“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Catholics, And I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

—Pastor Martin Niemoller

To all of those who have fallen for this and say…”Oh, go get those Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin supporters…they are just loons anyway..” Well, you will one day be next on the list. It is called divide and conquer. First do as the Nazis and Russians did..target certain groups, marginalize them, call them names, and then say “Well, they are the real problem..if we didn’t have those Ron Paul supporters, we would be okay. They are the REAL terrorists. Make sure and fall for it. Don’t associate with one of THEM–otherwise you will be next. Of course, YOU are not one of THEM anyway, so what do you care?

Just FYI, it took me less than 5 minutes to “put that list together.” I just listed those items from memory. Didn’t need to use Google or anything. These are fairly large items about Ron Paul, and the fact that there are so many egregious problems for Ron Paul just says what kind of person he is.

It seems that you seem to want to defend Paul on some of the list. I really don’t think most of those items are defensible, so I don’t think there’s a point to debating with you on most of the items on the list. If I had compiled a similar list for Pol Pot, David Duke, Stalin or Kim Jong Il, it would be possible for a defender of any of those people to come along and try to spin or rationalize the problems raised in each point. Such a debate of defending the indefensible with spin is not worth my time. I’ll just let people make what they will on the indefensible points that you try to defend, and only engage you on issues where your defense has any credibility.

#1) OK so we agree that Ron Paul blames the Union for the Civil War. That’s looney. You didn’t take a position on how Ron Paul puts a priority on protecting whites from the ‘tyranny’ of federal government, and assigns a lesser priority to blacks actually being enslaved under the tyranny of slavery. So you don’t defend these seeming racist set of priorities.

#2) Your defense of returning to the gold standard is to list a Nobel-prize winner who supports the notion, yet you didn’t address my objection to going back to the gold standard (i.e. it’s pointless since the economy is always expanding, so the money supply must always expand, and the supply of gold will not expand). So that means that your rationale for supporting this theory is pure deference to intellectual credentials alone. By that logic, since we do not hear most Nobel Laureates saying we need to return to the gold standard, then it can be assumed that more of these intellectual giants oppose returning to the gold standard, and thus using your logic of deference to intellectual authority, we must reject the gold standard theory since more intellectual giants oppose it than endorse it.

#3) Paul was not “quoting” anyone when he said that we invited the 9/11 attacks upon ourselves. He was expressing his own beliefs.

#4) Your defense of Paul on this point only adds to my point. Not even having a flat tax means that the federal government has no revenue, meaning that the government will not have the money for basic government services (defense and transportation) as well as providing for vital programs that people’s lives depends on (health care and welfare). Maybe that’s not a problem to you if we can’t defend the country, or if tens of millions of people are sick and other millions die or commit crimes due to sheer poverty and starvation. We’ll have to disagree on that.

#5) OK, so you accept as acceptable, what I have called Paul’s “selective libertarianism” or “hypocritical libertarianism”, whereby someone in Washington DC telling you what to do is oppression, but someone telling you what to do in a state capital is freedom. You think this is consistent and acceptable. We’ll agree to disagree on that as well.

#6) You basically duck my point here and then make a foolish assumption here. Yes, nearly all of Congress engages in pork-barrel projects, but not all of them are saying that the role of the federal government needs to be returned to colonial times. You can’t argue that we need to bring the size of government back to before Alexander Hamilton’s days, while requesting tens of millions of federal dollars for “shrimp research.”

#7) You have ducked this point here as well. NAFTA is not mentioned in this point. Ron Paul believes in a conspiracy theory that would unite North America into one country. That is not NAFTA.

#8) OK, we agree on this point then.

#9) OK, so we’ll again agree to disagree on this point. You defend a meeting and a handshake with a high profile Neo-Nazi as just ‘getting to know your constituents.’ I, and I suspect most people, find it to be something potentially damning about the politician who engages in it.

People, be they liberals, conservatives, libertarians, or whomever can rationalize anything that they choose to. The fact that anything can be spun, does not mean that people will condone certain “looney” behavior, just because it has been spun into something that seems sane.

Thanks for taking the time to put these together. It is only after having someone put these lists together can we discuss in a reasonable manner.

#1 The Union refused to allow the southern states to succeed. Until that time, the United States of America were just that – individual state governments that had some shared purpose in handling federal items like national defense. It wasn’t until Lincoln and the Civil war that federal government assumed so many federal powers. With regards to your race comment, many southerners were not fighting for slavery but against federal control. I know not whether Paul is a racist, because it really is an internal belief, but arguing that the north/union forced the war isn’t = to racist. Remember that the difference between being a rebel and a patriot is only a matter of who wins.

#2 Gold standards exists to combat inflation. While a gold standard exists, the paper money has the promise of some amount of gold in return for that money. Nobel Prize winner in economics Robert Mundell on the use of gold backed money to fight inflation. Definitively not loony.

#3 Paul was quoting the 9/11 report that cites our presence in Saudi Arabia as a contributing factor to the attacks. Page 2 of section 2. You can find the report here. In case you don’t click through here is a quote:

In August 1996, Bin Ladin had issued his own self-styled fatwa calling on Muslims to drive American soldiers out of Saudi Arabia. …. he told the interviewer: “We are certain that we shall—with the grace of Allah—prevail over the Americans.” He went on to warn that “If the present injustice continues . . . , it will inevitably move the battle to American soil.”

#4 Paul doesn’t support a flat tax, he wants to abolish income tax completely. He also wants to reduce spending of the federal government to offset that tax. He argues that we need quite a bit less to maintain roads and a national defense especially if we stop doing it abroad. Here is a link that shows our disproportionate defense spending habits. The important thing to note here is that the US spends more than the next 9 countries on the list… combined. I think many on this blog can agree on less spending.

#5 I can see how you view the difference between state rule and federal rule as hypocrisy. However Paul has maintained the rule of the constitution and its appeal to states governing themselves vice the federal government in every speech, writing or debate I’ve ever seen of him. From a libertarian view, only anarchy provides absolute freedom, except that it doesn’t. In a society with no rule of law, we wouldn’t be able to have freedom because we would be governed by the strongest regardless of societal rules. I would argue quite simply that Paul has never espoused “total libertarianism” as you coined the phrase. He advocates more liberty than we have today and he uses the founding fathers and our constitution as his guide for that more consistently than most politicians.

#6 I don’t defend earmarks, Paul putting them into bills, or his voting record. If you think earmarks or voting against bills laden with them is loony for a congressman, than I don’t think you are paying attention.

#7 I remember that question in the debate season. He has pointed out that the NAFTA is a type of trade union and that he didn’t want to see any expansion of that agreement or others like it. Opposition to NAFTA or next generation trade agreements, whether it includes currency or not, is also not loony.

#8 I agree with you that Paul’s association to the newsletter is loony.

#9 I didn’t find the picture, but did find plenty of discussion. I was surprised to see that he kept the money from Don Black, but then I wouldn’t expect him to try to limit any group’s constitutional protected voice so perhaps it is a consistent viewpoint. Jury is out on this one for me.

“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals.” ~ Ron Paul.

I’d never argue that the Paul campaign doesn’t pull the disenfranchised in a higher percentage than normal campaigns. His viewpoints are extreme in comparison to what we get out of the mainstream candidates. I don’t accept that we can label the person without the discussion.

Another RP supporter told me that the GOP Republican primary in Nevada (where Paul lost to Romney) was rigged. Apparently another conspiracy. I would love to hear someone explain how the GOP Nevada primary was rigged so that Paul would lose. lol

But, I still don’t think it’s OK to profile anyone because of who they support politically. That just ain’t right.

(1) Says that it was basically the Union’s fault for starting the Civil War, despite that the South seceded and fired first upon federal forces. Apparently Paul is a racist, since he believes that white people should be liberated from federal government, but blacks should not be liberated from being slaves.

(2) His gold standard ideas seem pretty looney. It seems to me that the money supply needs to constantly expand as the country’s economic output expands and its population expands. So how can you fix your money supply (that needs to expand) onto a a finite natural resource (gold)?

(3) He did blame the US for 9/11. His words during an exchange in the Republican primary were they struck us because “we were over there” (i.e. because the US was fighting as part of the UN in Operation Desert Storm in 1991).

(4) Paul fails to grasp that some 40% of America would probably suffer severely under his economic plans, since income and wealth distribution are highly unequal, so having some sort of flat tax would be an enormous punishment to about 40% of Americans, would gut the funding for their schools, their healthcare and we probably would not even have enough money to maintain our defense, roads or other basic government services.

(5) Paul is a hypocrite in that he espouses total libertarianism but would only actually do selective libertarianism. Specifically he finds the federal government to be tyrannical, but accepts state government telling people what to do in abortion and gay marriage issues as not tyranny. That is hypocrisy.

(6) Paul is also a hypocrite in that he has inserted tens of millions of dollars of pork barrel spending for things as trivial as “shrimp research” for his district in Texas. He then votes against the bill AFTER putting the pork in.

(7) Paul is a conspiracy theorist in so far as he peddles this idea that there is a North American Union conspiracy theory.

(8) Ron Paul has lent his name to a newsletter of conspiracy theorists and racists.

1) His association with Lew Rockwell

2) His refusal to jettison the GOP last year and run as an independent candidate

I changed my voter affiliation to “Republican” last year, just so I could hold my nose and vote for him at some Saturday morning closed GOP caucus (I was “holding my nose” because of the GOP angle–certainly not because of Ron Paul). I had a “clean” record of living my life free of any political party affiliations, up to that point. And then Ron Paul, with all his backing and all that money gushing in, off and decides he’d rather be a pissant congressman from Texas!

I suspect Missouri law enforcement will find the same thing with the “Ron Paul terrorists”: They’ll make big plans, gather the money and resources together to pull it off… and then bail out at the last minute.

“Bob Barr terrorists?” They’ll talk a lot of guff about “high morals,” and then late some Thursday night try to sneak some young girl in the back door of a Kansas City Planned Parenthood clinic.

Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com

Not ones I necessarily agreed with, but not what I’d call loony. I would certainly say he’s a bit of a borderline candidate touting oversimplified approaches in some cases, and that he therefore attracts disenchanted folks susceptible to that kind of populist appeal.

Maybe he does in fact support some crackpot ideas. But he has at least a few sound defensible ones, and I don’t think he deserves to be simply dismissed.

But the 2-party system strongly militates that he be dismissed. Neither of the two parties can sustain a successful effort if an iconoclastic figure emerges with the power to attract a disproportionate number of votes from one of the two major parties. This accounts for why, in general, the GOP seems more eager to marginalize Paul, just as the democrats had been eager to marginalize Ralph Nader in the past.

Nader helped so much with it that its hard to tell now how much of the push came from the party. But it’s always a difficult position to negotiate. During the course of a primary campaign, the major party and its mainstream products can co-opt a small handful of the most viable and popular views of a guy like Paul or Nader. And then this will usually force the candidate further to the fringe to maintain a distinct identity. Sadly, there really isn’t a viable 3rd way for an insurgent candidacy. You either accept the co-opting and move into the mainstream or you end up actively participating in your own marginalization.

While difficult to prove the negative I submit the federal reserve transparency act, Paul’s use of Peter Schiff as an economic adviser and his focus on the economy in the republican primary debates as proof that Paul’s views have more than a little merit. Now prove me wrong. Submit items for consideration from Paul (not his supporters) of “loony” beliefs.

Jim told the truth about Ron Paul and you react with typical conspiracy theorist drivel (copying what someone says and saying it back to them) and saying that anyone who doesn’t buy your conspiracy theory is a “sheeple”.

Oh how I envy the enlightened few who are knowledgeable of the vast conspiracies that have the rest of us fooled. xD

Yeah, sound money backed by gold not air is pretty loony.

I guess affordable universal health care is pretty loony.

Hmm maybe that he wants to secure our southern boarders is the loony part you speak of.

Could it be his view on stopping all the billions of dollars of foreign aid we spend yearly and used in the U.S. is loony?

It has to be his $1.00 a year paycheck he gets from congress makes him a loon.

Ummm maybe it’s his belief in following the U.S. Constitution and The Bill of rights is loony.

Jim S. you know nothing of Ron Paul and his character.

For you to parrot something you were told with no proof or knowledge makes you the loon and sad sheeple.

Ron Paul on the other hand argues the values our country was founded on, personal liberty and freedom. If you call him a loon you are calling those who created and defended this great country loons, which could be construed as an anti-American statement. Maybe we should add you to the list as well…

Kathleen Sebelius is a Bilderberger!!!! The Health Secretary belongs to the Illuminati! I knew it, this is proof that Obama belongs to the New World Order! :O

I vote no for special treatment for Ron Paul supporters.