Ron Paul is persona non grata among establishment Republicans and other party loyalists\u2014including and especially those in the mainstream \u201cconservative\u201d media.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On its face, the very idea that any self-professed lover of liberty should have anything but the utmost respect and admiration for Paul strikes us as a paradox of the first order.\u00a0 After all, to hear Republicans tell it, liberty consists in just those things\u2014\u201climited government,\u201d personal and fiscal responsibility, the United States Constitution, etc.\u2014of which Paul has proven himself as adamant and impassioned a proponent as any.\u00a0 And yet, these very same Republicans deride him as a \u201cnut,\u201d a \u201cfraud,\u201d and, in some instances, a \u201cracist,\u201d an \u201canti-Semite,\u201d and even an American hater.\u00a0 Paul, they say, is no real conservative, for he befriends 9\/11 \u201ctruthers\u201d and \u201cneo-Nazis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Occasionally, Paul\u2019s GOP detractors suspend their efforts to assassinate his character by speaking to the substance of his positions on the issues.\u00a0 However, no sooner than they suspend their campaign of besmirching his person than one fallacy gives way to another as the ad hominem attack is replaced by the straw man fallacy.\u00a0 Whether through advertence or a genuine lack of understanding, it is never Paul\u2019s actual views that they engage but their blatant misrepresentations of them.<\/p>\n
Domestic Policy<\/strong><\/p>\n Take Paul\u2019s position on our drug policy.\u00a0 His critics argue that he favors the legalization <\/em>of recreational drugs.\u00a0 They are mistaken.\u00a0 What Paul favors is an end to the federal government\u2019s ban <\/em>on drug usage for recreational purposes.\u00a0 That is, he believes that whether drugs should be legal or not is a question that properly, constitutionally<\/em>, belongs to the states <\/em>to address.\u00a0 If the residents of a state decide that they would prefer to maintain the current policy of the federal government, then so be it; they have the right, <\/em>as far as Congressman Paul is concerned, to make that decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n As far as his positions on marriage, prostitution, gambling, and virtually every other issue goes, his reasoning is identical to that which informs his perspective on drug policy: it is the individual states<\/em>, not the federal government, that the Constitution entrusts with the authority to settle these matters.\u00a0 Thus, Paul argues for the dismantling, not of all <\/em>laws governing such activities, but of all federal <\/em>laws designed to do so.\u00a0<\/p>\n Paul\u2019s Republican critics would be well served to attend to the Paul Derangement Syndrome that has overtaken them.\u00a0 You see, if Paul can be said to affirm the legalization of drugs and prostitution because of his stance that these are \u201cstates\u2019 rights\u201d issues, then, by parity of reasoning, every other self-proclaimed \u201cpro-life\u201d Republican who insists upon making abortion <\/em>a \u201cstates\u2019 rights\u201d issue stands convicted of fraudulence, for they expose themselves as proponents <\/em>of abortion.\u00a0<\/p>\n That Paul is as strong and consistent a foe of abortion no one <\/em>who knows of his record as an obstetrician would think to deny.\u00a0 This is telling, for it suggests that the distortions of his viewpoints spring not from ignorance, but bad faith.\u00a0 Anyone doubting this should just bear the following consideration in mind: Because Paul thinks that drug usage, prostitution, and gambling, are matters with respect to which the federal government hasn\u2019t the constitutional authority to speak, his objectors don\u2019t hesitate to conclude that he champions their legalization.\u00a0 Yet when he makes the same claim about the federal government\u2019s role vis-\u00e0-vis abortion\u2014that is, when he makes the same exact claim that they do <\/em>about this <\/em>issue\u2014his fellow Republicans do not so much as remotely suggest that he advocates the legalization of abortion.\u00a0 In convicting Paul of this, they would just as quickly condemn themselves.\u00a0 So maybe, just maybe, they do <\/em>understand his positions on these other issues but refuse to justly characterize them.<\/p>\n Foreign Policy<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It is really Paul\u2019s position on foreign policy <\/em>that incenses his critics to no end.\u00a0 As everyone knows, Ron Paul staunchly opposes what he refers to as \u201cmilitarism,\u201d a doctrine\u2014sometimes euphemistically described by its apologists as \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism\u201d\u2014that calls for America to essentially \u201cpolice\u201d the globe against \u201chuman rights\u201d violators or, what amounts to the same thing, the enemies of \u201cDemocracy.\u201d\u00a0 Since this enterprise has, within the last decade, been prosecuted in the name of combating Islamic terror, it is principally Paul\u2019s objections against the assumptions, implications, and tactics of \u201cthe War on Terror\u201d that have earned him both the contempt and fear <\/em>of his competitors.<\/p>\n To begin with, Paul emphatically rejects the proposition\u2014treated as an axiom by the Republican Party\u2014that Muslims hate us because of our liberties and freedoms.\u00a0 Rather, it is a hyper-aggressive American foreign policy, he insists, with its occupation of and sanctions and wars against Islamic lands, that accounts for the rage that culminated in the attacks of 9\/11.\u00a0<\/p>\n For this position, Rick Santorum and legions of other representatives of the GOP establishment have blasted Paul for \u201cblamingAmerica\u201d for the attacks.\u00a0 There are, though, at a minimum, three fatal problems with their approach.<\/p>\n First, an understanding of an agent\u2019s action need not involve praise or blame.\u00a0 Descriptive<\/em> statements are distinct from prescriptive <\/em>statements: just because something is <\/em>such and such a way doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that it ought <\/em>to be that way, and just because one thinks<\/em> that such and such is this way doesn\u2019t mean that he either approves or disapproves of it.\u00a0 In our daily lives, most of us have no difficulty grasping this simple conceptual distinction between, on the one hand, explanation, <\/em>and, on the other, justification.\u00a0 <\/em>For some reason, a little elementary logic of this kind manages to elude Paul\u2019s Republican rivals when it comes to his stance on the motivations informing those Muslims who want us dead.<\/p>\n Second, from Osama bin Laden to the 9\/11 commission, from former CIA agents who spent decades in the Middle East to political science professor Robert Pape who, to date, has conducted the most extensive research into the reasons underlying Islamic terror, there is no short supply of authoritative sources from which Paul can readily draw in substantiating his position on the 9\/11 attacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n Finally, let us say for argument\u2019s sake that Paul did <\/em>intend to blame the United States government for inviting the 9\/11 attacks.\u00a0 That the government <\/em>is not <\/em>equivalent to the United States <\/em>should be obvious to any and every lover of liberty.\u00a0 If, by ascribing blame to the government, Paul can be said to be ascribing blame to America<\/em>, <\/em>then whenever any other Republican holds the government accountable for objectionable policies or outcomes\u2014something that occurs incessantly\u2014they too must be held to be \u201cblaming\u201dAmerica.\u00a0<\/p>\n As it stands, Republicans do themselves no service in conflating the federal government with the country itself.\u00a0 In hurling this bogus charge against Paul, they only contribute further to the growing perception among both the base of their party as well as independents that all of their talk of \u201climited government\u201d and the like is just that: talk.<\/p>\n Iran<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n Paul has also taken considerable heat for failing to react with the same hysteria that the public has come to expect from Republicans when the subject of a nuclear armed Iranarises.\u00a0 Now, few of us, including Paul, no doubt, wants <\/em>for Iran to be armed, and few of us, including Paul, supports the Iranian regime.\u00a0 Yet none of this is in the least bit relevant to the question regarding how <\/em>America should proceed in preventing a determinedIran from acquiring nuclear weaponry.<\/p>\n Paul recognizes that such preventive efforts must consist of actions that can only result in death and destruction: whetherAmericaimposes sanctions or engages in military action of one kind or another, innocent Iranian (and possibly American) lives will be extinguished by our attempt to keepIranfrom obtaining nuclear energy.\u00a0 He also recognizes that our military, already stretched to the snapping point, simply cannot afford (by any conceivable measure) to involve itself in but another \u201cforeign entanglement,\u201d especially in the Islamic world.<\/p>\n But if, as his Republican nemeses hold, Paul\u2019s perspective on this matter is so unacceptable, then how is their view any better?\u00a0 On the one hand, the prospect of a nuclear armed Iranis one that they resolutely refuse to entertain: it is imperative that we prevent this state of affairs from materializing, they swear.\u00a0 However, on the other hand, not only have we long known that Iranwas pursuing nuclear power, it began to expedite its pursuit during the Bush administration.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n And yet, to date, no action has been taken to deter it.\u00a0 Moreover, no concrete action to impede its efforts has even been seriously proposed.<\/p>\n \u201cRacism\u201d and \u201cAnti-Semitism\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n I usually refuse to dignify accusations of \u201cracism,\u201d \u201canti-Semitism,\u201d and the like with a response, but they warrant some mention in connection with this defense of Ron Paul.<\/p>\n Paul favors the elimination of all <\/em>\u201cforeign aid.\u201d\u00a0 BecauseIsrael is among the nations of the world to which theUnited States supplies financial assistance, some, like David Horowitz, have charged Paul with being \u201canti-Semitic.\u201d<\/p>\n It is strange indeed that those who never tire of lamenting the ills afflicted by the Welfare State against black Americans and others at home should find fault with a man who seeks only to liberateIsrael(and every other country) from the oppressive burdens of the American Welfare State abroad.\u00a0 Paul is actually a friend toIsraelinasmuch as he wants for it to be able to give unabashed expression to its sovereignty\u2014something that will be forever impossible as long as it remains dependent uponAmerica.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet it is Paul\u2019s detractors who want to maintainIsrael\u2019s dependence uponAmericawho claim the moral high ground.\u00a0 It is they who are supposed to be the best friends of Israeli Jews.<\/p>\n As for the charge of \u201cracism,\u201d the widely respected black thinker Thomas Sowell is among many who have long noted that, whether measured in terms of street violence or rates of incarceration, the federal government\u2019s \u201cWar on Drugs\u201d has had incalculable deleterious effects on blackAmerica.\u00a0 Paul has labored indefatigably to end this war.\u00a0 His accusers want to continue waging it.\u00a0 And it is his critics, not Paul, who insist upon displacing, injuring, and killing untold numbers of non-white peoples (Middle Eastern Muslims) through \u201cthe War on Terror\u201d or George W. Bush\u2019s \u201cFreedom Agenda.\u201d\u00a0 Paul not only wants to end the wars, at considerable cost to his presidential campaign and his popularity among the fellow members of his party, he has spared no occasion to articulate to audiences an understanding of the terrorists\u2019 motives that counters the conventional Republican account that reduces the Islamic terrorist to an embodiment of raw, undifferentiated irrationality.\u00a0 For this, this \u201cracist\u201d has been accused of \u201cblamingAmerica.\u201d<\/p>\n It is one thing to disagree with Congressman Paul.\u00a0 It is another thing to throw one baseless allegation after the other against him.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n originally published at The\u00a0New American as “The Case Against Ron Paul is Defeated”\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ron Paul is persona non grata among establishment Republicans and other party loyalists\u2014including and especially those in the mainstream \u201cconservative\u201d media.\u00a0 On its face, the very idea that any self-professed lover of liberty should have anything but the utmost respect and admiration for Paul strikes us as a paradox of the first order.\u00a0 After all,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n