GOP debate recap and analysis
Beyond my observation of McCain’s verbal foulup, I should probably just refer you to the usual suspects for GOP debate recap and analysis and share an excerpt from my reply in an email conversation I’m having with a Republican:
If I wasn’t totally against voting and elections now, I’d probably be saying something very similar to what Anthony Gregory did:
“The Heroic Ron Paul — Wow. He kept coming back to a non-interventionist foreign policy, spoke of how infationary spending was a hidden tax on the poor and middle class, attacked the income tax and IRS, said we need to end the entitlement state and the perpetual imperialism if we want to really cut taxes, defended the Fourth Amendment, said stem-cell research should be left up to the market and the states, came out strongly against a national ID card, defended freedom of expression and speech, never called for more government, and was responsible for the last words said by a candidate at a Republican debate being ‘habeas corpus.’
Wow.”
As Konkin noted in this interview, though:
Share ThisQ: By the way, what do you think about Ron Paul? Many partyarchs confronted with voluntaryist arguments against electoral politics point at him and ask: “Look at Ron, do you really think that he ’s destroying the Libertarian movement?” How would you answer that question?
SEK3: Ron Paul in many ways belongs to another era. His closest ideological ancestor was the Iowa Congressman H.R. Gross in the 1960s and 1970s, and Rothbard’s favorite, Congressman Howard Buffett of Nebraska in the 1950s. One can go all the way back to the Original who split with Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans in the early 1800s, John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia. The 435-member U.S. House of Representatives seems to be able to tolerate about one at any time, perhaps as a court jester, or maybe a lone example of what the House was supposed to do in theory. Note that there are never two at the same time. Note also that they have to operate within the two-party oligopoly. And, finally, note that Paul did NOT have the guts to join African-American Left-Reform Democrat Barbara Lee in voting against the enabling resolution of the U.S. House allowing George III (Bush II) to circumvent a Declaration of War (against whom? what enemy State?), although he has been a more consistent defender of both civil and economic liberties after that vote than Lee has.
Finally, Paul is too independent to even travel in a pack with the “Republican Liberty Caucus,” [Brad: not that that's a bad thing...] the latest of four attempts to build a soft-core, conservative voting bloc in the Republican Party as an alternative to third-party futility.
