This past weekend at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference Ron Paul proved once again why he is so worth defending. As a friend wrote to me in an email:
Paul could have easily gone down there into the lions den and simply said what the tea-partiers wanted to hear..."We need to trim domestic spending blah, blah, blah..."and then convieniently not bring up foriegn policy. But instead, he fearlessly marches in there with his scrappy followers and relentlessly attacks republican hypocracy of pretending to believe in free markets while they still support the largest empire in the history of the planet. A politician taylors his speech/ message to the room he is speaking to. Ron Paul is not a politician; he is an educator. Ron Paul has such a rabid following precisely because he never makes political calculations. He's an anti-politician. He speaks the truth as he sees it and lets the chips fall where they may. That is why we love him. It's also why the bad guys hate, fear, and respect him all at the same time.
This clip from the conference shows him at his finest, staring down the neo-con boos, and telling the truth.
Dave Nalle has a pretty fair assessment of all this in his recent article "Understanding Pro-War Republicans". He nails it with this passage:
ReplyDelete"Most Republicans who support our current wars do not do so because they are in favor of war or of imperialism, but because they are unquestioningly pro-America. They may believe in a strong national defense, but they do not believe in wars of conquest and occupation. They oppose the anti-war position, not because they like war, but because they dislike those who take issue with the actions of America as a nation no matter what the reason.
They operate from the perspective that our government is good, not because government is good, but because our government is American and America is good. They therefore assume that the actions of our government, including making war, must be good and right actions because they are the actions of an American government."
http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/understanding-pro-war-republicans/#ixzz0lESzaRHS
Ah yes, mindless nationalism. Another fine gift of democracy. Especially democracy on such a massive scale.