Ron Paul holds forth on NYT blog
Our favorite Favorite Son, US Rep Ron Paul of the Fightin' 14th Congressional District, was given the floor by the Freakanomics blog of the NY Times, which received 400 questions from readers for the fellow we fondly call The Grumpy Gynecologist.
If you've followed Paul as we have there weren't too many surprises in his comments, but one question regarding why he didn't run as a third-party presidential candidate following the Republican primary yielded something of which we weren't aware:
...I also signed legally binding agreements not (to) run third party in 2008 if I failed to win the G.O.P. primary. That was the cost for ballot access in several states, 11 total I believe. So even I had wanted to, it would not have been possible to run in the general...
News to me, but perhaps not you.
For those of who have called Paul a nut for his views on the gold standard, the economy, etc., I wonder how you feel now that it's clear no one in the current administration and very few members in Congress know either how our financial sysytem "works" and what in the Sam Hill happened to it.
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5 comments:
Paul wasn't a nut because of his stances on the economy or the gold standard. Paul was a nut because of his lamebrained idea that if we were only to leave the rest of the world alone they would leave us alone. The simple fact of the matter is that we have HUGE economic interests in the middle east. Every little thing that happens over there gets magnified a thousandfold after the marketplace gets through with it. Had we left things as they were and not gone into Iraq and Afghanistan, $150 a barrel oil would have looked mighty cheap by comparison. Hell, 8 years of Clinton proved that doing nothing was no protection from them. He didn't lift a finger. And it was on his watch that the USS Cole was attacked, the marine barracks was attacked, the embassies in Africa were attacked. Clinton had the opportunity to have Osama handed over to us on a silver platter and he declined. So clearly doing nothing was obviously not going to work. But that was all Paul had in his bag of tricks. Sticking his head in the sand and pretending the rest of the world didn't exist.
THAT was why he was a loon.
Invading Iraq was loony.
No Banjo, it wasn't. Saddam WAS trying to build a nuke, why else would there have been so damned much yellowcake that we sold to the Canadians to be processed into reactor fuel?
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/20080706_Iraq_s_nuclear__yellowcake__moved_to_Canada.html
Don't even TRY to give me that line about there were no WMD's because this is proof positive that he WAS trying. And he HAD used WMD's in the past, ON HIS OWN PEOPLE, so we knew he had the balls to use them as soon as he got them. Further, he had made it very hard for the international community to prove he didn't have them because he was actively trying to imply that he did have them while hiding every possible means of proving it one way or another. Here is the thing that nobody mentions about those "international inspections" that happened during the Clinton admin. they announced a week in advance where the inspectors were going to go and what they were going to look for. So of course when they got there there was nothing there to see.
Did he have a functional weapon? apparently not. Did he have a centrifuge cascade to make HEU? there was one of pakistani design that was dug up in the back yard of one of his nuclear scientists but it was not in use, it had apparently been buried to hide it until after the heat was off and Saddam could restart his nuclear program without a lot of attention being drawn to it.. Saddam expected to survive the invasion, just like he did the first time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/books/chapters/1031-1st-obeidi.html?pagewanted=print&position=
He expected that the pressure from rest of the world would be so great that Bush would back off just like his dad did. That was a miscalculation on his part.
How could he have "been trying" to make WMD with a non working centrifuge prototype buried in an oil drum? Looks like he wasn't trying. And the yellowcake that had been there since 91 would seem to put the lie to the Niger lie spun by W. And Co.
Bottom line: our country would be far better off had we continued containing Saddam, who provided a counterpoint to the nutty Shia of Iran.
Don't forget that Saddam was sending a bounty to the families of every suicide bomber that blew themselves up in Israel. So yes, he was sponsoring terrorism.
Yes he was trying. He was trying to keep control over the technology and materials until he could restart production. He knew that if it were ever discovered that it would be taken from him.
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