Posted on 05/15/2007 4:25:06 PM PDT by CounterCounterCulture
Republican Presidential Candidate Debate #2 – Columbia, South Carolina 05/15/07 - Official Discussion Thread
Watch live coverage of the First-in-the-South Republican Party Presidential Candidate debate on FOX News Channel and FOXNews.com on Tuesday, May 15, at 9 p.m. EDT (6 p.m. PDT).
I imagine several candidates were looking pretty steely-eyed at Paul's comment, but they chose to show Rudy. And his response wasn't that great -- "issue a retraction"?
Like Rudy thought Paul just made his comments up as he went, and could have been "mistaken" about what he was saying. Maybe Rudy makes things up as he goes, but Paul, bless his troubled soul, is deadly serious and should be treated that way.
It illustrated another of the problems many of us have with Rudy, the inability to work on the plane of ideas and sound reason. Rudy's response was visceral, emotional, and personal. It HAPPENED that in this instance, he was attacking something we all disagreed with so it sounded good, but Rudy could have done EXACTLY the same steely-eyed answer if one of the candidates had insisted that a 17-year-old daughter who was pregnant should be required to carry her baby to term.
I still think the Ron Paul vote isn’t revealing, because he’s the candidate all the democrat activists are voting for — they ARE watching our debate, like we watch theirs, and they are all choosing to vote for the anti-war candidate to embarrass the republican party and the president, and because frankly that’s all they care about anyway, anti-war.
Since half the country is democrat, Ron Paul easily wins with half the country splitting their vote among the other 9 candidates.
Maybe you consider sucking the brains out of babies, confiscating guns, wide open borders, sanctuary cities, homosexual marriage and property rights "silly issues", but conservatives don't.
The next president will likely choose two justices. I want those choices to be Scalia-like, not Ginsburg-like, so I want to do my part in seeing that Rudy doesn't get the nomination. Yes, Rudy says he will appoint conservative justices, but Rudy considers himself a conservative and I wouldn't want Rudy or his ilk on the Supreme Court either.
I think they're still working people's emotions over 9/11, and emotional responses seldom make for good decisions.
Well, whether you agree or disagree with what Ron Paul said, your discussion and others about it shows that it wasn’t some crazy nut-job thing to say, that we could use a debate about wrong ideas, and that Rudy went for the easy point, without showing any real understanding of the complexities that face the next president trying to navigate the middle east.
Rudy’s philosophy would bomb Pakistan the moment they do something to bother us. Since every nation will do something to bother us, we won’t have any allies. Some like that idea, but an entire middle east with most of the world’s oil all united in a common hatred for our country — that’s not a good thing.
That’s Jimmy Carter thinking, that led to Iran being our blood-enemy.
Americans put the Clintons in office.
Americans tolerated (not without protest) the shenanigans going on in the oval office, while the Clinton Regime pulled out of Mogadishu at the first setback, one engineered by the lack of a force structure adequate to the task.
CLinton refused to take Bin Laden when he had the chance, and refused the rooms full of data on Al Qaida.
CLinton looked the other way at several bombings, from Oklahoma City to Africa, and the Mid-eastern connections were roundly denied by the Clinton Administration in their quest for a domestic boogeyman which would allow him to press on with his agenda. Americans tolerated that. Maddy Albright's people lost a couple of laptops with the names of humint assets in the SW Asia region, and the dots came off the map in the next year or two (the data was not even password protected). Americans said diddley squat when they announced the loss on CNN (Making sure the information was sought).
Clinton appointee Gorelick wrote the memo which stovepiped intel data so agency people could not compare notes and connect the dots.
Americans tolerated all of this and more.
No culpability?
We, collectively, despite those of us who raised unholy hell about it, tolerated all of the missteps which led up to 9/11, and some which actually encouraged the jihadis to take things to the next level.
Now while that did not have my vote or aproval, Dr. Paul just might have a point.
For what it is worth, now that we are present in Iraq, we had best better see this through, or the jihadi elements will be encouraged as never before, and backed like the Soviets and Chinese never backed the Viet Cong.
If we fail to do so, whose fault will that be?
Americans.
That's the tactics the liberals employ and embrace. And let's not kid ourselves we're not succeptible to them. Why else is Rudy even up there?
“Basically it’s a bunch of independent-minded and often autodidactic thinkers marching to the tunes of their own drummers, hard for them to agree on stuff even within their own outfit.”
Libertarians are well armed liberals that don’t want to pay taxes.
That means it would do absolutely nothing about the illegals that come here and wouldn’t need his stupid ID card.
Why would they want one? Rooty’s plan always demanded that illegals could never be asked to prove their legal status for any reason.
Just like his moronic ideas about guns, punish the honest that would comply with his silly rules and hope that criminals would somehow be reduced.
“Oooh, good point. He’s so mean that he only won his district by a 2-1 margin over his Democrat opponent. I’ll take some of that kind of “mean”, thank you very much.”
LMAO! Yes, we could use that kind of “mean” candidate.
It doesn’t matter what Romney’s positions are. He will get the WOMEN vote...so he will be the nominee.
Amazing. Ron Paul has dominated the conversation on this thread and has moved into the lead of a party that can’t find itself. I’m shocked to see Free Republic Republicans on the defensive like this.
Ron Paul is nuts. He should shut up and get off the stage.
“Well, I’m not going to go back and quote myself but I did reference the strong possibility that Dims were texting to support RP.”
Of course. The very first thing I thought when I saw the poll results. And a quick perusal of the BDS websites would probably bear that out.
Actually, I don’t really think we should be in the business of nation building, but I also don’t think there is any other solution in this case. I was not really ‘for’ going into Iraq initially, but the more I read, the sounder the idea seemed, even if we’re not doing the best in military execution, we needed to have a base over there, and where else would have been practical? Iraq was the best choice, especially given 17 prior UN resolutions that proved that ‘international organization’ impotent.
This notion of other nations behaving as we do in this regard leaves a rather significant ideological difference unaddressed. We do not do this (despite angry, international popular opinion to the contrary) nation building effort to exact these nations into our culture. We do this simply to give each individual person w/in those countries a voice. We are the only Superpower in history to behave this way, ever. People seem to neglect this point, disregarding the fact that we aren’t actually an imperialist nation, despite the hate America hype.
To use your example, if China invades the United States, it ain’t gonna be to ‘free’ us from anything except our natural resources. Visit the local gas station. We are not benefitting from Iraq’s oil reserves, and they now have the freedom to use this resource against us if they so choose.
I believe the Rules of Engagement have changed in some respect with our clamp down in Baghdad, although I could be wrong about this. It is one of the risks and the reason we are seeing more casulties among our soldiers. And necessary to fight effectively, I agree.
There are very few accurate analogies to our experience in Vietnam, but this and the media’s negative impact are two that are definitely true.
President Bush is doing what he should do and taking the advice of his military people, unlike President Johnson, who was too involved in the details of running the war that should have been left to his generals. Our current generals all know the lessons of Vietnam, so if they can’t get it right, I’m not sure where we stand.
Of course, examples like Gen. Batiste are simply treasonous, but I’m no where near wise enough to have actual solutions on this, it’s a big picture problem that al Qaeda knows is a weakness and they are intentionally using the ‘Vietnam’ scenario against us. Their leaders have said so. They think this is our Achilles’ heel, frankly, and the media is not smart enough to realize this and back off.
Another reason we are not executing this entirely in ‘WWII’ style is that this war is not nation specific. That’s part of why making the argument for going into Iraq was difficult.
Democrats still don’t get the somewhat subtle al Qaeda/Iraq connection, do you really think they are intelligent enough to figure out the hopscotching that is going to be necessary in the future to stamp this enemy out in 1) Somalia, 2) Indonesia, 3) Phillipines, 4) EUROPE . . . it is a different war. It is many of our past nightmares rolled into one, unfortunately.
Been here lately? http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
And San Fran Nan & Co. refuse to accept the Global War on Terror moniker. Morons.
I think I've posted several times now I am not a libertarian. Look on my Homepage. Are you still a Rockefeller Republican or a card carrying Communist? Didn't like that huh? Then don't dish it out. BTW I have nothing against Libertarians. The ones I known personally I would trust with my life.
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