Ron Paul doesn't grasp what America is
There's a great piece in NRO by Jamie Fly which tries to figure out Ron Paul's foreign policy. It's only tangentially related to Israel (we are mentioned). But I thought this bit at the end was spot-on. [Ron Paul] doesn’t grasp what America is, what we have always stood for, and what our global responsibilities are as the world’s sole superpower, and he clearly has no sense of who actually threatens our way of life. A country governed by a Paul administration would lead to a much more dangerous world, embolden our enemies, and likely result in significant American casualties.Amen.
As Ronald Reagan eloquently put it in his speech at Pointe du Hoc on the 40th anniversary of D-Day:We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.Ron Paul has not learned that lesson. Lucky for the country, he’s unlikely to become president, but it’s heartening to see his rivals have begun to point out, as Newt Gingrich recently did, that “Ron Paul’s views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American.”
The same should be said of those who support him, regardless of what happens in Iowa. The Republican party does not need these voters, many of whom are independents or Democrats unlikely to support the eventual nominee. The libertarian policies they advocate, whether isolationist or noninterventionist, only serve to undermine the party of Reagan’s tradition of peace through strength. This is a tradition which, thankfully, all of Paul’s competitors have embraced, and it is the tradition that will guide the foreign policy of the next Republican occupant of the White House, whoever that may be.
Labels: American exceptionalism, Ron Paul
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:23 PM
1 Comments:
Ron Paul opposes (publicly) force of arms to retain the secessionist states in the Union under Lincoln.
He opposes American entry into WWII (notwithstanding that America entered the war only after Pearl Harbor and a unilateral declaration of war by Hitler) because he's convinced in that walnut sized noggin of his that FDR was behind Pearl Harbor or Wilson's imperial war forced Germany's hand or something (something as in ... jooz).
He thinks, and this is also on public record that Osama bin Laden had the moral right to commit 9-11 because America "killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis every year," oh, and were in Osama s "Holy Land in Saudi Arabia" and, ah, "didn't give the Palestinians a fair shake" so bin Laden "got annoyed". He opposes sanctions against Iran because they are "an act of war" and Iran isn't going after nuclear weapons and if it is, so what, it feels threatened.
Ron Paul's pedagogic libertarian doxology inhabits a fictive America that would have been unrecognizable (and anathema) to the Founding Fathers and their successors who had to secure American freedom against very real foreign interference right on our doorstep in forging a continental USA.
But then, given his support for a hands-off stance toward the Confederacy, slavery, Jim Crow, and Hitler Ron has a uniquely idiosyncratic perspective.
He is a disgrace to the GOP. For now, the party of Lincoln has morphed into something at once angry, twixt and between, creepy, and self-trivializing.
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