The Political Inquirer

Back in June, an article gained some attention by a blogger at TownHall.com, a prominent right-wing Republican site. This article made a lot of anti-Paul Republicans quite comfortable with themselves and their dislike of Ron Paul because they found that someone else agreed with their warmongering, anti-freedom views. I’m here to rebuttal all of his article and show why the true conservative case against Ron Paul doesn’t exist–only the neoconservative case against Paul.

In what follows I’ll have a quote from Mr. John Hawkins and then my reply underneath it.

#1) Ron Paul is a libertarian, not a conservative: I have nothing against libertarians. To the contrary, I like them and welcome them into the Republican Party. But, conservatives have even less interest in seeing a libertarian as the GOP’s standard bearer than seeing a moderate as our party’s nominee. In Paul’s case, his voting record shows that he is the least conservative member of Congress running for President on the GOP side. So, although he is a small government guy, he very poorly represents conservative opinion on a wide variety of other important issues.

Hawkins says that a small government guy is not a conservative. Because he is against a gay marriage amendment, the war, and…I think that’s about it, he’s suddenly a flaming liberal? No Democrats running for president want to end Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security over time. They want to grow it bigger. The conservatives do as well, if you don’t believe me look at George Bush and his Medicare program. Neoconservatives do not believe in small government, they just believe in a different form of big government socialism than Democrats.

Paul consistently shows he is the most conservative member of Congress on the most important issues of our time: the war, monetary policy, liberty, and taxes. Given that “conservatives” have accepted the big-government version of all these policies (more war, inflation, etc.), Paul could even be classified as a “radical liberal” for wanting to change these things, whereas Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are technically “conservatives” at this point.

#2) Ron Paul is one of the people spreading the North American Union conspiracy: If you’re so inclined, you can click here for just one example of Paul talking up a mythical Bush administration merger of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, but you’re not missing much if you don’t. Reputable conservatives shouldn’t be spreading these crazy conspiracy theories and the last thing the GOP needs is a conspiracy crank as our nominee in 2008.

Whether or not you believe it is a true conspiracy to form a North American Union, there have always been people in America who would like to take over Mexico and/or Canada. They are imperialists and nothing less. The works to integrate may be part of a conspiracy or it may not. I would suspect this guy has to disregard every candidate that isn’t Romney or Giuliani because at the ‘Value Voters Debate’ in September, all of the candidates, including Huckabee, said whether or not this was true they would oppose it. Imperialism over Canada and Mexico exist. Anyone remember the Mexican war and 54′40 or fight?

#3) Ron Paul encourages “truther” conspiracy nuts: Even though Ron Paul admits that he does not believe in a 9/11 government conspiracy, he has been flirting with the wackjobs in the “truther movement,” like Alex Jones and the “Student Scholars for 9/11 Truth.” Republican politicians should either ignore people like them or set them straight, not lend credence to their bizarre conspiracy theories by acting as if they may have some merit, which is what Ron Paul has done.

Big deal. And whacking pinko communists support Hillary Clinton while closet gay Republicans who like to dress in drag support Rudy Giuliani.

#4) Ron Paul’s racial views: From the Houston Chronicle, Texas congressional candidate Ron Paul’s 1992 political newsletter highlighted portrayals of blacks as inclined toward crime and lacking sense about top political issues. Under the headline of “Terrorist Update,” for instance, Paul reported on gang crime in Los Angeles and commented, “If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”

Paul, a Republican obstetrician from Surfside, said Wednesday he opposes racism and that his written commentaries about blacks came in the context of “current events and statistical reports of the time.”

…”Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” Paul said.

…He added, “We don’t think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.”

Paul also asserted that “complex embezzling” is conducted exclusively by non-blacks.

“What else do we need to know about the political establishment than that it refuses to discuss the crimes that terrify Americans on grounds that doing so is racist? Why isn’t that true of complex embezzling, which is 100 percent white and Asian?” he wrote.”

Ron Paul has since claimed that although these comments were in his newsletter, under his name, he didn’t write them. Is he telling the truth? Who knows? Either way, those comments don’t say much for Paul.

It’s a common fact that magazines like these are often written with pen names of more credible people. Sadly, that may hurt Paul in the process, but given that the media brought this story up then quickly dropped it shows me they found it has little credibility.

#5) A lot of Ron Paul’s supporters are incredibly irritating: There are, without question, plenty of decent folks who support Ron Paul. However, for whatever reason, his supporters as a group are far more annoying than those of all the other candidates put together. It’s like every spammer, truther, troll, and flake on the net got together under one banner to spam polls and try to annoy everyone into voting for Ron Paul (which is, I must admit, a novel strategy).

Not a good reason to not support Ron Paul. The man has recruited no one, but attracts people who love freedom. There may be some ‘nutjobs’ but nothing serious here. People are passionate about their liberty and the future of the country, sadly, Mr. Hawkins doesn’t see that.

#6) Ron Paul is an isolationist: The last time the United States retreated to isolationism was after WW1 and the result was WW2. Since then, the world has become even more interconnected which makes Ron Paul’s strategy of retreating behind the walls of Fortress America even more unworkable than it was back in the thirties.

No, bad reasoning. The cause of World War II was not isolationism, it was because of American and British companies and politicians writing the Treaty of Versailles so that Germany would almost be forced to react sometime in the future to it. Hitler was in the right place at the right time.

#7) Ron Paul wants to immediately cut and run in Iraq: Even if you’re an isolationist like Ron Paul, the reality is that our foreign policy isn’t currently one of isolationism and certain allowances should be made to deal with that reality. Yet, Paul believes we should immediately retreat from Al-Qaeda in Iraq and let that entire nation collapse into genocide and civil war as a result. Maybe, just maybe, Paul’s motives are better than those of liberals like Murtha and Kerry, who want to see us lose a war for political gain, but the catastrophic results would be exactly the same.

And if all the Iraqis kill each other (which there is no evidence they would), so what? At least Americans aren’t dying. Or, perhaps Mr. Hawkins is scared the Islamic boogeyman will take over the United States.

Yeah, right.

#8) In the single most repulsive moment of the entire Presidential race so far, Ron Paul excused Al-Qaeda’s attack on America with this comment about 9/11:

“They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years.”

In other words, America deserved to be attacked by Al-Qaeda.

This is the sort of facile comment you’d expect to hear from an America-hating left winger like Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky, not from a Republican running for President — or from any Republican in office for that matter. If you want to truly realize how foolish that sort of thinking is, imagine what the reaction would be if we had bombed Egyptian or Indonesian civilians after 9/11 and then justified it by saying “We attacked them because those Muslims have been over here.”

This shows nothing less than complete ignorance. Mr. Hawkins needs to study neocolonialism and the reaction of the Middle East against the way French and British imperialism has corrupted the governments in the area. A group of people without a nation state attacked us because they see American imperialism as the reason that they are oppressed. Terror is their last resort. Is it truly justified? I think not, but it made their statement.

By the way, Mr. Hawkins, if Ron Paul is flirting with the “truth” movement of 9/11 then why do you even bring this up? Ron Paul doesn’t believe 9/11 even happened! Either he has to believe 9/11 didn’t happen, they’re crazy terrorists who hate us, or they hate us because of American Imperialism. It can’t be two of the three, only one of the three, and Paul believes it is due to American Imperialism, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

#9) Ron Paul is the single, least electable major candidate running for the presidency in either party: Libertarianism simply is not considered to be a mainstream political philosophy in the United States by most Americans. That’s why the Libertarian candidate in 2004, Michael Badnarik, only pulled .3% of the vote. Even more notably, Ron Paul only pulled .47% of the vote when he ran at the top of the Libertarian ticket in 1988. Granted, Paul would do considerably better than that if he ran at the top of the Republican Party ticket, but it’s hard to imagine his winning more than, say 35%, of the national vote and a state or two — even if he were very lucky. In other words, having Ron Paul as the GOP nominee would absolutely guarantee the Democratic nominee a Reaganesque sweep in the election.

An anti-war candidate is the only one with a chance to beat Clinton. Polls consistently show Ms. Clinton beating every single Republican candidate. Given that Ron Paul comes close to beating her with no name recognition is a huge plus for Paul.

John Hawkins, you made a bad case for conservatives to dislike Ron Paul. Most of your reasons were not thought out well and your reasoning was largely misguided.