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Quack Off
by
Free
Market Duck
The Ron Paul Phenomenon
(May 17,
2007)
Columbia, SC – All
hell broke loose at the 2nd GOP Presidential Debate last Tuesday
when Rep. Dr. Ron Paul (R-TX) suggested that the U.S. government invited or
– depending on your political persuasion and how you might want to spin it –
bore some of the culpability in provoking Osama bin Laden and the 15 Saudi
Arabian terrorists to bomb the U.S. World Trade Centers on 9/11/2001.
Dr. Paul’s major
point, as he discussed later in an interview after the debate, was that the
U.S. government’s interventionist military (and banking) policies over the
last several decades during our foreign
nation building has incurred a lot more hatred toward Americans
than many of us like to believe. For example, the U.S. government installed
the Shah of Iran who brutalized the people; the U.S. installed Dictator
Saddam Hussein in Iraq who murdered and gassed thousands with
American-supplied weapons; and the list goes on an on throughout the world.
We even paid for the deadly gas that Saddam used on the Kurds.
So, the big
question is: are we Americans as innocent as we seem to think we are? Is
it possible that we have ticked off, to put it mildly, a few foreigners with
our military and our forced funny money?
“I’ve heard a lot
of excuses for the New York WTC bombings,” said presidential candidate Rudy
Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, “but I’ve never heard this
absurdity put forth by Dr. Ron Paul. I challenge Rep Paul to withdraw his
statement and say he didn’t really mean it,” added Giuliani who then
received a loud applause from the GOP audience in South Carolina.
But Rep Ron Paul
did not retract his statements and, judging from the recent FOX TV and ABC
Web Site polls after the 2nd GOP debate, candidate Paul struck a
resonating chord with a majority of the viewers who cast their votes: 25% of
40,000 in the FOX poll, and 20,500 out of 24,000 in the ABC poll. In the
MSNBC poll after the 1st GOP presidential debate in California,
Ron Paul led all 10 candidates, garnering 31% of the 83,000 votes cast.
Other recent polls show that over 74% of Americans want the U.S. to get out
of the War in Iraq and liken it to the no-win quagmire of the Vietnam War.
The overwhelming results of the 2006 elections in which the Democrats took
over both Houses of Congress are attributed to the same reasons: i.e., while
it was OK for the U.S. to take out Dictator Saddam Hussein who, according to
the Dulfar Report, harbored and then shipped WMDs to Syria, Americans are
tired of being embroiled in a no-win Islamic religious civil war in which
neither side wants us there.
The central
question remains: Are the GOP and the major news media pundits – both
Conservative and Liberal -- in denial about what is quickly becoming The Ron
Paul Phenomenon? Let’s look at the facts.
Ron Paul is the
only consistently principled presidential candidate not flip-flopping on all
the major issues. In this sense, he is a true Libertarian who argues
against Big Government, against the IRS, against more taxes, against the
private Federal Reserve and its central banking policies which pump more
than $3 billion of non-backed paper currency into our deficit economy per
day, against the corrupt United Nations, and believes that the only function
of government is to protect individual rights with an objective military and
judicial system. Ron Paul is no pacifist and is a medical doctor who has
served under ER conditions in the U.S. Air Force.
All the other 2008
presidential candidates – both Democratic and Republican – are flip-flopping
all over the deck like a freshly caught tuna on a fishing boat, and cannot
even state whether they do or don’t believe in abortion rights for women.
All the candidates, except Ron Paul, routinely say they will cut taxes while
in Congress they are busy raising taxes through pork barrel earmarks and
more deficit bureaucracy. All the 2008 presidential candidates except Ron
Paul have pushed for more and more Medicare spending, more Government school
spending, more FEMA, more Homeland Security bureaucracy, more TSA airline
boondoggles, and while Americans slept unaware, the GOP dominated Congress
slipped in over 15,000 special interest “earmarks” worth hundreds of
billions of dollars that President Bush failed to veto, not one veto in five
years, to essentially bankrupt the U.S. economy.
Back to the scene
of the alleged crime.
Was Rep Ron Paul
correct in his assertion that the U.S. government and the central bankers --
who pull many monetary and military purse strings throughout the world by
forcing third world nations to “accept” World Bank, IMF, and Import-Export
“loans” in exchange for U.S. military “protection” (think of OPEC and Saudi
Arabia) to keep dictators in power -- are partly responsible for Osama bin
Laden and the Islamo terrorists blowing up the WTCs on 9/11? Those news
pundits, such as TV commentators Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, who naively
think that bin Laden simply woke up one day and yelled, “Hey, Muhammad said
we should blow the Americans to smitherines just for the hell of it,” are
ignoring history. On a recent trip to Granada and Alhambra, Spain, and to
Morocco, Africa, I learned that the Moors, the Muslims, the Christians, and
the Jews lived in harmony for over 800 years. You can go to Dubai today, in
2007, and see Muslims, Christians, Jews, and every other religion living,
trading, speaking, and respecting each other’s rights with no fighting
whatsoever. (While the War in Iraq is not inherent in Islam, Libertarians
would encourage Iraqis, through peaceful means, to establish a free market
infrastructure based upon individual rights, instead of the U.S. military
trying to install a socialist democracy, the exact opposite.)
Those Americans who
think that it is inherent in the Muslim religion to play terrorist against
the U.S. and, therefore, the U.S. needs to go to Iraq and kill all the
Muslims, are not only extremely naïve, they are putting forth a stupid
doctrine of foreign intervention.
On top of this,
those who claim America must “win” the War in Iraq have never defined what
“winning” really means. When does the U.S. know we’ve “won?” What tells
us? The War in Iraq is like a project with no stated objectives and no
concrete goals. In software development or an engineering project, if you
can’t state specific goals, with milestones and schedules and project
reviews, your project will fail. From a strict project management point of
view, that’s exactly why the War in Iraq is failing. If one were to state
the objectives in Iraq, one would probably conclude we have no business, no
military business, being there.
But the major
reason that the War in Iraq is failing is that it is not a real war. It is
an American escapade, intervening into other people’s affairs after
correctly saving them from Saddam Hussein, and ridiculously trying to
establish President George Bush’s idea of a socialist democracy with fiat
currency much like our own absurd Federal Reserve and a huge bureaucracy.
Why? One can only assume that (1) our American leaders have no clue about
the true function of a limited constitutional republic based upon
inalienable individual rights, or (2) somebody stands to make a lot of money
from all the untraceable 93 projects to date, according to the latest GAO
audit, worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the War in Iraq.
In summary, does
Rep Ron Paul owe Rudy Giuliani and the American people an apology for
suggesting that the U.S. is at least partly to blame for the 9/11 WTC
bombings because of our previous foreign interventionism? Au contraire, mes
amies. I think Hiz Honor the ex Mayor of The Big Apple, Rudolf Giuliani,
and all the flip-flopping 2008 presidential candidates and all the major
news commentators who “dissed” Ron Paul after the debate last Tuesday owe
him a big apology for telling the ugly American truth that some individuals
in the GOP don’t want to admit.
Watch out, folks.
The Ron Paul Phenomenon is here, it’s real, and it’s coming soon to a voting
booth near you. – FM Duck
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