Posted on 03/19/2014 11:46:02 PM PDT by Lou Budvis
BERKELEY, Calif. — Delivering a rare speech for a Republican at this bastion of liberalism, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday was given multiple standing ovations by the left-wing audience after railing against government surveillance and warning the students: “Your right to privacy is under assault.”
“I am here to tell you that if you own a cell phone, you’re under surveillance,” he told the crowd.
Paul’s address at the Berkeley Forum on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley focused on the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone metadata and the debate over privacy.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
Morale conservatism? You probably aren’t even Christian, just a RINO. I on the other hand am, and after Roe vs. Wade, I don’t want the Federal government to dictate what is morally acceptable behavior in my community. I want that to reside at the state level, where it should be. The only way to restore morality at the national level is make people face the consequences of sin, which means eliminate the welfare state, hence big goverment— a return to small goverment is the only way out. I will say and do what I please.
How is immigration part of social conservatism? Immigration is an economic issue more than anything else. If you’re basing opposition to illegal immigration on the Bible, please cite chapter and verse where Jesus would support such an idea.
What, *exactly* is a “dangerous isolationist?”
After three failed major wars and a dozen smaller expenditures of blood and treasure in the last 25 years, what would be so “dangerous” about isolationism?
It is what Geo. Washington offered as advice in his farewell address. It worked quite well for the American people until Ivy League professors-turned-presidents got us into WWI. Since then, we’ve been funnelling young men non-stop into wars for the benefit of other people, with huge amounts of money following.
At some point, people have to get their heads out of their rumps and realize that a) we’re broke and b) we’re broke. We can’t afford foreign adventure any more.
“What, *exactly* is a ‘dangerous isolationist?’”
Rand Paul and obviously you are examples of dangerous isolationists. It was his type of idiocy that allowed Adolf Hitler and the Japanese to grow strong in the 30s.
Also, don’t you DARE deflame George Washington by quoting him. You do NOT understand what he meant....especially that it MUST be understood in the context of the time he spoke it.
“Morale conservatism? You probably aren’t even Christian, just a RINO.”
Read my “about” page.
What allowed Japan and Nazi Germany to rise to power was the sort of stupid, academic-pollyanna view of the world arising after WWI. The Treaty of Versailles and the ruinous war reparations imposed on Germany brought about a person like Hitler, and, not to put too fine a point on it, also helped bring about the Great Depression. Post-WWI was gun control on a global scale, and Chicago shows how well that works on a city-wide scale. It doesn’t. Never has, never will.
I know quite well what Washington meant, and he meant it in terms of the sort of stupidity that got us into WWI. We should not have meddled in a war between a bunch of inbred cousin-humping monarchies in Europe. If Germany had actually induced Mexico to make a grab for the southwest again, then we would have had actual cause to get involved - to take over Mexico. But to get in the midst of the war between cousin-humpers? No. That’s exactly what Washington warned against: monarchies and cousin-humpers in Europe using the US to their own ends, for their own purposes, at our expense.
WWII happened as a result of the stupidity that arose after WWI, in particular, the “League of Nations” and all the idiotic academics that fawned over it... much as they do today over the UN.
I’ll repeat again, and this time I’ll type very slowly so you can understand it:
We’re broke.
We’re out of money. Even the idiots at the CBO have finally admitted this and are sounding the alarm. The Fed and IMF are awakening to the fact as well, and these are the clowns who helped bankrupt us. As a result of being broke, even if we elected a solid panel of war-mongering neo-cons to office, our actual financial ability to sustain the expenditures necessary for foreign adventures is now severely limited. Rand Paul and others like him realize this.
As an example, we’re pissing 10’s of billions down the rat-hole of the NSA and other snoopy agencies per year, raping the Constitution in the process, and yet none of these clowns could see the Boston Marathon bombings before they happened, despite the Russians handing the bombers to us on a silver platter. The NSA can’t point to a single terrorist plot against the US that they’ve foiled.
OK, so neo-cons warhawks like you might claim “well, the NSA was developed to spy on the Russians/USSR in the Cold War... they haven’t adapted yet to the new world threats.”
Very well then, why did the Russian incursions into Crimea and Ukraine come as a surprise to all in DC? The NSA should have seen that coming weeks ahead of time. The level of military planning and force organization necessary would have been available on tactical comm channels for weeks of moving men and material around to make those moves. Instead, we have all manner of clowns in Congress and the White House making prognostications that Russian won’t make the move, they’d be “insane” to make such a move... and the Russians don’t look so insane right now.
We’re now going to give up all the gains we made in Iraq and Afghanistan. All that money, all those lives, will have been for basically no net gain. Yes, we killed a lot of terrorists, but net:net, we’ve changed nothing geopolitically. The breeding ground for terrorism is growing more terrorists all the time, and the Muslim world thinks that we’re weak now.
We should go into wars with one objective: To win. Winning means that the enemy is defeated, crushed and has no more appetite for making hostile moves against us. That means killing lots of people - including civilians. Our political leadership no longer has the spine or resolve to do these things. In WWII, we killed hundreds of thousands of civilians with dry eyes and a clear purpose - of winning the war as fast as possible.
Winning in Iraq or Afghanistan would have required real slaughter - on a scale so large that Muslims the world over (1 billion and counting higher) look at the result and say “Hmmm. Well, we’d better not piss off those guys again. The Great Satan wears big boots and when he kicks ass, your ass stays kicked.” No, instead, we got into all manner of domestic squabbling about the scope of war, blah, blah, blah. We didn’t want to win - from the get-go, on both sides of the aisle. Bush/Cheney were talking about being seen as “liberators” and so on. Screw that. We weren’t seen as liberators when we marched into any other country after a war. The South didn’t see Grant or Sherman as “liberators” - but they sure as hell understood that those men meant business when they said “X is going to happen.”
If we’re not going to get into wars to win them, then it is best we stick to our knitting, maintain a strong defensive posture (like the Swiss, for example) and let the rest of the world see how it works without us. Sooner or later, they’ll decide that the UN is useless and the US comes back on the stage, or they’ll go back to killing each other en masse, in which case that leaves more resources for us. Either way, we win.
What the heck was that about? Immigration and the Bible?
Rand is a Senator voting on federal law, and is running for president, gays in the military, abortion on federal lands, gay marriage in the military and in federal employment and in immigration are not “state” issues, they are issues of bigger and more costly federal government.
“We’re broke.”
I have no problem raising taxes IF it is to STRICTLY pay for national defense. Of course, I would not agree to this IF the congress were to use it as a way to grow government outside of DoD.....and DoD needs close scrutiny that they are not wasting money on bureaucracy and bogus contracts. The money should go for personnel, materiel, etc. Stuff needed to actually train for and prosecute a war.
“If we’re not going to get into wars to win them, then....”
To that point I agree. IF a conflict is not worth total force...it probably is not worth pursuing. However, I also know there is the appropriate concept of proportionate response.
“....it is best we stick to our knitting, maintain a strong defensive posture (like the Swiss, for example) and let the rest of the world see how it works without us. Sooner or later, they’ll decide that the UN is useless and the US comes back on the stage, or they’ll go back to killing each other en masse, in which case that leaves more resources for us. Either way, we win.”
At this point you devolve into isolationist nonsense again with the wrong/naive conclusions.
BTW - I am NOT a NEOCON. I have mixed feelings about Iraq and Afghanistan. My main problem with them being that we allowed places we conquered (we didn’t liberate anything) set up Islamic states. That was an epic mistake. IF we are going to spread any “American” value...then the first one should be freedom of religion.
I don't doubt you, but there's a huge difference between perception and reality and many people vote perception.
The perception was that Romney was a rich religious conservative and there were certainly some that voted against that perception.
Rand Paul is seen very differently and that's important.
The perception was that Romney was an economics genius, an economy wiz, that was despised by the religious right that Christians wouldn’t vote for, and who had been Governor of Massachusetts and gave us Romneycare and gay marriage.
Romney won hugely among the Independents, the “new” voters.
Romney was the first nominee in history to win hugely among the independents, yet lose the race, and he did it in an election that we couldn’t lose.
Paul has also come out against conservatism.
There is no way to raise taxes to “strictly pay for national defense.” Money is fungible. Money you squirt into the FedGummint in one door will be used to offset spending in other areas.
This has now been shown to happen through sequestration.
Being isolationist has been turned into a dirty word by people who think we have endless supplies of money and bodies to solve other people’s problems.
Hint: We can’t. Look at what happened to the UK after WWI and all their far-flung misadventures around the world. They were the pre-eminent power of the late 1800’s, and endless wars bankrupted them by the post-WWII years. We’re now in the same situation, only 100 years later. We’re going to become more isolationist whether you like it or not. I don’t like it, but I know the numbers well enough to see the handwriting on the wall in large, block letters. We’re broke. “Conservatives” better get used to this fact of life. It means that “conservatives” can no longer cut taxes and spend on debt, as they’ve been doing since Reagan’s era. It means that we’re going to have to cut actual spending - real cuts, the way we do cuts in Wyoming when tax revenues go down.
So far, “conservatives” have been peddling the idea that we can “grow our way out” of the mountain of debt we’ve accumulated. We heard such twaddle coming out of so-called “conservatives” like Larry Kudlow for a decade, as well as people like Paul Ryan and others. Well, until we get rid of such nonsense as a “free trade” agenda where the other party gets all the benefits of our trade policy, our economy is going to under-perform potential for decades to come. The macro-econs haven’t gotten ANY of their post-2008 GDP projections correct for the US, always over-estimating our GDP performance from quarter to quarter, and sometimes over-estimating by rather significant amounts.
This tells me that the macro-econ crowd’s models are based on post-WWII assumptions that are now simply broken. There is no longer a workable model of how the US economy will perform going forward that is being used to project GDP or tax revenues, and that compounds our spending problems.
We’re broke. And when interest rates start inevitably going back up, we’re going to be much more broke than we are now. The interest necessary to service the US debt is set to explode upwards towards a trillion bucks a year if rates go back to what we saw as recently as the latter 90’s.
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