RON PAUL IS AN ABOMINATION….READ WHY
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The Top 8 Reasons Ron Paul Is an Abomination Who Should Be Cast Out of Decent Society
Posted By Calvin Freiburger On October 17, 2010 @ 9:00 am In Agendas of the Left,Anti-Semitism,Anti-War Movement,Conservatism,Conspiracy Theories,Email,Feature,Homeland Security,Middle East,Military & Defense Issues,Politics,Racism,Radical Islam,Terrorism (Islamic),United Nations,War on Terror | 18 Comments
Let’s talk about Ron Paul. It’s no secret that the Texas congressman isn’t the most popular guy in this corner of the blogosphere, though despite NewsRealBlog’s many, many posts explaining why, we’re still subjected to wild speculation about our “real” motives—the Paulite hordes routinely diagnose their opponents’ “true” motives as everything from hating limited government to the will of our (imagined) Jewish masters.
Considering that domestic policy—where Paul’s talk of the Constitution lines up pretty well with the rest of the Right—is currently where the electoral action is, now’s a good time to make perfectly clear exactly what’s wrong with Paul. The inane misdirection has gone on long enough; it’s time to set the record straight with Ron Paul’s top eight greatest hits.
8. Founding Faker
A big part of Paul’s appeal among conservatives and libertarians is the public image he’s cultivated as one of the last remaining adherents and spokesmen of the Founding Fathers. That’s a good marketing strategy, but unfortunately, in Paul’s case it’s also bogus—on foreign policy, Ron Paul doesn’t faithfully apply the Founders’ words, he hijacks them for his own ends.
Yes, George Washington warned the country not to needlessly entangle herself in foreign affairs of no concern to America, and John Quincy Adams told us not to simply go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” But from these general principles, Paul and his cultists have inferred drastic conclusions that have little to no support in our forefathers’ actual words. Whatever one thinks of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the fact is that they were directly motivated not by imperialism or utopianism, but by America’s national security interests, as counterattacks against the global Islamic movement that struck the US on 9/11.
Whether or not these wars were wise or just is a question of what the contemporary evidence from the region said, not a proposition directly deducible from the Founders’ writings. At some level, Paul knows this—which is why he voted to invade Afghanistan and why he ignores the evidence of Iraq’s WMD pursuits and ties to terrorism.
7. Lincoln Derangement Syndrome
In my mind, one of the biggest absurdities of modern American politics is the intensity with which Abraham Lincoln is hated in the paleoconservative/libertarian circles in which Ron Paul runs. Lincoln Derangement Syndrome stems from that corner of the Right’s misunderstanding of the relationship between state and federal power and the nature of the Union, which has led some to see Lincoln’s waging of the Civil War as the beginning of big government in America (no it wasn’t).
Paul complains that Lincoln was “determined to fight a bloody civil war” to “prove that we had a very, very strong centralized federal government,” even though he could have simply bought all of the South’s slaves for a fraction of the war’s cost. Of course, Paul’s math is wrong, and so is his history—Lincoln actually looked into doing just that, but it proved to be a dead end. Further, the assertion that Lincoln wanted the war is simply wrong. The Union was split because a portion of the country wanted to preserve slavery, and refused to accept the election of a president that respected the institution’s constitutionality but opposed its further expansion into new territory. That Paul ignorantly dismisses one of the greatest crises any president has ever faced as a bid to “get rid of the original intent of the republic” is another instance of Paul abusing history and undermining America’s greatest allies to liberty while claiming to stand for both.
6. Fair-Weather Spending Foe
Ever wonder why Paul keeps getting reelected? Believe it or not, it probably has something to do with the fact that he’s not quite as pure as his good-government posturing suggests. It turns out the good doctor plays the Capitol Hill game more than he lets on, collecting federal pork for his district with the best of ‘em. Paul’s rationalization doesn’t explain his favored projects’ constitutionality, and amounts to little more than, money’s getting wasted anyway, so it might as well be wasted on behalf of the people who can vote for me. As Leon Wolf says on RedState:
Ron Paul’s idea of fiscal responsibility is to lard up appropriations bills that he knows will pass with pork for his district, and then cast a meaningless “no” vote on the bill as a whole. This is a great tactic for duping people who don’t believe the 16h Amendment to the Constitution is constitutional, but not such a great tactic for actually reducing the overall size of government.
5. Leftist, Not Libertarian
Redirecting federal tax dollars to his constituents isn’t the only way Paul’s conduct doesn’t square with any recognizable center-right political philosophy. In defending the proposed Ground Zero Mosque, the congressman blasted critics as enemies of freedom, dismissing their acknowledgment of the legal right to build the mosque as “lip service given to the property rights position.” As I said at the time:
In Ron Paul’s world, the right to do something also includes the right to never be criticized for it. Of course, this is logically absurd: the Ku Klux Klan has the legal right to buy property, too, but that doesn’t mean I’m obligated to keep quiet when they move in next door. This is why Paul’s brand of non-judgmental libertarianism, which seems increasingly difficult to distinguish from leftism with each Paul post, is ultimately worthless: by demanding personal indifference to morally repugnant acts in addition to legal indifference, it all but ensures evil’s ascendance.As National Review explains, there are all sorts of things Americans may legitimately, constitutionally do to resist the Cordoba House’s construction—public condemnation and argument, protests, boycotting businesses that aid the project—that in no way endanger liberty. After all, isn’t the whole point of limited-government philosophies like conservatism and libertarianism that you don’t need government to solve every problem, because the people can solve them through persuasion and free association? If Ron Paul’s America would deprive the American people of both avenues, perhaps libertarians should reconsider the faith they place in their hero.
4. A Crackpot’s Best Friend
Every large group of people is going to have a few bad apples. Good people might occasionally accept donations from someone who turns out to be seedy. And well-meaning politicians might even mistakenly sit down with a TV or radio personality they shouldn’t. For most politicians, these things tend to be isolated incidents, and it would be unfair to associate them with the fringe.
Ron Paul is different. As extensively documented here and here, radical associations aren’t an isolated incident or two, but a long, disturbing pattern. He pals around with 9/11 Truther Alex Jones, invites Truthers like Jesse Ventura to speak at his events, and on numerous occasions calls for a new investigation into what “really” happened on September 11. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists have worked for his campaign. He speaks to the John Birch Society. David Duke supports him, and the racists at Stormfront fundraise for him. He endorses books edited by anti-Semites and featuring the writings of former PLO gun-runners. His work has been published in Holocaust-denial newsletters.
He infamously had his own series of newsletters that frequently ventured into prejudice and conspiracy-theories. It’s that newsletter scandal—or rather, Reason Magazine’s reporting on it—that has revealed the likely key to Paul’s endless flirtation with extremism:
The newsletters’ obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic “paleolibertarian” movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new “paleo” coalition.Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990 Liberty essay entitled “The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism.” To Rockwell, the LP was a “party of the stoned,” a halfway house for libertines that had to be “de-loused.” To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. “State-enforced segregation,” Rockwell wrote, “was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one’s own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse.”The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement.” Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an “Outreach to the Rednecks,” which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an “unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.”
In that light, Paul’s record makes perfect sense: it’s a strategy to prop himself up with a coalition of the paranoid, prejudiced, and conspiratorial. And so far, it’s worked out pretty well for him. For rational, principled political discourse? Not so much.
3. Israel’s Worst Nightmare
At best, Paul’s insistence that America drop its support for Israel is another naïve misapplication of Washingtonian principles (I suspect Washington just might have made a distinction between supporting another nation’s mere interests and supporting her survival, especially when that nation happens to be a rare ally in a global struggle against an enemy that wants both of us dead). But Paul’s opposition to Israel runs deeper than that. Paul shamelessly lies about the basic facts regarding Israel’s national security measures and struggles against her enemies (we could be charitable and chalk it up to scandalously-unprofessional ignorance, but then we’d have to ask why he never acknowledges it when these falsehoods are brought to his attention).
And as NRB’s Jeanette Pryor has discussed here and here, Paul promotes the conspiracy theory that “neoconservative” foreign policy is dominated by a shadowy class of ruthless, utopian imperialists who “unconditionally support Israel and have a close alliance with the Likud Party.” Paul alleges that, for decades, American foreign policy has been driven, first and foremost, by Israel’s desires. I wonder how he feels about the fact that his son Rand has been meeting with AIPAC, the local arm our secret Israeli masters (not to mention other dreaded neocons)?
2. Evil’s Unofficial Spokesman
Several of the prior entries touch upon lies and fallacies that play directly into our enemies’ hands, but the funny thing about Ron Paul is, you never quite know when you’ve reached the bottom of the barrel. Paul can always be counted on to find the enemy’s version of events more credible than America’s. Case in point: his chronic dishonesty on behalf of the government of Iran. He insists Iran only wants nukes because they feel threatened by the big, bad US of A. He predicts the feds are on the verge of staging a fake incident between US and Iranian forces as an excuse to go to war, and speculated that might have been the case when our ships had a near-confrontation with theirs in January 2008 (shockingly, no war ensued). He says he “woudn’t do that much about Iranian nukes,” and has made numerous glaring misstatements about Iran’s nuclear program and cooperation with the United Nations to make that position seem slightly less terrifying than it really is.
If the prospect of Ron Paul as commander-in-chief doesn’t scare the living daylights out of you, nothing will.
1. He’s Playing You Like a Drum
Ron Paul is never going to be the President of the United States. You know it, I know it, and Ron Paul knows it. In the 2008 race, his poll numbers were consistently pitiful, his much-hyped straw-poll victory at CPAC 2010 didn’t actually mean much (straw polls tend to be determined by how many supporters can be bussed in, and it’s counterbalanced by a lousy showing in the Values Voters ’10 straw poll anyway), and his most recent poll showing in the 2012 polls was a mighty fifth place.
Sure, he’s benefitted a little lately because foreign policy is no longer center stage and nobody else on the Right screams presidential material. But it’s not enough to make it to the White House. Try as they might, it’s extremely unlikely that the Paulestinians can get enough conservatives and Republicans to ignore foreign policy entirely to secure the GOP nomination, and he simply has too much baggage of the crazy, irresponsible, bigoted, and dangerous variety for average Americans to take him seriously once they get to know him (you think NRB’s been tough on the guy? Just imagine what the Democratic National Committee would do). And an independent or third party run would be an invitation to divide the conservative vote and guarantee the victory of another leftist president.
Ron Paul may be nutty, but he’s not stupid. Like any good demagogue, he’s playing to his audience’s fears, as well as their hopes. Maybe he’d like to be president, but he also knows that his dual role as herald and savior has paid off pretty well, too—the man’s made a cottage industry out of becoming America’s premiere voice of paranoia, and it’s won him books sales, hyperactive financial support, an extremely safe House seat, and a cult of intensely-loyal groupies that puts Obama-mania to shame.
That just might be the most unseemly thing about Ron Paul: all the lying, smearing, and fear-mongering he’s done isn’t even in the service of some terribly-warped or misguided ideal, just the cynical meal ticket of a slimy politician that a vocal, devoted minority has fallen for hook, line, and sinker. For taking advantage of so many people through such dishonorable means, Ron Paul deserves the condemnation and rejection of all men and women of goodwill.
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Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College. He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.
Article printed from NewsReal Blog: http://www.newsrealblog.com
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