Category: Ron Paul

Gingrich Campaign ‘Imploding’ in Iowa; Ron Paul Leads; Rick Santorum Gains

Posted on Comments

Newt Gingrich’s campaign in Iowa is “rapidly imploding,” according to the latest poll, as the former House Speaker has tumbled to third place and Ron Paul has moved into the lead in the Hawkeye State, with Mitt Romney in second place just two weeks before the crucial Jan. 3 caucuses.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum moved into a three-way tie for fourth place with Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry in the latest Iowa survey by Public Policy Polling. It was the second consecutive gain in the PPP Iowa poll by the Pennsylvania senator, who has seen his support in the state nearly double since Dec. 3.

CANDIDATE ……… Dec. 3-5 … Dec. 11-13 … Dec. 16-18
Ron Paul ……………………… 18% ………… 21% ……….. 23%
Mitt Romney ……………….. 16% ………… 16% ……….. 20%
Newt Gingrich ………………. 27% ………… 22% ………. 14%
Michele Bachmann ……….. 13% ………… 11% ……….. 10%
Rick Santorum …………….. 6% …………… 8% ………… 10%
Rick Perry …………………… 9% …………… 9% ………… 10%
Jon Huntsman …………….. 4% …………… 5% …………. 4%
Gary Johnson ……………… 1% …………… 1% ………….. 2%

“Newt Gingrich’s Iowa support was extremely soft and has collapsed in only two weeks,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Ron Paul has taken the lead, but it will be interesting to see if he can turn out his unique base of voters for the caucus.”

(Via Memeorandum.)


Republican Fascism And Raaaaacism

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Yet another superb Bill Whittle outing:

Now that you have a clear idea of the historical basis for ‘fascism’, here goes Larry Johnson:

The core of conservatism is the belief in the inalienable rights of the individual and the limits imposed on Federal power in order to protect and preserve those rights. But none of the Republicans, with the exception of Ron Paul, believe in the limited power of government. To the contrary.
All willingly embrace the claim, first by the Bush Administration and now by Obama, that the Federal Government can declare a person a “terrorist” or a “terrorist supporter” and hold that person indefinitely without recourse to a court. If you are younger than 38 years old you probably do not remember much of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and Communist China. But there was a time when the United States resolutely opposed and fought against those authoritarian regimes. Yes, fascists and communists. Those governments insisted they could declare someone an enemy of the state and, by virtue of their declaration, do whatever they wanted to that person.

Johnson’s theory seems to be that the United States Constitution was somehow ratified everywhere, and that the rights of our citizens apply universally. The nearest I can come to agreeing with Johnson is saying that, yeah, the notion of the Laws of War is firmly rooted somewhere in the past, probably in the roaring ’20s, before they got around to outlawing war in the early ’30s, and proceeded to gear up for WWII.

Yes, one can largely agree with the complaints about Senate Bill 1867, especially where it seems to blow by posse comitatus. Or at least the some Congressmen can explain the missing nuance here:

Racism was another topic in Whittle’s essay. On that topic, Stogie over at Saberpoint actually has links to Ron Paul’s (in)famous newsletters, which end up being kind of ho-hum, for a bit of light perusal:

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am not a supporter of Ron Paul. Paul is a paleolibertarian, and as such, holds foreign policy views that seem similar to those on the far left. For that reason, I cannot support him as a candidate. However, truth is truth and fair is fair. Ron Paul’s views on race are often tactless and unhelpful, but not necessarily wrong.

You See, Mr. Paul, History Does Not Support Scientific Experiments

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

The Australian reports that

RUSSIA seized today a consignment of the radioactive isotope Sodium-22 at a Moscow airport from a passenger who was to travel on a flight to Tehran, the customs service said.
“Tests showed that the Sodium-22 could only have been obtained as the result of the work of a nuclear reactor,” it said in a statement. “A criminal inquiry has been opened and the materials transferred to prosecutors.”

Sodium 22 is not recommended as a dietary supplement:

22Na is a positron-emitting isotope with a remarkably long half-life. It is used to create test-objects and point-sources for Positron emission tomography.

So the argument may be that Iran has legitimate medical interest. Yet, back to The Australian:

Moscow has echoed Western concerns about the nature of the Iranian nuclear program but stopped short of publicly accusing Tehran of seeking atomic weapons and always said that the standoff should be solved by diplomacy.
Experts have long called for tight controls against nuclear smuggling so that Iran cannot get ahold of materials it is barred from obtaining under UN Security Council sanctions.

The point of the sanctions is to put peaceful international pressure on Iran to be a nicer kid on the international playground. Maybe, Mr. Paul, if you understand that Tehran plays the bully in the Middle East the way the Federal Reserve pushes everyone around with respect to the currency, you might grasp that political liberty is as crucial as economic liberty. Yet you’re stuck in Neville Chamberlain mode, sadly. Even though what you say about the overall peacefulness of the Iranian people is very probably true, that assertion does not seem to hold for the Iranian leadership.

Here’s the 2012 rub, Ron: if it was a laboratory setting, it might be of interest to see if your approach would work, where Chamberlain and Jimmy Carter failed, failed, failed. But it’s not. History is a one shot deal. And you can go all Sermon on the Mount in your personal life, where I truly appreciate the foundations of your ideas. Yet, the Almighty constrains neither free will, nor the capacity for evil implied by that free will.

  • Nobody wants to see a dirty bomb employed.
  • Nobody wants the stress of dealing with the threat of a dirty bomb employment.
  • Crucially, the majority of Americans are going to vote against your strange comfort level with the previous two points.

Update: American Power think Paul is unserious.

Update II: A thorough Paul review at The Pirate’s Cove.

via Zero Hedge

Jeffrey Lord vs. the Paulistas

Posted on Comments

Driving back today from picking up my twin sons at college — today was the last day of final exams in their first semester — I heard my American Spectator colleague Jeffrey Lord on Sean Hannity’s radio show talking about his war against Ron Paul’s supporters.

It makes my head hurt to think about it, stirring unfortunate memories of internecine feuds between paleocons and neocons stretching back at least 30 years.

My own nuanced take on the situation: Beginning with the Bush 41 administration, the neocons began insisting not merely on their own dominance within the Republican Party, but started demanding that their paleocon adversaries be utterly purged from the ranks. (David Frum, among others, so insisted.) And so it was that, by the time of the Bush 43 administration, there was no one inside the “Big Tent” disposed to say a discouraging word about the prospects for a bloodless conquest of Mesopotamia while also, incidentally, using U.S. armed forces as the necessary means to introduce Pashtun tribesmen to the wonders of Western democracy, including women’s suffrage.

“Hey, Chief, can we have a brief discussion about the concept of ‘imperial overreach’ here?”

You don’t have to think Ron Paul is The Only Hope of the Republic, or be a devout disciple of Lew Rockwell, to say that maybe it would have been helpful if, circa 2002-03, some non-interventionists had been in a position to influence the decision-making process at the White House.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favor of kicking jihadi butt. And I’m not one of these kooks who sits around brooding about the “military-industrial complex,” “international bankers,” et cetera. But isn’t it fair to ask, three years into the Obama Age, if GOP foreign policy got a wee bit hubristic during Bush 43’s presidency?

Mine is a modest criticism, then, of neoconservative influence in U.S. foreign policy, as distinct from the all-out crusade that Jeffrey Lord seems to be pursuing against Ron Paul and the Paulistas. I’m not sure how this started, but here are some recent items by Lord at the Spectator:

Sean Hannity’s interview with Jeffrey Lord — and I only heard a few minutes of it — reminded me of all the reasons why I sometimes hate Sean Hannity, who has a tendency toward a Manichean worldview in which there are always exactly two sides to any argument:

  1. Hannity’s side, and
  2. UN-AMERICAN LEFT-WING RADICAL EVIL!

Having been occasionally accused of “simplistic” politics, I would assert that I am an enigmatic tapestry of layered complexity by comparison to Hanntiy’s accustomed mode of discourse.

Stipulate that Ron Paul’s supporters include legions of monomaniacal fanatics and a certain number of outright Jew-haters. Is it not possible to engage the more decent and rational Paulistas in a discourse leading toward a principled and honorable compromise, so that their energy (and profound opposition to the Welfare State) can be harnessed within a broad-based coalition aimed at defeating the common enemy, Democratic PartyLiberalism?

UPDATE: Speaking of Manichean worldviews — MSNBC compares Mitt Romney to the Ku Klux Klan.

Of course, the KKK never flip-flopped but . . . Never mind.

Ace of Spades Really Hates Ron Paul, Endorses Re-Election of Barack Obama

Posted on Comments

“I heretofore state I will not support, or vote for, Ron Paul, under any circumstances whatsoever.
“That’s where I’m coming from. Under no circumstances whatsoever will I vote for this reactionary, anti-semitic peacenik ‘We brought 9/11 ourselves’ pacifist Chomskyite crank.
“And I’ll say it: I will, yes, be amenable to Barack Obama being re-elected under those circumstances.”
— Ace of Spades

This seems to be turning into “Let’s F– With Ace” Week, so what the heck? Go with it. Having spent three months kicking Tabitha Hale in the shins — “Not Good Enough for BlogCon” — this wheel’s gonna keep on squeaking until some grease shows up.

Also, “heretofore,” Ace? Think you meant “hereby” or “henceforth,” but if the Valu-Rite Vodka says “heretofore” . . . Go with it.

Everybody knows I love Ace, so why am I doing this? Why would I push a running gag so far as to deliberately expose him to the vitriolic rage of the Paulistas who will flood his comments with fuming denunciations? A few possibilities suggest themselves:

A. It beats the hell out of finishing my long post about why you should hit my tip jar to send me to Iowa.
B. It beats the hell out of transcribing audio of the various interviews I’ve done recently.
C. It beats the hell out of soberly confronting the undeniably grim prospects for the Herman Cain campaign.
D. There’s no point traffic-baiting Allahpundit who, since becoming an employee of Salem Communications Inc., doesn’t give a damn anymore whether bloggers talk smack about him.
E. Admit it: “Let’s F– With Ace” Week is probably funnier than anything else I could be blogging about this week.

If you answered “All of the Above, But Mainly E,” congratulations: Put $10, $20, $50 in my tip jar and I’ll keep it up all week, just for fun and also to pay my way to Iowa. Because if you’re going to f–k around on a blog as a therapeutic escape from depressing realities, you might as well do it for profit. More f–king around after this ad for our Amazon “Black Monday Deals Week” specials.

See? I got no shame in my game, because Smitty reminded me last week why he’s willing to pay the blog-hosting fees out of his own pocket: It’s his patriotic duty to keep me online. Continue reading Ace of Spades Really Hates Ron Paul, Endorses Re-Election of Barack Obama →

Ron Paul Still A Few Foreign Policy Briefs Behind, But Tempering His Rhetoric

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Via Political Class Dismissed, we have Ron Paul on Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, born under FDR and who has been with CBS since, shag me, I was born.

Schieffer sounds his age, and tries to go after Paul on the usual foreign policy topics. Interestingly, Paul tempers his opinions on questions of causality for events like 9/11. Let me form my objection to Paul as a question: when should you ever take your enemy’s propaganda at face value? When they are Commies? Nazis? Radical Muslims waging explosive jihad? Teach is just a little less gentle in objecting to Ron Paul.

The remark about 900 bases in north of 130 countries is equally worrisome. Paul is correct about the unaffordability of the arrangements we have, for example, troops in South Korea and Japan. The ‘bring the boys home’ argument, though, ignores both the historical reasons the troops are there and the unintended consequences of creating a power vacuum. The Chinese don’t like the Koreans don’t like the Japanese don’t like the Chinese. While none of the peoples involved have any screaming love of Americans, they do give us basing and buy our debt so that we can provide a Pax Americana.

It is an interesting policy question to talk about pulling the plug on the Pax Americana, but Ron Paul owes potential voters just a little more detail on how he intends to shore up the status quo.

It is as though Ron Paul has really done his homework on fiscal policy, and opted for something perhaps over-simplified on the foreign policy front.

After all that, Ron Paul is way ahead of the pack in discussions about trimming federal over-reach, which is 15 trillion kinds of essential. Thus, I’m glad to see him linger in the debates, if only as a thorn in the side of the RINO crowd, which is more interested in admiring problems than demonstrating leadership in going after them.

Update: linked at Katy Pundit.

Ouch! New Poll Shows Perry at 7% in Iowa

Posted on Comments

The headline on the Des Moines Register story is “Herman Cain, Mitt Romney lead new Iowa Poll,” but when you break down the numbers, the really shocking result is farther down:

Herman Cain …………………. 23%
Mitt Romney ………………….. 22%
Ron Paul ……………………….. 13%
Michele Bachmann ………….. 8%
Rick Perry ………………… 7%
Newt Gingrich …………………. 7%
Rick Santorum …………………. 5%
Jon Huntsman …………………. 1%

Perry tied for fifth place? This poll was taken Oct. 23-26 (Sunday through Wednesday), entirely after the Oct. 18 Vegas debate, during a period when the media were heavily reporting Perry’s new tax plan and …

Fifth place? Single digits? Wedged between Bachmann and Santorum?

Perry put $174,000 into a TV ad campaign that started Tuesday in Iowa. As far as I know, Perry is the only candidate now running TV ads in Iowa, so he’s likely to see his numbers rise between now and mid-November. We’re still 65 days from the Iowa caucuses, but Perry’s got a lot of ground to make up if he’s going to avoid an embarrassment.

And the really scary thing: Romney wasn’t supposed to be a player in Iowa, and yet he’s neck-and-neck for the lead. Romney is almost certain to win New Hampshire. If he also wins Iowa . . . dude, game over.