We are likely to part ways on your tagline too! Rand Paul will have the very difficult job of proving to me that he is not simply a much more polished stealth version of his father's insanity. I don't blame him for supporting his father given the blood tie. OTOH, no one I could ever support would have the combination of Neville Chamberlain's surrendermonkey foreign policy, Timothy Leary's chosen policy on drugs, Log Cabin's view on permissible perversions (even to be subsidized with tax dollars or with private corporate funds which like corporate taxes are derived from the customers without seeking their opinions), and NARAL's and Planned Barrenhood's eagerness in slicing, dicing and hamburgerizing innocent babies. On abortion and perversions posing as "marriage" I am looking not for dishonest lip service but for tough legislation on a federal level since the evils arise from federal court decisions and I don't care about namby-pamby arguments based on their views of the Ninth or Tenth Amendment. The fedcourts started this fight and have cowed state courts into surrender based on the Judicial Supremacy clause. Congress will just have to step up to the plate and punch the judiciary's ticket among other things.
That Santorum is "notso hotso" on economic matters does not phase me since I am less and less economically conservative but more and more Roman Catholic as I grow older. What does phase me is Rick's seeming inability to gain traction. Get back to me on him when he takes a poll lead but we need but one of Rick and Newt and it looks like Newt's the one.
As to Ron Paul, I cannot imagine anyone on the Right finding acceptable his foreign policy, his DO NOTHINGness on abortion and perversions posing as "marriage," his support for gays in the military (I am wiling to keep them from wars and from divorce court). Auditing the Fed sounds like a fun blood sport and quite worthwhile and he has the subcommittee chairmanship to do it in this, his last term in Congress, but, true to form, it is just too much trouble for him to bother backing up his words with action. Earmark king. His idea of returning to the gold standard would trigger the French Revolution American style complete with mobs manning guillotines in the streets and brushing aside severed Paulistinian heads by the dozen (not a bad idea in itself but it scares the children). The GOP badly needs a massive injection of Jacksonian (Andrew) populism not further dallying with libertarianism of the Paul sort. Those college cadres of his, if inclined at all to Republican futures, will become actually Republican when (if?) they marry and have kids.
My departure from the free-thinking ways of libertarianism came on the day when I read the freshly decided Roe vs. Wade and grew up. When I was a state officer of the Libertarian Party, no one in my state's LP leadership favored the Viet Cong or Uncle Ho in the then current war. No one despised the troops or their mission. The party was libertarian (of course), favored legalization of gold, the individual freedom to smoke pot and hashish (not sympathy for hard narcotics), favored slipping between the sheets with one's significant (opposite sex) other while taking due care (hey, we were hormone-ridden kids), school vouchers, attacking the funding sources of the welfare state and deconstructing the Great Society, defending the RTKBA since we trusted no government that did not trust us with guns. Herod Blackmun and Roe vs. Wade ripped it.
Since Roe, libertarianism has evolved into a menace to Western Civilization (defined in the Vatican but also by various Evangelical authorities, Scripture and Orthodox and Chassidic Judaism). Indulging in youthful pastimes like dope-smoking and unmarried but otherwise normal sex turned out to be a sort of sociological gateway drug leading to abortion and perversion as new norms. Not for me! Then there was the growing anti-militarism and canoodling with anti-American anti-war movements. On all these counts, see ya, LP! Far, far from me. I also grew a lot less thrilled with La Rand when pondering her infamous lifestyle and non-political opinions. If I had not previously departed, her specific support for (spineless Attila) Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan because Reagan was pro-life and Rand thought abortion a secular sacrament would have done it.
Our choices for influences on the GOP are hardly limited to El Run on the one hand and Mittwit and Miss Piggy McCain on the other. First of all, each of them is effectively an enthusiast for baby-killing and perversion, which puts all three on the same side other than mere lip service. I'll take Princeton Professor Robert P. George, former academic Dean of Yale College Donald Kagan, Norman Podhoretz or Midge Decter, Phyllis Schlafly, President Larry Arnn at Hillsdale College, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Seattle radio talk Show host Kirby Wilbur, Professor Hadley Arkes, Jim DeMint, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry (but not on Gardasil), Michelle Bachmann, Marco Rubio (but not on the subject of Gingrich or Romney), Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, Mike Pence, any GOP Congress Member voting against the increase in the debt ceiling of 2011 not named Ron Paul, Walter Jones or Jimmy Duncan, Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York, (Rev. Mr. ?) Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Conference, Rabbi Yehuda Levin of New York City, Jeffrey Lord of American Spectator, Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation, and a lot of similar folks whom I am not remembering but you get the picture.
Newt will appeal to a lot more than 30% of the public if nominated and he stands the best chance of winning of the remaining candidates. Populism is his long suit and he is playing it well. Sexual history? House rebellion against him (by the likes of Hastert, Boehner, by pro-abort Susan Molinari of Staten Island and Bill Paxon her hubby from Buffalo)? Fannie, Freddie, K Street? Newt is one of us. Mittwit and Ron Paul are not. Santorum is one of us but he has no apparent chance. We are fed up with candidates being chosen by the LSM and the Elites. We will no longer listen to either. Newt's the one, whatever his flaws. He has a set of enemies a man can be proud of. We know how to hate and we will not hate one of our own. We have his back. Whether you wish to be part of us is up to you.
I guarantee you that a nominated Mittwit will lose and it will be the social conservatives who finish him off. McCain was the last stand of the mushheads for us. Never again!
Libertarians don't seem to get just how dead meat Ron Paul truly is. We really don't need him to do the thinking for us.
Oh, and I have been called an "extremist" all my life and I am proud of it. The day I am accused of moderation is the day I double check my premises.
God bless you and yours.
God bless you and yours as well. I enjoy reading your posts even if I end up disagreeing with you. Which I invariably do. But they’re carefully crafted, cogent and funny. I appreciate that and it’s something that I’m finding harder and harder to find in political discourse.
Frankly, I think we seek similar ends, just have vastly different ideas of the best way to get there.
I suspect it’s that inquisition thing. Eastern Catholics just don’t understand why you’d bother to have an inquisition unless, of course, it were to extract some really good pirogy recipes.