[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Paul: I have never watched a full debate with him in it, and I cam away unimpressed, especially given the hype. His voice squeaky and his manner twitchy, which gives him no command. I also thought his response to “conspiracy theories” was hilarious - he thinks there are plans that are secret and no one will talk about, but they aren’t conspiracies. An unserious candidate, and always has been. [/quote]
His answer to the conspiracy question was absolutely dead-on. It was a superb answer to a difficult question - one that had the potential to do significant damage if he fumbled it before a national audience.
What he said, in effect, was that he’s not fighting against any particular “conspiracy theory” so much as an IDEOLOGY (his exact phrase). “Conspiracy theory” has all sorts of negative implications. There is simply no way to publicly endorse the notion of such a theory and remain a viable candidate.
Paul understood this, and thus had to phrase his answer so as to be consistent with his previous statements, yet not turn off potential voters. He did just that, providing a reasoned, well-thought out response.
[quote]tedro wrote:
I thought McCain looked very good and made Paul look like an idiot. He was just stating things as they are.[/quote]
What he was stating was nothing more than the classic, oft-repeated, neocon refrain: “If we had only stopped Hitler in Munich…”
The only possible way to think that McCain made Paul look stupid with that line is if you subscribe to the neocon version of history. Ron Paul, as a paleocon, obviously holds a different notion of what triggered WWII. I hope you were aware of this, and didn’t think that Ron Paul was just pulling things out of his ass, but at any rate, you know now.
Paul could have replied to McCain by stating that the abandonment of neutrality in WWI directly paved the way for WWII. However, I’m glad he chose not to say that, because most Americans are not ready to hear that degree of truth about their country.
The paleocon version of history, endorsed by Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and Lew Rockwell et al., holds that interventionism creates more problems than it solves. It creates monsters and “blowback” which come back to haunt us later.
America abandoned it’s neutrality in WWI and pursued a very belligerent policy towards Imperial Germany (this was BEFORE the US had officially entered the war). After the war, the Allies tried to place the blame entirely on Germany, who had acted quite honorably, by all accounts (even by the testimony of individual British soldiers on the front lines).
Germany had followed accepted conventions of war which the US and Britain had ignored. Lusitania was a MILITARY SHIP, carrying arms and munitions, with specific orders to ram or depth charge any German U-Boat whose captain had the courtesy to surface his vessel. The Allied Powers got exactly what they wanted…and the America people were duped into a war that they had opposed.
In WWII, the same scenario unfolded. Despite a thriving non-interventionist movement in the US, the American administration once again pursed a belligerent diplomatic policy towards Japan, despite it’s “neutral” status. In the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, FDR did absolutely everything he could to goad the Japanese into “striking the first blow”.
And they did. The rest was history. The scenario unfolded exactly the way it was intended to by the people in charge.
The US defeated Nazism…so that Communism could ravage Eastern Europe and Asia for half a century. Today, even mainstream historians acknowledge that Stalin’s Russia would have acted as a buffer against Hitler’s expansion in Europe.
Hitler proved unable to take the Isle of Britain, and certainly never would have reached the US (it has been recognized by world statesmen since the time of the American Revolution that the United States could not and would not be territorially conquered by any European power).
After WWII, we hunted communism around the globe for decades, deposing democratically-elected leaders in favor of puppet dictators and funding violent insurgency movements.
Today, we find ourselves overextended, underappreciated, and going completely broke, desperately trying to slay demons of our own creation.
Welcome to Ron Paul’s version of history.
Still feel like listening to Old Man McVain?