

I don't think there is a single Ron Paul supporter who doesn't have some small disagreement with the man's positions or reasoning somewhere. It's simply a case of everyone else being so utterly and completely wrong about everything that the choice is obvious.

A Ron Paul presidency would mean an immediate end to our military occupation of Iraq.

And it would hopefully mean the demise of the fascistic paramilitary corporation Blackwater, with its 500 million in government contracts---not including its secret 'black' budget. This 'force' is on the verge of getting the green light to perform 'operations' here in the U.S. if deemed 'necessary' by the federal government. And they are, to a great degree, answerable to no law, civil or military.

KD, your last comments inspires me to post the following, from Tom Wolfe.

Wolfe wrote about a panel discussion at Princeton in 1965, in which the participants included Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist magazine, Günter Grass, and Wolfe:

"The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn't make any sense out of it. . . . This was the mid-1960's. . . . [T]he folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy's body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester's book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights. . . .
Support [for Wolfe's view that fascism wasn't coming to America] came from a quarter I hadn't counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.
"For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn't you say!"

I believe your worries are a bit greater than the facts justify, KD. But you're part of a long tradition, to be sure.

Thanks for the quote from Tom Wolfe -- he's always a pleasure to read.

Here's something on Blackwater:

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0907/091207kp1.htm

Let's not drown ourselves in Blackwater, folks; this post's about Ron Paul!

Point well taken, Andrew.

I only wanted to point out a government funded corporation like Blackwater -- the personification of war as a business, violence as a service -- will have no place in a Ron Paul presidency.

I fully agree: It's time we came home!

Isn't the Vatican position that we should stay until peace is secured? Let's start listening to them a little more, and not look at things ideologically...

Andrew, although Dr. Paul's position on Iraq and the so-called "War on Terror" is morally sound, these words from a college senior are worthy of consideration:

"Much of Ron Paul's popularity is due to his unwillingness to deal in political buzzwords and jargon, and his most popular positions are a refreshing appeal to America's common sense. But unfortunately, like so many things in today's attention deficient world, it is too easy to make a snap judgement of Dr. Paul based on his sound bites and YouTube clips. For all of their intellectual appeal, there are reasons why Libertarians have uniformly been hapless also-rans in every important election, and most of these flaws can be recognized in a perusal of Dr. Paul's campaign promises.

The dismantling of America's regulatory system and the dramatic decrease in our government's bureaucracy, Paul proposes, would be an unmitigated disaster up and down the line. The tragic collapse in July of a Minnesota bridge and its subsequent investigation proved that many areas of America require more oversight and funding, not less. The lacking services of vitally important federal agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency or consumer protections, reflect their neglected fate as little scraps of the federal budget. And though there is no doubt that every branch of the government's immense bureaucratic structure is in need of better efficiency and reform, Dr. Paul's argument that regulations and investigations put a damper on corporate profit and freedom do not hold up to any sort of scrutiny. Were it not for the new safeguards put in place to monitor the amount of pollutants in our drinking water, you could be sure that we would learn quickly that one cannot rely on the goodness of corporate hearts to self-police their own interests.

Most every Republican and Democrat knows that Ron Paul's promise to abolish the IRS on the first day of his taking office is preposterous. Defense of the Constitution and the liberty we all love (and for which Dr. Paul is a true champion), can no longer be funded by import duties and excise taxes as it was in the days of Franklin and Jefferson.
If money is the 'life-blood' of man's existence, as Ayn Rand's hero of 'Atlas Shrugged' grandly proclaims, and if it is our 'social barometer,' how can we institute policy that unduly punishes, by the law of diminishing returns, the nation's neediest citizens. Freedom from hunger and fear is just as important to the American people as the freedom to make a buck.

America is better for having Ron Paul in the thick of the political fray. He is a man of intelligence and vision in a crowd of pretty faces and speeches. Here's hoping that the thorn in the side of America's political establishment does a lot more damage before he's through."

I fully understand disappointment, frustration, and even anguish regarding the Bush administration and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but supporting a candidate from the political realm of crackpottery is not an appropriate response. In any case, the Ron Paul candidacy is an exercise in futility -- he has no chance of securing the nomination of either of the major parties. The Democrats probably will nominate Bill Clinton's husband, while the Republican nomination is still up for grabs. Right now Giuliani and Romney are ahead in the polls, but a lot can happen between now and the start of the 2008 presidential campaign. A lot, that is, except for the nomination of a person who, if he's known at all, is generally thought of as fringe-ist. Really, if I were to take an absolutist stand on principle, the fringe candidate I'd probably vote for is Alan Keyes, who has about as much chance of winning as Ron Paul. And, while I'm not happy with President Bush's foreign policy, Ron Paul's comments quoted above display a shocking degree of naivete. If you think the current administration is a disaster, just think how much worse it would be under the Paul administration.

I don't think traditional conservative ideas are "crackpottery" but chacun à son goût...