Posted on 01/11/2007 4:32:27 PM PST by dogbyte12
It seems to me that the whole nature and concept of our enemy is beyond his ability to grasp.
Good night everyone, and remember, in the immortal words of Captain Ron Paul Jones, Libertarian Navy, "Give up the ship! Give up the ship!"
And it's not just political disagreement over the war - something you could have stated in calm and measured terms in a couple of posts. It's dozens upon dozens upon dozens of insult-laden rants at everyone who said anything remotely positive about the guy.
I clicked on the first thread and saw hundreds of freepers commenting on this story...interspersed with you and you alone responding to practically every single one of them with insults about Paul and also about them if they dared defend him.
So I looked for another thread and came to this one...only to find more of the same.
Whatever your beef with the guy is, it's not rational and it's time you take a reality check. The simple fact is that Ron Paul is only a congressman. He has no money. He has no national campaign organization. He has little name ID outside of Texas. He has no national media following him around like the major candidates. He's nowhere on the polls. He openly admits himself that his presidential bid is a longshot. And the primaries are over a year away.
Yet here you are running around in panic mode as if he's on verge of stealing the nomination away from one of the frontrunners, and seem to have made it your personal mission in life to attack and berate every single freeper who ever had so much as a passing thought about considering him. Surely you can think of a more constructive use of your time than trying to "sink" - and only in your mind at that - a candidacy that hasn't even gone anywhere and probably won't.
If you hate Ron Paul that much then don't vote for him. Chances are that most voters won't even know who he is, much less vote for him. And those who will vote for him will probably do so out of admiration for his iconoclastic political principles, meaning you aren't going to change their minds by hurling hundreds of insults their way.
Well said. What a reasoned, adult post. Thankyou for that. Ron Paul has good reasons for believing the USA shouldn't be in Iraq. He's not alone in them, and he spells out what they are.
He is also about the only politician who speaks out openly about statist government control and corruption, and for individual liberty and small, controlled government, things I would have expected to get him admired on FR.
As you say, the squealers are few in number, and pointlessly hysterical. I suspect the many that know and admire Paul for his values are just not bothering to come here.
He's right on Constitutional issues.That's fine if you think the response to 9/11 should be the issuance of Letters of Marque and Reprisal (which Ron Paul advocated) instead of dropping some Daisy Cutters on the Taliban (which Bush did).
. . . and that is fine if you like a declaration of war on a tactic, not a country. The "Letters of Marque and Reprisal" approach would be to set a bounty of $10 billion on Osamma's head and see how long it stayed on his shoulders. Lots cheaper than the WOT, and possibly more effective.If that didn't work it could only be because of action by a foreign government, with which we would then have a causus belli. It might have played out the same in reality, but politically it would have been advantageous. And it would (obviously) have been constitutional.
You live in a dream world.
Imagine for a minute if Bush's response to 9/11 was the equivalent of stapling WANTED posters on telephone poles and in the Post Office.
The real world is outside.
ditto :)
LOL!
Maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul is eyeing a bigger office. Paul, whose district includes Galveston County, has formed an exploratory committee to run for president.
Paul, who ran for president on the Libertarian ticket in 1988, plans to seek the Republican nomination in 2008.
Paul filed incorporation papers in Texas on Thursday to create a presidential exploratory committee that allows him and his supporters to collect money on behalf of his bid.
Kent Snyder, the chairman of Paul’s exploratory committee and a former staffer on Paul’s Libertarian campaign, said the congressman knows he’s a long shot.
“There’s no question that it’s an uphill battle, and that Dr. Paul is an underdog,” Snyder said. “But we think it’s well worth doing and we’ll let the voters decide.”
Paul, of Lake Jackson, acknowledges that the national GOP has never fully embraced him despite his nine terms in office under its banner. He gets little money from the GOP’s large traditional donors, but benefits from individual conservative and Libertarian donors outside Texas. He bills himself as “The Taxpayers’ Best Friend,” and is routinely ranked either first or second in the House of Representatives by the National Taxpayers Union, a national group advocating low taxes and limited government.
He describes himself as a lifelong Libertarian running as a Republican.
Paul was not available for comment Thursday, Snyder said.
But some of Paul’s supporters were intrigued by his potential candidacy.
“I have an immense amount of respect for Ron Paul,” said Chris Peden, a Friendswood city councilman. “Politics has a way of forcing people to go against their core principles for political gain. That has never been the case for Ron Paul.”
Even the chairman of the local Democratic Party welcomed Paul’s presidential bid, albeit with a tongue firmly in cheek.
“Well, it would give us a better shot at his congressional seat,” said Democratic Chairman Lloyd Criss. “He has no chance of winning. People should run for what they believe, and I am glad he is running.
“I am thinking of running (district court judge) Susan Criss for president. She will have a better chance of winning than Paul.”
Judge Criss happens to be the Democratic Party chair’s daughter.
Paul easily won re-election last November. He enjoys broad Republican voter support, but not that of the party brass. That may prove a problem when it comes to collecting campaign dollars for a presidential bid.
That’s the reason for testing the waters, Snyder said. The campaign will test its ability to attract financial and political support before deciding whether to launch a full-fledged campaign.
Snyder said Paul is running to win, not just to make a point or to try to ensure that his issues are addressed.
Paul is expected to formally announce his bid in the next week or two, Snyder said.
Snyder said Paul and his supporters are not intimidated by the presence of nationally known and better-financed candidates, such as Sen. John McCain of Arizona or former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.
“This is going to be a grassroots American campaign,” he said. “For us, it’s either going to happen at the grassroots level or it’s not.”
Paul limits his view of the role of the federal government to those duties laid out in the U.S. Constitution. As a result, he sometimes casts votes that appear at odds with his constituents and other Republicans. He was the only Republican congressman to vote against Department of Defense appropriations for fiscal year 2007.
The vote against the defense appropriations bill, he said, was because of his opposition to the war in Iraq, which he said was “not necessary for our actual security.”
On Thursday, Paul released a scathing attack on President Bush’s recently announced new strategy for Iraq, hinting that it could possibly lead to an attack on Iran.
“The talk of a troop surge and jobs program in Iraq only distracts Americans from the very real possibility of an attack on Iran,” Paul said in a speech on the House floor Thursday. “Our growing naval presence in the region and our harsh rhetoric toward Iran are unsettling.
“I am concerned, however, that a contrived Gulf of Tonkin-type incident may occur to gain popular support for an attack on Iran.”
Rep. Paul is my congressman and I like him, but his above comments show that he is running in the wrong Party and is increasingly becoming an embarrassment to his Republican supporters.
snore
God love ya for trying, Ron. You have my vote.
Like, er, George Washington? Read his farewell speech to Congress and get back to me. I love our military,(I am headed down to Bragg on the 27th to see a dear friend of mine graduate from Special Forces school), but we have no business getting them involved in half the crap we do. They are best to work justice and retribution, smash em up, and say "we will be back for more if you don't behave yourselves and do what we do.... LEAVE US ALONE!" Empire maintainers are hated, despised, attacked at every opportunity, and ultimately blamed for the cowardice and foolishness of their political leaders.
Ron Paul believes we should mind our own business, and he believes the US Government should actually PAY ATTENTION to the limits proscribed for it by the Constitution. I find it difficult to argue with that.
Post 168: "It's about divining their intent if they were writing the document today..."
Post 174: "There are strict constructionists, (and I consider myself one of them)..."
These two theories of Constitutional interpretation are at odds with each other. You can't hold them both simultaneously (unless you suffer from multiple personality disorder).
Strict constructionists don't think it is possible to divine original intent and focus on the what the document says, not on what the original intent might be. This neatly sets aside whose original intent one is supposed to be divining since Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison (for example) had many and varied disagreements on what powers a Federal government should properly hold.
Original intentists don't give a hoot about what the text says. They only care about what they currently think the various authors of the Constitution might have wanted it to say. This is a very slipperly slope, since one can argue pretty much any interpretation, leaving open the question, why have a written Constitution at all?
jas3
I disagree with that. Obviously, what the document says is the controlling factor, but it's a rather brief document and it doesn't go into much detail.
That's why a study of the Federalist Papers gives an insight as to what principles were being established in those few lines. That's still a strict constructionist interpretation.
What is not "strict constructionist" is inventing a new principle not mentioned in the Constitution and giving it constitutional status.
I've never been a fan of isolationism. We "minded our own business" for too long, and that got too many people killed.
I think strict constructionists DO divine original intent. Words are only a combination of letters, so of course one has to make a determination of what they mean. And they only can mean what was intended at the time they were written.
If there were a constitutional right "to be gay", it should be only construed as a right to happiness, not homosexuality. Okay, bad example, but I think it illustrates my point.
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