Posted on 07/06/2007 9:32:27 AM PDT by Josh Painter
What are you, twelve?
A humble foreign policy is a conservative foreign policy, not because of juvenile names you come up with, but because we have a unique view on the role of government.
We are humble in all things government can accomplish. Domestic policy and foreign policy.
Perhaps if more freepers were actually alive when Reagan was president, they would understand this concept.
Dr. Paul is not an enemy of real conservatives. He doesn’t take jihad seriously enough, but most republicans don’t take conservative views serious enough either.
I’m not at all happy about the direction the GOP is going, and seeing the behavior of people towards Dr. Paul is a reminder of the real problem. Republicans just aren’t very conservative any more. They care more about policing the world then they do limiting government.
Do you want me to make believe that I respect paleoPaulie's foreign policy or that of other "paleos" who have the gilt-edged nerve to call themselves "conservatives"???? This while they practice the foreign policy posture of George McGovern and Bertrand Russell, on their knees or on their bellies prostrate before our nation's enemies. If I have to choose between a gutless "conservative" coward like Neville Chamberlain or paleoPaulie or a man's man like Winston Churchill, I will take Churchill every time. Likewise any choice between actual conservative Ronald Reagan and paleopipsqueak paleoPaulie will be Ronaldus Maximus every time.
There are many aspects to conservatism. They are not equal in importance. The small government stuff may arise in any election. It will NEVER be permanent policy. Nor will expansion of government be permanent policy since again it is a question in every election. Likewise, the size of the tax burden or the sociopolitical identity of those most burdened. I object to neither small government nor smaller tax burdens. I don't regard as either as crucial in the sense that military victory over our nation's enemies is crucial or in the sense that ending the abortion holocaust (even if that means more government) of 50+ million by surgical abortions alone is crucial. We are conservatives and not Nazis. We actual conservatives are not indifferent, not even to protect your stock portfolio from taxes that pay necessary government bills.
If paleoPaulie were serious about reducing gummint and not just yakking about it, let's see him do something useful like leading (you and Baghdad Paulie should pardon the expression) a crusade to abolish public schools which squander a lot more of your money than the military ever has and with a lot poorer results. The gummint skewelers do to the minds and memories of innocent children dumped into their hands for "free" babysitting what Lieutenant Calley did to the bodies of innocent Vietnamese villagers.
The rhetoric of accusing our soldiers of "policing the world" is right up there with "self-determination" of foreign thugs controlling their nations and other communist and anti-American rhetoric. Listen to spineless antiAmerican ideological mutants like George McGovern, Ramsay Clark, choose any surviving antiAmerican antiwar jerk of the Vietnam War era other than the repentant Joan Baez. Listen to Mother Sheehan of our own era. They all use the same rhetoric. Think: talking points. Al Qaeda has them and has laypeople to chant them for them here (this is far worse than simply not taking Jihad seriously and amounts to paleoPaulie playing the role of what Lenin rightly called "useful idiot." Maybe it would be better if I called paleoPaulie a paleo-useful idiot.
In any event, you can count on the fact that I shall not refrain from calling paleoPaulie what he is whether you think it is "juvenile" or not. We live in the age of the Clintons and only idiots bring only a knife to a Thompson submachinegun fight. PaleoPaulie wants us to bring only a pillow.
When I was a prep school senior, Barry Goldwater (who was not then accused of pacifism and not yet known to be a raging pro-abort and favorable to homosexual "rights") convinced me that, unlike my labor union and most border state ancestors, I would be a Republican and reading National Review, Bill Buckley, Frank Meyer, Will Herberg, Willmore Kendall, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and a lot of their contemporary actual onservatives and rejecting the serial adultress Ayn Rand's near incoherent kneejerk philosophy (as did von Mises to her face in 1961) confirmed that choice.
If you don't like the direction of the GOP, it is because your own personal preferences are diverging from those of the party, because the party faithful understand, apparently better than you, the necessity of aggressively interventionist foreign policy, pre-emptive war when necessary and the need to keep our Islamofascist enemies dying in their homelands and not in ours where they can take our civilians with them as they did on 9/11.
Reagan's foreign policy notions included going in whenever necessary, fighting to a quick victory with maximumn firepower and getting the hell out. That is the GOP foreign policy. Bush has made the mistake of catering to the fussy complaints of leftists and paleos alike all of whom are deathly afraid that we actually accomplish something. Nation building is not our mission. We should make Iraq pay every nickel expended plus interest as reparations and the cost of being rid of Saddam Hussein. Why else is there oil under their sand? A Reagan move would have been to give the Fallujah women, children, cripples, civilians 48 hours notice by air-dropped fliers to leave by passing through checkpoints and told them that Fallujah was about to be wiped from the face of the earth along with Muhammed el Fatmouth's little Shiite militia and that anyone still there when the bombs dropped would be responsible for their own demise. Conservatives do not pine to cut and run. Conservatives wonder when we will learn the basic lesson that war requires the imposition of absolutely unacceptable pain and death on the enemy to be destroyed, that we really don't care what they think of us, or what Mr. Main Street merchant in Isolationville, USA, or what J. Random college professor at the University of California at Berserkley thinks (assuming that he, she or it thinks at all), but prefer that the Islamofascisti and other enemies spend their every waking hour in abject terror of what WE think of THEM and what WE shall do to THEM about it. Bush's problem is too little war, too limited means and not too much.
Although each soldier lost is a tragedy, to keep things in perspective, the death toll on American highways in the late 1960s was more than 4,000 per month. We shall have been at war in Iraq (however imperfectly) since March, 2003. In September, we shall have been at it for 54 months and sustained fewer dead Americans than were lost in one month in our highways in the late 1960s.
Buy a clue.
So precise! So accurate! So true!!! Thanks. May God bless you and yours.
It’s a shame you forget your history.
Goldwater, Reagan, and Dr. Paul have very similar views on foreign policy.
If you go to war, you go to win the war - not to win hearts and minds. This is the humility I am referring to.
Goldwater campaigned under the idea that we could use low level nukes and deforest the supply routes China was using to supply the enemy. This is what Reagan was referring to in 1968.
In 1976 only 4 republicans congressmen endorsed Reagan - Dr. Paul was one of them.
As President, Reagan saw first hand how insane the middle east is, quickly changed his policy and got the frick out - pronto. He was courageous enough to admit a mistake. Apparently today’s party of personal responsibility doesn’t have the balls to do the same. They refer to it as cut and running - and it is this mentality that is going to get shredded in another election.
Ummmm, the supply route was the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It ran through Laos. It was there that the soviets and not the Chicoms were having the NVA and VC bring the supplies they provided. An essential reason for the sino-soviet split of 1955 was that chairman mao resented taking orders from Ho Chi Minh who was the second in command of the Comintern. Later, mao underlined his continued opposition to Ho and the soviets and the Comintern by making agreements with Nixon to allow our bombing of rail lines on Chinese territory which were used by the soviets to supply the folks running supplies to our enemies over the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Reagan said that ALL of North Vietnam should and could be reduced to the world's largest parking lot, with stripes within six months. That was not a reference merely to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Presumably, the site clearance would have taken a day or so and the paving six months.
I hate to break it to you but, despite Reagan's support of Goldwater in 1964 which raised half of his campaign warchest by one speech on election eve, Goldwater always functioned as an enemy of Reagan gaining the presidency. Goldwater's first wife Peggy was a Planned Barrenhood National director from about 1940 to 1975 when she died. Goldwater was, however, in his books and in his presidential campaign an explicit and hard-core interventionist unlike paleoPaulie. Reagan was very close to interventionist and NOT an internationalist or isolationist. Ron Paul is an isolationist stooge whose time had expired politically a few years after he was born (12/7/41 was when it expired).
As to those low level tactical nukes that got Goldwater in hot water, his proposal was sensible. He also said that we had the technology to "lob one" into the men's room at the Kremlin and choose which urinal. In fact, Nixon used a non-nuclear smart bomb to kill a particularly insolent French ambassador to Hanoi in his bed.
In 1976, defending pro-abort Feckless Ford, Goldwater made an ad that actually warned California Republicans not to put Reagan's finger on the nuclear trigger. That was a political ad and not stand-up comic stuff. The treason of the libertarians against the conservative movement is nothing new.
Reagan withdrew troops from Lebanon after an attack but he had never committed troops to war. He was the same President Reagan who launched airstrikes from Great Britain (thank you Maggie Thatcher) to strike against Qaddafi and his family in response to Lockerbie, causing Lowell Weicker to have a paleoPaulie style hissy fit, but Qaddafi was wearing headgear on the right side of his head ever thereafter and which had not been seen previously. We hit him and his family in tents in the Libyan desert. Two of his children were killed and unfortunately Qaddafi survived as a chastened dictator.
Did I miss the memo where paleoPaulie advocated the actual use of tactical nukes????? I did not think so.
Punching someone in the face and then running away is not what I call “non-interventionism,” which would be the analogous situation to trying to up-and-quit right now.
While your assumption about the effect of withdrawal is really too simplistic, IMHO, it is not at all what I was talking about.
My point was that an isolationist foreign policy is not logically invalid, it is merely amoral.
The technical aspects of migrating form an ‘imperialistic’ to an isolationist policy are sheerly incidental, and I never suggested that this should be down through a summary withdrawal, or any other means, because that is not relevant to my comment.
Here are my beliefs. We live in a time more dangerous than any time that has come before... we have enemies unlike any we have had before. Tojo and Hitler represented Nation States and presented us with a way to win by giving us a static target to shoot for. They fought with conventional armies (by and large) and we used any and all means at our disposal to defeat, conquer, destroy and rebuild their Nations.
Today we face an enemy that is pure evil... not that WWII didn’t have it’s fair share of evil... satan was in Command of Axis troops then too... but our enemy can be anywhere (British know what I’m talking about), look like anyone (now they are recruiting European Caucasians)... may blow up buildings, cities, power plants, malls etc using cars, trucks, bombs, suicide belts, guns and or Chemical or Nuclear combinations of all of the above. America has no choice but to be the Nation that takes the fight to them. We are TARGET NUMBER ONE... the MODERN CRUSADERS... even though every Western leader tries to convince that it is Not a religious War... but our enemy tells us daily that it IS a religious War. We do not have the option of isolationism... it is immoral... because it will ALWAYS FAIL. Not once in mankind's History has isolationism ever worked... it led us into TWO World Wars... and even cavemen (sorry Geico) have been murdered in their sleep due to (wanting to leave the tribe down river alone and mind their own business). As long as evil walks the Earth, as long as men hold hate in their hearts, as long as islam remains viable... we must engage and fight terrorists at every opportunity.
One day we will see internment camps again in America... I fear we will see a smoldering ruin of an American city... and how long do you think it will be before we see attacks on regular Americans... like the ones in Great Britain? We have already been attacked a dozen times since 9/11... but isolationists in the media have never called it that. A JEWISH Center in California is attacked by an armed islamic... not terror... muzzie terrorist (iranian) tries to kill students in a rec area with an SUV... but not terrorism... a islamic radical tries to blow up a college football game, but blows himself up instead... but no terror there... and we have islamic radicals plotting to kill America Soldiers on an American Military Base in N.J., but no terror anywhere to be seen.
No, not only is isolationism immoral in these times... it is tantamount to group suicide... To those that support isolationism... what flavor of Koolaid do you prefer? Jim Jones would be proud!
LLS
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