Sandefur: ‘No, we shouldn’t take Ron Paul more seriously’
Reblogging completely from sandefur.typepad.com because it is a comprehensive overview of a libertarian critique of Ron Paul:
[Ron] Paul doesn’t just support pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but wants to close U.S. bases all across the globe. He not only wants to withdraw all foreign aid, and end our “entangled alliance” with Israel, but he’s spoken out against Israel’s efforts to defend its citizens against terrorist groups. When Israel invaded Gaza to prevent Hamas rocket attacks in 2009, Paul recorded a video calling it a ‘sad day for the whole world.’ He said Palestinians were living in a ‘concentration camp’ (a thinly-veiled attempt to liken Israelis to Nazis) and said terrorists had just ‘a few small missiles.’ Well, try telling that to the Israelis whose daily lives were being disrupted by thousands of missiles being aimed at houses, schools, bus stations, hospitals, grocery stores and other civilian locations at random moments, with only seconds of notice.
In last Thursday’s debate, Paul dismissed the significance of Iran getting nuclear weapons (a radical regime that has called for ‘Death to America’ and wiping Israel off the map). To be clear, it isn’t a matter of him being against sending troops to Iran, or bombing Iran—he is even against imposing sanctions, or taking any other actions to attempt to stop them from getting nukes. He also warned that assassinating terrorists would ‘translate our rule of law into a rule of mob rule.’ In May, Paul said that he wouldn’t have ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden because ‘it was absolutely not necessary.’ This is just a small inkling of the positions he’s taken recently.
And none of this gets into Paul’s penchant for indulging fringe characters—from flirting with 9/11 truthers to allowing racist newsletters to be published under his name.
Nor does it mention his support for government intruding into your bedroom, telling you what drugs you can use, and how you can express yourself; or his hostility to gay rights, the right of privacy, separation of church and state, and to state’s rights regarding abortion. All while speaking up for the right of slave-owners to violate the Constitution and ‘secede’ by violence to perpetuate slavery.
Ron Paul is not only not a libertarian, he is, simply put, a con artist: a man who has fooled a large number of otherwise intelligent people into thinking that he believes in liberty, when in fact his beliefs—assuming he has any—are a patchwork of poorly understood anti-government positions and opportunistic populism. He does serious damage to the cause of liberty, and cannot deserve the support of anyone devoted to its defense.
On a slightly different note, see also The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Indecision 2012 - Corn Polled Edition - Ron Paul & the Top Tier