10s across the board; no splash.
Some people seem to have misunderstood exactly what the Ron Paul campaign is all about. I don’t fault them for misunderstanding Paul or his campaign as he is very clearly making a run for the Presidency and doing all of the campaigning and fundraising that goes with that.
Larry Auster has made several posts about Paul’s shifting alliances and his cozying up to whichever group provides the most political expediency. Auster compares Paul to Murray Rothbard, the famed anarcho-libertarian who has heavily influenced Paul. Rothbard is famous for sidling up to various left-wing student factions in the 1960s and for shifting his stance on immigration during the early 1990s to come more in line with the Pat Buchanan paleoconservative portion of the right wing. From Auster’s site:
“At the time of the ‘racist’ newsletters,” the reader writes, “Paul was building bridges to the David Duke crowd. Now he is appealing to a left-wing, OWS, anti-Iraq War crowd, so he is pro-immigrant, anti-anti-Muslim, anti-DADT, etc.”
If we look at Paul as strictly a viable option for the Presidency, this would pose a problem. But if we look at Paul as a messenger – which is how I view him – then we should not be surprised or taken aback by his strategies to leverage various alliances to spread his core message of fiscal stability, liberty over equality, limiting bureaucracy, ending wars, and, most importantly, auditing/ending the Federal Reserve. Whether we accept the entire package that Paul offers – and I don’t (characterizing the justice system as racist is a political ploy and ignores statistics) – we have to recognize that he is injecting arguments into the debate that nobody would be discussing. I think Paul telegraphs his long-term view (read: non-viable politicism) here:
“There’s a different understanding now. There’s a lot of people talking about free-market economics rather than Keynesian welfarism and interventionism,” Paul said on ABC’s “This Week.” “There is an intellectual revolution going on with the young people. There are people who have sat on the sidelines for years.”
…
“It has not been translated into an absolute political change,” he said. “But believe me, the intellectual revolution is going on, and that has to come first before you see the political changes. That’s where I’m very optimistic.”
I’ve mentioned being post-political. By that I simply mean that I – and many Ron Paul supporters – are less interested in the man and more interested in the message. This creates a situation where I support Ron Paul but don’t support Ron Paul. I have a Ron Paul bracelet and a couple of t-shirts, but I don’t actually want him to win anything. Why? First, I think of the core ideas he has been pushing would suffer much like a cake brought out of the oven too quickly. Such ideas have to bake in to the electorate; they can’t be forced by fiat. Ron Paul is part of the baking process, and in order for his ideas to seep in to the main, he has to at least play at wanting to stay in that big giant oven known as the electoral process.
And Paul signals his true intentions with meta statements rather than political ones. He’s optimistic about political changes and ideas – not about what specifically he will do for the country once he is in office. Of any candidates, he has a truly long-term – post-political, post-electoral – view.
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Yes.
On reflection, I think you’re right.
His supporters are better off if he doesn’t win. Not yet.
Auster seems like an Israel firster. They generally don’t like Ron Paul and can always trump up some charges to justify hating him…
The hell, WHY is it wrong to be against the Iraq war?! They didn’t even have beefs with Israel, they hated Iran more. Afghanistan is one thing, that was an unstable shithole before we got there, but Iraq actually had a decent semblance of stability for its people.
His son Rand is a senator. We could see him make a run in the near future.
Camp Lo?
What about Coolie High?
lol
@Kaz- Egypt was stable too, and didnt cause trouble for their neighbor countries. No, we didn’t invade or bomb their country; merely sticking a knife in Mubarak’s back got it done.
By getting the ideas out to the grass roots, but not actually winning the contest, Paul and his supporters avoid responsibility for the eventual collapse, while at the same time positioning the philosophy as one of the few credible alternatives remaining once people suffer enough to realize that the Keynesian/Monetarist models don’t work, and that the established political parties are two sides of the same coin.
Ron Paul could never be president because he doesn’t want to “crack down” on anything. And there is nothing Americans love more than bloated pigs in SWAT gear blasting into someone’s house and killing the dog because of some random “crackdown.” If you look around, there’s always something new we have to “crack down” on. Back in the 1960s, NYC cops regularly stormed bars in Greenwich Village, where they made sure gay men didn’t dance together because of a ‘crackdown.” When that ceased to be allowed, they found other things to crackdown on: drugs, raw milk, butter knives in schools, you name it. This has become so ingrained in the fabric of the country that any candidate proposing nebulous “freedom” is considered a laughing stock or dangerous.
In fact, I would like to see the name of the country change from USA to “Crackdown.”
This fanatical intolerance may have its roots in the MA Bay Colony. Since the early 1990s the most consistent targets have been “racists” (e.g., Ruby Ridge),”religious nuts” (e.g., Branch Davidians), and the Militia-Patriot-”Sovereign Citizen” crowd-all of whom are vilified by the DHS-ADL-SPLC:. The drug war keeps going mainly because it’s good business for the “law enforcement” wing of the Permanent Government.
Who then will you support in November?
Hector:
I’m not sure. I’ll probably vote Romney, but I kind of want Obama to win because I want to see him turn hard left and show his true colors. I admit that this is a selfish desire, but I’m a little less averse to experimentation. I don’t have too much to lose. But since I think Romney will be the GOP guy, I’ll vote for him.
Why not then just write in RP, and further the depth of the movement that you propose is happening? I had considered voting for Roms, provided he gets the nomination, but I don’t know that I’d ever be able to wash the taste from my mouth…in any case, there are many arguments to be made that he’ll be as bad, if not worse, than the big O. Especially wrt foreign policy, which is bleeding us out right now.