Monday 2 January 2012

The last word on the newsletters

3 comments:

James Strong said...

I like Ron Paul a lot.
Yes, he's flawed but he's by far the best of the nationally-known politicians in the USA and he's better than anyone we've got in the UK.

I hope and expect that he will do very well in Iowa.
When that happens you can expect enormous villification, dirty tricks and lies.

The MSM, the corporations which enjoy corporate welfare, the Zionist lobby, and anyone who benefits from foreign aid do not want him as President and will not ALLOW him to take office.
If he continues to succeed in the primaries he will be killed, maybe by a 'respectable' group or maybe by drug-dealers because sure as hell they don't want their lucrative criminal activities brought into the area of legal trade.

cisbio said...

Ron Paul will never be elected POTUS. More to the point, he knows that well enough. So long as Paul sticks to his utterly 'unelectable' platform (disbanding the FR, ending aid to Israel etc..) he will remain an crazy outlier. Which raises the question: why does he bother?

That is simple. His profile is carefully designed to be the lightening rod for the hard-line libertarian wing in the GOP. He serves faithfully during each election cycle to keep the libertarians within the fold, who otherwise might raise an independent candidate.

As soon as his candidacy crashes and burns, the resentment against the MSM etc. is transfered, without missing a beat, to the Democrats and the 'liberal elites'.

Foreign aid, BTW, is a foreign policy tool. Usually, in the case of Great Britain, 'foreign aid' translates as export credits, in other words goods on account, typically weapons or training. There is a cosmetic element, too, handed to NGO's or the British Council. But even this has a foreign policy agenda. Pure humanitarian aid constitutes a miniscule amount of government spending, equivalent to one tax break to one foreign inward investor, say a Japanese car maker -if that.

Trooper Thompson said...

James,

if he were to be helped out of his mortal coil, it would most likely be a plane coming down or a crazy woman with a knife, but I don't like to discuss such things.

Cisbio,

I hope your powers of prediction are as bad as your abilities to read character.

He is not unelectable, but obviously he will get no help from the establishment media. If he gets the nomination, then it will be up to the independents to decide. Naturally, the establishment will swing round to Obama, including all the Fox pundits, but rather than ending the Fed and aid to Israel, it’s the opposition to the wars, especially the next one they’re stoking up with Iran which will what they will go on about, and there’s plenty of time to goad Iran into firing the first shot (first shot, if we don’t count all the crazy Sunni gangs being funded to blow stuff up or the assassination of scientists etc).

The reason he bothers is because, by taking part in the primaries, he puts real issues on the agenda, and whether or not he is doomed to lose, he has done more for the libertarian cause than anyone else in recent years. The electoral system makes it very difficult to run as a third party candidate, as they don’t get on the ballot in all the states, as you know. But it’s not the case that Ron Paul is keeping libertarians on the Republican plantation. Most of his supporters are very separate from the average GOP voter, and there’s no guarantee that they will support the GOP candidate if it isn’t Ron Paul.

He has made great progress since last time, and he's educating the public the longer he stays in the race.

As for his ‘profile being carefully designed’; no, that’s just the way he is. You can dig out interviews from 1988 and you’ll find him with the same message. What you certainly cannot say is that Ron Paul has obscured the major differences between his view and the view of both the Republicans and Democrats.

"Foreign aid, BTW, is a foreign policy tool"

Yes indeed, it does very little for the huddled masses, it's more like a bailout for the military industrial complex, with a Swiss bank account and a fleet of bullet-proof Mercedes thrown in for good measure.