Posted on 02/21/2008 6:18:29 PM PST by markomalley
On a couple of other boards, I have heard the allegation that "Ron Paul is the Military's Candidate." I always figured it to be your typical overblown hyperbole...
So I decided to research the numbers, in order to blow away the conspiracy theory. There's no way that he could be the leading candidate for military contributors...right?
Well, I went to the FEC Contributions Database that is maintained by opensecrets.org...the numbers I came up with were both surprising and very, very disturbing.
First of all, the methodology:
What I found was that the Paul folks were right! Both the number of individual contributions (372) and the amount contributed ($167K), far outstripped the other candidates checked. In comparison, McCain only had 110 contributions for $50K.
The disturbing part of this was that the runner up to Ron Paul wasn't McCain, it was Obama (172 contributions for $77K)! That was a shock!
Would a kook write about all this:
When was the last time you heard an elected official openly talking about our sovereignty and getting out of the UN?
There is an entire subculture of leftists in this country who make their living by falsely claiming to war veterans.
That is an observation that I really hadn't considered...but how do you prove it?
That's your perception on what he said. What he actually said contradicts your views.
Did you control for the number of non-military people who would lie and say they are in the military?
$167000 / 372 contributors = about $450 per military person. Either my math is off or our current military heroes/heroines (and they are) have a lot more disposable income than I did - or they are very passionate about Dr No.
If your research is correct, no other conclusion is possible: when putting their money where their mouth is, a plurality, maybe even a majority, of the U.S. military are card-carrying Paultards.
They, with their world-wide first-hand experience with U.S. policy up close and personal, seem to disagree strongly with the neo-con keyboard brigades on the wisdom of pretending we can run the world.
I realise this is harsh but the criticism of Ron Paul on this site has often been petty, silly or faintly rediculous (about what many here would say of Paul’s foreign policy).
Consider the source and take it with a grain of salt.
Yes, there are people in the Military do like Obama. They are not obvious about it.
Well, he's not going to get the nomination thanks to the GOP establishment that refuses to yield for change and an apathetic voting public that craves statism. So you can breathe easier now.
Now please explain what makes Dr. Paul a kook. This word has been casually tossed around at Dr. Paul, as if it came from leftists instead of FReepers who were taught how to recognize liberal BS.
It matters not who contributes to his campaign, he's still a kook.
Ordinary Americans who still believe in freedom and the Constitution contributed to Dr. Paul. Now go ahead and call the 150,000+ Paul donors, especially those who dumped $6 million in one day to Paul's campaign, a bunch of white supremacists and kooks.
As I said before, no. This was very broad brush (and did include DA, DAF, DON civilians...). If you can give me a method to weed out fakes (one that I can do quickly), I'd be happy to do so.
To follow up on #24, did you check the contributors individually to see if they are really in the military? Are are you just assuming, as I alluded in #24, that everyone is telling the truth?
Have in instituted an actual study of active duty military to see what the depth of support for Paul is?
I mean, that is quite a bold headline for such a shallow-assed study.
let freedom ping.ping.ping.ping.
Giving money to a candidate didn’t constitute an endorsement, last time I looked.
The famous book Stolen Valor proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the fake veteran subculture exists.
And you really can write anything you want on an FEC form. Every election cycle sees donations made by foreign nationals claiming to be US citizens, such august individuals as Seymour Butts and Ben Dover making donations, etc.
Plenty of people make donations listing a different employer because they don't want their employer to know who they are contributing to: i.e. Jim Jones who works at Acme has a supervisor who is a gung-ho leftist and is afraid that if he donates as Jim Jones of Acme his boss will find out - so he donates as Jim Jones of Worldwide International instead.
Did your study control for the number of veterans who are plumbers, doctors, lawyers, electricians, etc., who would report those occupations instead of, say, “former military”?
Did it control for reservists who put their full-time occupation, and not their part-time military status?
Didn’t think so.
Thanks. I hadn't considered the possibility that Paul speaks a non-English language whose lexicon is - by coincidence - entirely homonymic with standard English, so that the words he speaks sound like English words but have different meanings altogether.
I didn't say it was...I saw this same dog and pony show from the "Military for Kerry" facade in 2004.
They're not giving Dr. Paul money for charity there bub.
If they're donating to him, they endorse him and his message, no different than Bush holding $2,300-a-plate fundraisers.
Yep. And yet, the presumptuous headline remains. Seems I read something about this in “How to lie with statistics.”
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