Ron Paul sucks.
What? You want me to elaborate? Okay, let’s start with this quote from John Derbyshire (of “the best thing he ever did was get kicked in the head by Bruce Lee” fame) :
Ron Paul believes a lot of what you believe, and what I believe. You don’t imagine he’s going to be the 44th POTUS, but you kind of hope he does well none the less.
And why not? Look at those policy positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO; end the War on Drugs; overturn Roe v. Wade; repeal federal restrictions on gun ownership; fence the borders; deport illegals; stop lecturing foreign governments about human rights; let the Middle East go hang. What’s not to like?
First of all, abolishing the IRS is a batshit crazy idea. The idea that you can fix a problem by either abolishing the agency with problems (IRS, Fed) or pulling out completely (UN, NATO) is anarchy. It doesn’t make the need for those organizations go away, it just replaces one set of problems with a worse set of problems.
Ron Paul is one of those “free market” zealots (a scary breed of faith-based politician) who honestly believe unregulated capitalism is the cure for all of society’s ills. We tried that in the late 1800’s and we ended up with the Gilded Age, steel monopolies, children working in factories, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, etc. This “Invisible Hand” bullshit would lead us back to that awful time. Ron Paul’s rhetoric sounds good when you’re trying to get a crowd of people to pump their fists, but in terms of actually solving problems, it’s lunacy.
Another thing, and this can’t be repeated often enough, that Ron Paul caucuses with the Republican Party. The same one that wants to ban gay marriage, ban abortion, has exploded the deficit, etc. Odd that a principled, small government maverick would aid a party that has abandoned every ideal he stands for. It’s enough to make you wonder if “libertarians” like Ron Paul aren’t just a bunch of phonies or sellouts who will support a party whose platform they find abhorrent as long as they get their precious tax cuts.
Of course, the way liberals are jumping on the Ron Paul bandwagon, I can’t help but wonder if their support is equally based on a myopic one-issue platform, even if it means, for example, we get stuck with a small government conservative president who would likely oppose any effort to provide universal healthcare. As long as he ends the war, he can roll back Roe vs. Wade all he wants.
Normally, I’d just end the Ron Paul bashing there, but there’s so much more to cover, like this but from a recent NY Times profile :
A larger vulnerability may be that voters want more pork-barrel spending than Paul is willing to countenance. In a rice-growing, cattle-ranching district, Paul consistently votes against farm subsidies. In the very district where, on the night of Sept. 8, 1900, a storm destroyed the city of Galveston, leaving 6,000 dead, and where repairs from Hurricane Rita and refugees from Hurricane Katrina continue to exact a toll, he votes against FEMA and flood aid.
FEMA and flood aid are pork? I guess he gets points for not being one of those libertarians who favors abolishing everything only to backpedal when you start pointing out all of the things we really need the government to do, but voting against FEMA? Moreover, why is he the lone dissenter in these cases?
In 1999, he was the only naysayer in a 424-1 vote in favor of casting a medal to honor Rosa Parks. Nothing against Rosa Parks: Paul voted against similar medals for Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. He routinely opposes resolutions that presume to advise foreign governments how to run their affairs: He has refused to condemn Robert Mugabe’s violence against Zimbabwean citizens (421-1), to call on Vietnam to release political prisoners (425-1) or to ask the League of Arab States to help stop the killing in Darfur (425-1).
And let’s not forget that he’s a racist too. DailyKos diarist phenry found this choice nugget from the “Ron Paul Political Report” :
Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficultly avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists — and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.
Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action…. Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the “criminal justice system,” I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.
If similar in-depth studies were conducted in other major cities, who doubts that similar results would be produced? We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.
Oddly enough, Paul’s excuse for this stuff now is that his offensive articles were ghost-written. Don’t worry folks, Ron Paul just outsourced his racist rants.
A friend of mine was in an argument with a Ron Paul cultist the other day whose answer to criticism is that we’re just scared of “people with big ideas”. You know what’s even scarier? People with bad ideas.