Here's a title for you:S**t My Rand Says: A Compendium Of Paul's Wacky Quotes
And here are the first five:
Church And State
• "Addressing President Bush's program of channeling government money through religious-based charities, Paul said on KET's Kentucky Tonight on June 30, 2008, that 'churches do charity work, and that is wonderful, but they shouldn't be corrupted with government money.'
"He also said the initiatives 'obscure the church-state separation that there really ought to be,'" the paper reports.
The War In Iraq
• At a Jan. 31, 2008 presidential campaign rally in Montana for his father, Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R), Rand addressed the ongoing war in Iraq and the occupation of the country by U.S. forces.
"Some Republicans are not going to want to hear this," Paul told the crowd at the rally, according to the Courier-Journal. "But I live near Fort Campbell, and there are 50,000 soldiers there. I tell people you have to truly imagine what your feelings would be if those soldiers were Chinese soldiers and they were occupying the United States. We wouldn't have it. Republican and Democrat, we'd be blowing up the Chinese with roadside bombs as they were coming off the base. No country wants foreign soldiers on their land."
• "In an interview on May 15, 2009, Paul told the host of Antiwar Radio that he would have voted against going to war in Iraq and that he opposes a long-term occupation of Iraq or Iran."
"In the same interview, he said, 'I think torture is always wrong' and that 'our country should have a higher ideal than that.'"
Granted, he's a libertarian so he's bananas, and sillier quotes follow, but heck, until he gets to stuff about capitalism he sounds like a distant dream. Bring on the wackiness! From a non-libertarian that is...
2 comments:
Yep.
It's the stuff after that that becomes problematic. And I'm sure he'd have no problems with Obama's Cat Food Commission.
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At one time or another, people of pretty much every ideological stripe have sought some kind of alliance or separate peace with the Libertarians. There is a little bit in there for everyone.
But the fact that these outreach efforts have uniformly failed tells us as much about the Libertarian worldview as we need to know. They are utterly inflexible - it being an essentially adolescent ideology that can never find expression in real world politics, they don't ever offer any reach back. Or around.
The Libertarian ideology is basically in the same place as the pre-iraq assumptions about American power. Everyone just KNEW that you didn't want American military might deployed on your ass, just as everyone knows that a perfect implementation of Libertarianism leads to utopia. But when bush/cheney stupidly displayed the shortcomings of American military might, they broke the narrative. And Somalia is what your perfect Libertarian utopia would look like, which is very likely the reason nobody ever actually sought to deploy it...
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