Douthat: What Hath Rand Paul Wrought?

[supermario21]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/douthat-what-hath-rand-paul-wrought.html?_r=0

Comments are depressing, as usual, but the piece is very good.

[Cleaner44]

East coast liberal comments are never going to be good for small government constitutionalists. It is interesting to note that the original 13 colonies are some of the worst at straying from the Constitution.

[Lucille]

THE Republican Party built an advantage on foreign policy across generations, and then began demolishing it 10 years ago this month. What the cold war made, the invasion of Iraq largely unmade: beginning in 2003, a party that had long promised — and mostly delivered — peace through strength became identified with an intelligence fiasco, a botched occupation and the squandering of American resources, credibility and lives.

Two Republicans running for president in 2012, Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul, seemed to have some grasp of what Iraq had done to their party’s reputation...

Not to mention the country.

HAPPY 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE END
http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=50688


An Iraqi citizen describes how the Great American liberators implemented democracy in Iraq:

“It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.”

The neo-cons set in motion a chain of events that will ultimately result in the collapse of the Great American Empire. The hubris and arrogance of our leaders over the last ten years is a reflection of our military industrial complex capturing the government in collusion with the Wall Street cabal and bankrupting the nation through foreign aggression and domestic pillaging of the middle class. The warfare/welfare state benefits bankers, arms dealers, and mega-corporations. They use their riches to buy off the politician puppets in Washington.

Their lackey at the Federal Reserve prints the fiat currency needed to sustain and further their enrichment. The corporate media provides the storylines of terrorists, imminent threats from 3rd world countries sitting on our oil, and our successes in helping Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans and all of the peoples yearning to be free like us.

We build chicken factories in the desert, fake its success, have our leaders proclaim the success to the corporate media, and the MSM mouthpieces do their duty. Edward Bernays would be so proud of what America has become.

HAPPY 10th ANNIVERSARY!!!

https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/1224803072/h02521F2E/

The Worst Mistake in U.S. History — America Will Never Recover from Bush’s Great Foreign Policy Disaster

[supermario21]

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/the-legitimizing-of-rand-paul/

Here is a follow-up post to the Sunday Column.




The Legitimizing of Rand Paul
My Sunday column argues that the great Rand Paul filibuster represented an important step in the Kentucky Senator’s quest to widen the Republican conversation on national security beyond the “strength good, appeasement bad” rhetoric that the party had fallen back on (though not as completely as some Republicans would like) in the aftermath of the Bush presidency. The most persuasive counterpoint to my interpretation is that the right’s rally around Paul’s drones-on-American-soil stand is sui generis, with no wider implications for the G.O.P. foreign policy debates: Many of the Republican Party’s hawks have always been skeptical of drone warfare (preferring boots on the ground, more prisoner-taking, etc.), and the fact that Paul was making a reductio ad hellfirum argument about drones taking down latter-day Jane Fondas made it that much easier for them to leap on the partisan bandwagon and #standwithRand.

This is Dave Weigel’s point, explaining why so many normally interventionist Republicans were willing to take sides with Paul against John McCain, and it’s correct as far as it goes. But given how Republican foreign debates have proceeded in the recent past, I still tend to think the legitimization of Rand Paul as a right-wing folk hero has implications that extend beyond the narrow hypothetical where he chose to plant his filibuster flag. That’s because, as I’ve argued before, the relative sterility of the foreign policy conversation on the right doesn’t reflect a deep conservative uniformity on national security questions; rather, it mostly reflects the fact that the potential standard-bearers for a less interventionist worldview have been relatively easy for hawks to delegitimize as cranks, Israel-haters, RINOs, etc. And so the fact that a lot of the support for Paul from his fellow Republicans is opportunistic and confined to a narrow policy hypothetical matters less than the fact that the support exists at all — that a politician who has consistently advocated a more militarily-restrained foreign policy is suddenly being supported, elevated, and extolled at the expense of his more interventionist critics within the party.

None of this means that the entire party is about to tilt dramatically toward realism. But legitimizing, as Real Conservatives (TM), politicians who advocate restraint is a necessary precondition to broader policy change. Opportunism follows influence, and creates it — and right now Paul has more influence within his party than every other realist, paleoconservative and libertarian Republican of the last decade put together.

[RonPaulFanInGA]

The line about Huntsman's base pretty much having been only journalists is funny because it's true.

[supermario21]

It's because Huntsman was about as dry as a piece of stale bread.