Does anyone seriously think anyone right of center will be capable of voting for Obama? That no matter who is on the ticket, that they will hold their nose and vote Republican? This is what we did with McCain. And what happened? We lost.
Democrats rightly criticize the Republicans as they have existed for at least the last 15 years or so as being more or less Democrats who just don’t want to raise taxes. They spend the same amount, and just generate more deficits since taxes stay low. These same people argue that our budget deficit is surely not just a product of spending too much. This is a fallacious argument, as anyone can see who looks at just how much Obama increased spending over the already ludicrous Bush levels, but the basic premise within a small range is not invalid. Plainly, we could tax more.
Such people will see no reason to back someone like Romney, who if the past is any indication will talk a big fight, then more or less turn into George W. Bush. Our national debt will continue to skyrocket, commissions will be formed, and after much bluster and brinkmanship, exactly 3 cents will be cut from our projected INCREASES over the next decade.
Look at what Rand Paul has done in Congress. As one small example, he was the only one to ask, in the context of Obama’s constant calls for “investments” in infrastructure: do you have a prioritized list of repairs? The answer was no. Since we just spent some $130 BILLION on repairs, that should cause shock in a psychologically normal person capable of rational thought. Plainly, the goal was not fixing things, but spending money, and spending money in places that were motivated by politics. Vote buying would be the shorter and more honest description of where some $130 billion of our tax money (40% of which of course was FUTURE tax money, plus interest, since we borrowed it) went.
A major bridge into Louisville, Kentucky was recently declared dangerous and closed for six months. Was it on a list to fix? Of course not: there IS no list. I just said this. In preparing to spend $130 billion, not even basic homework was done. (note: that $130 billion is from memory. It’s in the range, even if not spot on).
Or take the recent decision by the Obama Administration to kill an American in Yemen. When talking about Guantanamo, my argument has always been THEY ARE NOT AMERICANS AND NOBODY ELSE WANTS THEM. But when it comes to Americans, we have LAWS that govern how to treat traitors and sabateurs and would-be mass murderers. We have a Bill of Rights, and the constitution to which it is an amendment.
Was this guy a danger to other Americans? Not really. Yemen is not exactly in our back yard. It’s in the back, back forty, and if it fell into the ocean tomorrow, maybe 100 Americans would know about it, ever. I speak with some confidence when I say that only perhaps 1% of Americans could find it on an unmarked map. Certainly less than 10%.
And from this flowed the bipartisan Congressional decision to create a law that would allow American citizens to be detained by the military indefinitely. This is a HUGE abrogation of our rights. Even if in practice that power is not abused in the short term, it means that technically arresting ANYONE is possible, without a writ of habeas corpus (as I understand the matter–I have not read the full language, and am not even sufficiently up to date to know if this was passed into law or not; it is the fact that it was proposed that concerns me here).
The idea is that Delta or DevGru can sneak into, say, Yemen, and do a body snatch. But once the principle is there, what about sneaking into QUEENS and doing a body snatch? What about pulling somebody out of their home?
Ron and Rand Paul are some of a very small number of people who grasp the implications of all this. People like John McCain–who honestly I used to like–are not thinking long term. They need to ask questions like: if a good friend of Bill Ayers were in the White House, do you think at some point this could be abused, particularly in conditions of being able to censor the Internet, and having more or less complete control of other forms of news propagation?
Net: Paul will by default win the vote of everyone who hates Obama, and by virtue of his policies the votes of everyone who fears governmental oppression and who opposes foreign wars. This makes him electable, in my view.
We need to give him a try. Yes, Romney says he will put a hold on implementation of Obamacare nation-wide, day one. But the forte of left wingers is demonizing people in power. Who is to say they can’t remobilize a Democrat resurgence in 2014 with rhetorical pictures of diseased children and grandmothers, left behind by the Big Meany Head Republicans?