No doubt you will hear a lot about Ron Paul as he edges into first place in the Iowa Caucasus. I expect him to be slandered. I even read an article that outlines how he will be slandered. They may not realize that they risk the Paul voters not voting for the Republican candidate in the fall.
Here is one slander that I have been hearing:
The implication is that Rep. Paul is a 9/11 truther -- you'd think, reading that one sentence, that Paul stated or implied the U.S. government either orchestrated or had foreknowledge of the attacks. In fact, Rep. Paul responded to the September 11 attacks by voting to authorize an actual war against its perpetrators; and as anyone who is even passingly familiar with his worldview knows, his controversial opinion is that Islamist terrorists attack the United States partly because they are furious about the quasi-imperial role America plays in their countries. The blow-back theory is itself controversial, but it is obviously different from 9/11 Trutherism.
What Paul is saying, and it is the exact same thing the 9/11 bipartisan commission said, is that the reason for the hatred toward America is the long standing intervention of America in the Middle East. This seems obvious to me.
Has the GOP elite lost track of their own party? From the same Atlantic article:
Dismissing the burgeoning number of Americans on the right who are suspicious of interventionism and hawkishness is intellectually suspect and unwise. A majority of Republicans now think that the Iraq War was a mistake. The general non-interventionist impulse on the right has never completely gone away. Paul is by no means the ideal vehicle for non-interventionism. But insofar as he plays a significant role in the GOP primary, it will be partly due to the fact that the legitimate concerns he articulates are taken up by no other viable candidate. One needn't be an ardent Paul supporter to suspect that National Review would rather that no viable GOP candidate spoke up to challenge the hawkish impulses on the elite right .
What then is the issue with regard to Iran? Here is a Youtube video of a section of a recent debate.
Bachmann has been making these same claims on the campaign trail. She is completely wrong about her assertions. These quotes would normally appear on a Bachmann lies website. However she is not lying. I think she actually believes the #^*@ she is saying. This is worse.
It seems to me that our policies increase the chances for a nuclear explosion.
Here is what the American Conservative thinks:
On the substance, Paul is clearly in the right, and Bachmann repeated some fictions that she used during the CNN national security debate last month. For instance, Bachmann claimed that the Iranian government has pledged to use nuclear weapons to “wipe Israel off the map,” and she says that the Iranians have threatened to use such weapons against the U.S. Neither of these is true, but she keeps getting away with making these claims. The first claim is misleading in two ways. Ahmadinejad’s statement probably did not mean what American hawks routinely assume that it means, and there is no reason to believe that Iranian leaders are going to usher in the annihilation of their own country by launching a first strike nuclear attack on Israel. There is also no reason to believe that Iranian leaders are going to provoke massive retaliation from the United States by attacking the U.S. with a nuclear weapon. For that matter, all indications are that the Iranian government has not yet decided to build nuclear weapons.
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No less important, the official, public Iranian position on nuclear weapons is that their use is forbidden under Islamic law. Of course, hawks can continue to cherry-pick the evidence as they usually do. Meanwhile, Bachmann and the others provided a perfect argument for why Paul’s candidacy is more necessary than ever if the GOP’s ruinous habit of pushing for new foreign wars is going to be broken.
While one would expect this from the Non-Interventionist American Conservative, it represents a large segment of the Republican party—25 to 50% depending on how you ask the question. Whoever the candidate is, they cannot win without this part of the party. If it is claimed that 25 to 50% of the party are kooks, no Republican can win next fall. (Personally, I almost do not care anymore.)
As I have been saying, ultimately it does not matter, we must cut spending so drastically that defense cannot be exempt.