The big loser

I was able to watch most of last night's Republican debate in South Carolina and I fully agree with Frank Luntz's focus group that Fred Thompson was the big winner and Ron Paul (the ass-clown) was the big loser.

Just how utterly unserious Paul was as a presidential candidate really came home to me during two of his statements about foreign/security policy. One was his reaction to the recent incident in which Iranian patrol boats harassed a US destroyer in the Straits of Hormuz. Paul attitude that a few "speedboats" could not have possibly been a threat to a destroyer. To this I have one thing to say.

USS Cole:





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Seventeen sailors were killed and thirty nine were injured when an explosive laden boat smaller than the Iranian patrol boats slammed into the side of the USS Cole.

It is impossible for me to believe that congressman Paul does not remember the Cole incident. He simply chooses to ignore it - which is the typical Libertarian response to inconvenient facts.

The second thing which Paul said which showcased his status as a true lightweight was his argument that we should end all aid to both Israel and the Arab world followed by his statement of support for Israel's bombing of the Iraqi Osirak nuclear facility in 1981. Paul again chooses to ignore the fact that Israel was only able to mount that air raid because they had F-15 and F-16 aircraft which had been given to them by the United States as military aid.

Paul also spread the poisonous lie that the US was once allied with Osama bin Laden. While it is true that the US and bin Laden shared a common enemy in the USSR it is not true that we armed or funded him. The fact is that bin Laden and those Afghans who were loyal to him would kill Americans and their Afghan allies as quickly as they would kill Soviets and their Afghan allies.

After the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan and the fall of the USSR (two events which are in some ways related but not by a straight line cause-and-effect connection) bin Laden began loudly and proudly proclaiming that HE defeated the Soviet Union. Since the mainstream media and other America haters reflexively believe anything said by anyone else who hates America as much as they do, and since the MSM also knows that the US aided the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan then, they reason, we must have been arming bin Laden.

Paul shows an exceedingly weak grasp of both history and human nature. His desire to live in a libertarian Utopia where the US has no alliances, no enemies and friendly trade and diplomatic relationships with even the most deplorably evil of tyrannies assumes that America has no vital interests outside of its own national borders. Or at least none which might merit the use of violence to defend.

Paul has laid out the libertarian vision more clearly and to a vastly larger audience than has ever been done before. The public opinion polls are clearly showing that message is resonating with hardly anyone outside the emotionally and intellectually stunted communities of the Stormfront crowd and the 9/11 truthers.