It has long been apparent that Ron Paul’s isolationist foreign policy has far more to do with the agenda of the anti-American left than anything resembling the ideas conservatives support. But, surprisingly, that confluence of far left and far right may also apply to his domestic concerns. As the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack reports, yesterday Paul threw a bouquet to the Occupy Wall Street movement and even compared it favorably with the Tea Party.
According to Paul, both the Tea Party and the Occupiers are citizens upset with the status quo, seek to overturn the political establishment and have far more in common than they suspect. This is, of course, nonsense. The Tea Party is about individual responsibility (remember, it started over mortgage defaulters having their bills paid by other citizens who pay their way) while Occupy is about entitlement and envy. They only look like the same thing if you are, like Paul, someone who is so obsessed with things like the Federal Reserve and opposing the defense of American interests and values abroad, that you lose perspective about how we can defend the freedom he says he believes in so deeply.
The point here is not just that Paul is far removed from the Republican mainstream though, of course, he is. Every poll shows the group he does most poorly with is registered Republicans. His bow to the Occupy Wall Street crowd makes sense, because left-wingers are far more likely to view him favorably than Republicans, even those with libertarian leanings. While some in the GOP share his instinctive distrust of government, Paul’s all-purpose extremism is easy to understand, because as far as he is concerned, there is really no difference between his rationalizing the Taliban and Iran and his sympathy for the neo-Marxist Occupiers. As Paul said:
I think some people like to paint Occupy left and the Tea Party people right, but I think it makes my point. There’s a lot of people unhappy, and they’re not so happy with the two party system because we have had people go in and out of office, Congress changes, the presidency changes, they run on one thing, they do something else. Nothing ever changes. And I sort of like it because I make the point that if you’re a Republican or Democrat the foreign policy doesn’t really change, even though there’s a strong Republican tradition of the foreign policy I’ve been talking about where we don’t get involved in policing the world. Does the monetary policy change? Do they really care about reining in the Fed? Would the Fed bail out all these countries around the world? More and more people know that now. But monetary policy doesn’t change.
Far from representing the values of conservative Tea Partiers who respect the Constitution, Paul’s obsessive hatred for the institutions of government and America’s place in the world is the antithesis of their world view.
The nexus of the far right and the far left has always been a dangerous place where extremists of all kinds, including racists and anti-Semites, linger. So it’s no surprise that Paul has pandered to these groups with his newsletters as well as his isolationism and conspiracy theories about 9/11. While he may be enjoying a momentary surge in Iowa, his politics of destruction are part of a long-failed tradition of populist extremism that has little appeal to most Republicans or mainstream America.
We went off the rails when the sanctimonious “progressive” Wilson intervened in World War I, carrying the water for the House of Morgan and others who had invested in loans to Britain, while preaching “making the world safe for democracy.” This intervention set the stage for the centralization of the state and the rise of Bolshevism, fascism and Naziism. r nr nWe have learned nothing since. Between Bush and Obama, we continue in one way or another to use force far from our shores in the name of “democracy,” with almost invariably disastrous results, while the taxpayers bail out the banks. r nr nDr. Paul is far from perfect, and is unlikely to win the nomination or the election, but he alone of the candidates puts the folly of interventionism, the evil of centralization of power, and crony capitalism front and center. r nr nIf Commentary were to engage in a bit of self-examination of the role of Jews in the financial scams that led to the collapse, and the disastrous and unsustainable interventionist foreign policy, instead of constantly trumpeting the search for anti-semites under the bed, it would be performing a great service. Fat chance of that.
Just waiting for the Youtube of a Ron Paul Townhall where Code Pink joins hands with an Aryan Nation militia. nhmm, guess THAT kumbaya moment would require the militiamen to check their AK47s at the door….
There is nothing surprising about the left meeting the right. Extremes meet. World politics is dominated by the threat of the union of Marxism and Islam–the most leftist and rightist of all doctrines. nIf we look back to 1939, Hitler and Stalin united and together attacked Poland Fortunately for the world, the coalition broke up when Hitler felt he had to attack the Soviet Union, probably because that's where most of the world's Jews were located and the raison d'etre of Nazi philosophy was the erasing of Jewish genes from the world.
or because the Soviet Union had massive oil reserves, that if the Nazis had obtained, they would have probably conquered all of Europe.
Ron Paul is being Attacked my everybody and their dog, because He Will bring REAL change to the foolem, blindem and Robem crowd who runs things now!
The left and right meet on the following issues:r nr nEnd the Warsr nEnd the bailoutsr nStop outsourcing our jobsr nInvestigate and jail the banking cartelr nr nRon Paul 2013 unless you want more war and more debt!!
10 words into your piece and i`ve seen enough to know that your views on ron paul are skewed and incorrect-watch tv much?
The one thing you will not hear from any of the "family values", "Christian", conservatives is condemnation for Ron Paul's racist newsletter statements. And no one in the "liberal media" is even surprised, since that's the one thing that most endears Paul to the Santorum, Bachmann, Perry, and Gingrich crowd. Being against gratutious, for-profit wars is "outrageous", but saying 95% of black males are criminals is perfectly fine. n nIf there's a judgment day, and if Jesus was God, I'd love to hear them explain how Jesus was one of the 5% "good ones".
That's the most convoluted piece of crap I've read in a long time. You've woven together such improper analogies and unidentified terms while mixing seperate and unconnected subjects together to create such incoherent phrases, you've failed to make the slightest point. One could take a guess that you intended to be insulting, but that would be a guess.
Some conservative ideas appeal to people on the left. Unless one is unduly partisan, this is not a bad thing in itself. I am very conservative, but let me give two examples. I am opposed to assassination of American citizens without due process of law and the indefinite detainment of American citizens without due process of law. I don't care if the "media" or the "foreign policy establishment" or "intelligence sources" say that someone is guilty. All of those can be a sham and can be manipulated for political purposes (e.g., the intelligence to support the invasion of Iraq, or the intelligence around the Gulf of Tonkin incident which led to Congress supporting the Vietnam War, but which has now been proved by declassified materials to have been manufactured). I don't care how many "bogeyman" are touted in the media as the "next great threat to our national security". I want "due process of law" for all U.S. citizens no matter what company they keep because due process itself is foundational to our liberties. Is this where left meets right? I hope so! I hope that we can all agree with Benjamin Franklin, “Those who are willing to give up their liberties to secure their safety will have neither.” n
Some conservative ideas appeal to people on the left. Unless one is unduly partisan, this is not a bad thing in itself. I am very conservative, but let me give two examples. I am opposed to assassination of American citizens without due process of law and the indefinite detainment of American citizens without due process of law. I don't care if the "media" or the "foreign policy establishment" or "intelligence sources" say that someone is guilty. All of those can be a sham and can be manipulated for political purposes (e.g., the intelligence to support the invasion of Iraq, or the intelligence around the Gulf of Tonkin incident which led to Congress supporting the Vietnam War, but which has now been proved by declassified materials to have been manufactured). I don't care how many "bogeyman" are touted in the media as the "next great threat to our national security". I want "due process of law" for all U.S. citizens no matter what company they keep because due process itself is foundational to our liberties. Is this where left meets right? I hope so! I hope that we can all agree with Benjamin Franklin, Those who are willing to give up their liberties to secure their safety will have neither.
anti-American left !! n nShame on you and your crap word smith for hire skills!
Yes, it’s true, extreme right and extreme left often meld one into the other. Take the example of the fabled neoconservatives, many of whom started out on the far left, as followers of Leon Trotsky and Max Shachtman, or some other “dissident” brand of communist, and eventually “evolved” to become neocons – merely transferring their desire to a global class war into agitation for a “war on communism,” and later a “war on terrorism” led by the US.
What part of 'broke' are you incapable of understanding, Mr. Tobin? We're broke and everyone knows it – countries with less debt than us are undergoing collapse in Europe as we speak. What will it take to convince you, food riots?
Inardozi, other than Greece, who in Europe is truly "broke"? Iceland? Ireland? They've been handled already. Italy? Spain? New governments who are making level-headed fiscal decisions ahead of the EU and IMF. That's why the Euro surged over the past week or so. There are bumpy roads ahead, to be sure, but Europe's finally getting over their long Statist Dream. n nAnd "countries with less debt than us are undergoing collapse in Europe" is a total straw man argument. What's their GDP comparative to the US's? It's an apples and oranges comparison, designed to scaremonger the readers into thinking that US debt alone requires us to think like chicken littles. Also, it provides no answers. What's your solution? Ron Paul? Show me a solution that doesn't give me kumbayah or utopia at the end of it, and I'll take you seriously. n nDo I worry about the debt? Yes, but largely from the standpoint of unnecessary debt and risk that Obama and congress has leveraged in the past 4 years (and threatens to explode with ObamaCare in 2013-2016). n nCome up with a better argument, sir.
Wow! What a disingenuous, thoroughly biased article. Those who shill for the establishment have a lot to lose in a Paul Presidency and it shows. But don't fall for smear pieces like this. Go to youtube and listen to Ron Paul for yourself. Tobin's attack on Paul is self-interested and downright dishonest. One quick example of Tobin's twisted reality. In next to the last paragraph, he refers to "Paul’s obsessive hatred for the institutions of government" saying that Paul's positions are the antithesis of the Tea Party's ideas. Let's stop and think for a second. The Tea Party supports smaller, less intrusive government, lower taxes, transparency and accountability in government. Yet those are things right out of a Ron Paul campaign ad.
Why do Tea Party beliefs coincide with Ron Paul? Because the Tea Party has its roots in Ron Paul's 2008 campaign. It began around the time that Ron Paul did a huge online fundraiser in mid-December, 2007 on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. And Ron Paul rallies were held in Boston. Then as the grassroots movement gained steam in 08/09 you began to see the more mainstream, establishment republicans opportunistically attach themselves to the Tea Party label. Many of them have proved to be Sunshine patriots (SC Gov. Haley, for example) and have now abandoned the Tea Partiers who helped them get into office and are more interested in doing whatever it takes to rise in the Republican party establishment. Ron Paul, along with a lot of Americans in the flyover states, love our national “institutions of government”. Our heroes are the incredibly wise founders of this great republic who loved liberty, hated tyranny and warned against standing armies (Jefferson), entangling alliances (Washington), banks controlling the money supply (Jefferson), giving up liberties in the name of the government to keeping us “safe” (Franklin). The Tea Party and Ron Paul believe those things, but Tobin certainly does not.
Wow, I'd almost believe this article if n nA. It didn't neglect the undeniable parallel that Paul has drawn between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party: the disgust of the rich taking billions from taxpayers to bail out rich Wall Street n nB. It didn't slander Paul as isolationist, which is an absolute lie n nC. It didn't stereotype all tea party members as hawkish, preemptive war lovers n nIt's one thing to do revisionist history. It's another thing to try to make up stuff about 2010 that wasn't true (the Tea Party being world police advocates). One of the biggest wins the Tea Party had was the Kentucky senate seat – Sarah Palin even showed up – where Ron Paul's son won while promoting a more humble foreign policy. n nIf we get Santorum or Obama in 2012, our deficits won't go down, our 2 $1+ trillion wars (on drugs, in the Middle East) will continue, and we'll continue to be on OFFENSE instead of building a strong DEFENSE, and soldiers will continue getting PTSD and committing suicide in record numbers.