Posted on 03/10/2013 5:39:40 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Rand Paul is the hottest commodity in Republican Party politics right now. But how high can he rise?
We put that question to a wide cross section of veteran Republican hands in the wake of the Kentucky Republican’s filibuster of John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director last week and got a nearly unanimous response: Paul is already a national leader within the party and will be a major factor if (but really when) he runs for president in 2016.
“The filibuster is the single largest leap I can recall from one act,” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based GOP strategist who served as a senior adviser for Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential bid. “The old guard’s gratuitous and meaningless tantrum attack the next day further solidified his sole position as leader of the new right.” (In the wake of the Paul filibuster, Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina defended the Obama administration’s stance on drones.)
Paul demonstrated two very important political traits during the filibuster:
1. He is a person of principle, taking a stand on an issue (drones) that almost no one cares about.
2. Paul has a showman’s sense of the moment, a rare and underrated ability in politics. “He is a PR machine who has an uncanny ability to galvanize the conservative base,” acknowledged one establishment Senate insider granted anonymity to speak candidly. (If you need evidence of that trait, look at how Paul kept chatter about the filibuster going; he did a series of television appearances and penned an op-ed explaining himself on the front page of The Post’s Outlook section Sunday.)
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I doubt we’ll find the perfect candidate. There has never been one previously. If we conservatives don’t drop some of the contentiousness amongst us and support the nominee with the best chance of defeating the leftist candidate, we are going to keep slipping farther and farther behind.
That’s going to be a problem. He needs to understand the costs associated with granting amnesty. It will be huge.
Every election is a step back.
I have to disagree. Remember we had Carter and if the country manages to survive this Obozo term, another step back would surely finish us.
Exactly. Look what occurred in last year’s GOP primaries with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Both men were far more conservative than Mitt Romney and look what happened. We spent so much time bitching and complaining that they had less than one hundred percent conservative voting records in congress and as a result we failed to coalesce behind one of them and split their votes thus giving Romney the nomination. Please, I’m tired of conservatives whining about the establishment and that there is little we can do against them when we’re the ones who keep the circular firing squad in continuous motion and then left wondering why we ended up with two terms of this president.
Given that:
a) we’re out of money,
b) we’re borrowing money at a torrid rate from ... thin air (thank the Fed), and this isn’t sustainable,
c) our foreign policy in the middle east makes less than no sense,
d) there’s nothing written in the Constitution that we have to be friends with Israel, and my take on the matter is increasingly “what have they ever done for us?” - I see no problem just treating Israel as we would any other nation....
what’s the problem with Paul’s foreign policy?
I agree.
The first thing we have to do is return to old-school conservatism, which means that we engage in much less of this stupid foreign adventurism. None of Bush’s foreign adventures have turned out as predicted by all the eggheads in DC... these engagements have been hugely expensive, with nothing to show for it but more instability and more chaos that we can’t manage.
It’s time for the GOP to start attending to matters at home, and cease trying to claim that they have the answers in foreign policy... which is abundantly clear at this point that they don’t.
I don’t think it was a matter of their stances on the issues....the problem was that none of the candidates really separated themselves from all of the others....each had their good points, and each had their flaws....but there was not a clear-cut advantage from neither of them...so that made it difficult for one of them to break away.
Then rather than supporting Romney, many so called Patriotic conservatives decided to allow Obozo to have four more years to destroy the USA. It is senseless. The libs circle the wagons around their candidates and conservatives cut off their nose to spite their face.
Is there an answer or solution to Islamofascism?
In the News/Activism forum, on a thread titled Washington Post:Rand Paul will be a major player in 2016,
Colonel_Flagg wrote
“Like when he votes for Chuck Hagel. I need to see more, and a willingness to recant his statement on social issues in the Republican Party, before I’d go all-in for him.”
Let’s give the man his due. The filibuster was a badly needed smackdown and showed the Obama b/s Vichy colaborators din din for what it was. He did set that offensive back
But I share your concern. Despite his “galvanic” attributions comming from all places, Walpo, which that in itself should tell you something 2016 is still 4 years away. Frankly I think they see him as more divisive than the GOPES. That earlier what’s wrong with the GOP address showed me that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Let US remember when you “galvanize” something. You dip your product into a tankfull of another material and turn on the juice. What you put into that tank gets lightly coated by that other stuff when electrically charged and changes its appearance. Lots of times no matter what that product gets coated with it’s still a piece of junk no matter how nice it looks.
Thank you. We fail to see that the Democrats are our enemy! Instead, we rotate that machine gun 360 degrees and mow down our own. Rand Paul, at heart, is a libertarian, but he did something that was noble and finally showed that somebody in the Republican Party has a pulse. Yet instead of congratulating him some on our side are already bashing him for not being a true conservative and worrying that he’s not ideologically pure enough to run in 2016. Gees, if I’m a Democrat I would read these chat rooms and be confident that the GOP is eating its own and they’re doing all of our work for us.
Rand also voted to confirm Hagel and Kerry........AND
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rand-paul-fires-back-at-filibuster-critics-shocks-glenn-beck-with-revelation-he-may-vote-for-brennan/
When asked whether he planned to vote for John Brennan as CIA director, now that the filibuster is over, Paul shocked Beck by saying he will “give deference” to nominees he disagrees with for political purposes — i.e., he might end up voting for Brennan if he gets a sufficient response from the administration today.
“I won’t vote for him on any of the votes if I don’t get information from the White House saying they’re going to adhere to the Constitution,” he said. Beck and his co-hosts winced at Paul’s suggestion, claiming that Brennan is simply “dangerous” and should not be confirmed for the CIA post no matter what. The senator agreed that Brennan would not fill the position well, but reiterated that his main goal was to get a clear constitutional answer from the administration regarding targeted assassinations.
Many of the same people who were so critical of Romney give Paul a pass.
How can the same guy who ran Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign, also run McConnell’s 2014 campaign?
Yes, there is, but neither the likes of McCain or the Ivy League eggheads that run the DNC will admit it.
That is to kill enough Muslims to the point where they realize that antagonizing Americans was a Really Bad Idea.
Much as we made the point to Japan - the last suicidal aggressor that we faced. The Japanese high command thought that they were going to hurt us *even after we dropped the second a-bomb.* The saving grace for the Japanese was that everyone else in Japan was by then convinced of our overwhelming superiority and ability to kill vast numbers of Japanese without placing in danger even two dozen men. In reading the history of the end of the war in Japan, it becomes pretty clear that the civilian population of Japan, which had been shielded from the consequences of their leadership’s action, got a rude wake-up call in the firebombing of Tokyo. The subsequent firebombing raids really started to turn public opinion... but these raids took hundreds upon hundreds of planes to pull off, and we lost more than a few B-29’s and P-51’s in these raids.
The hammer that finished driving home the nail into the brains of the civilian population was the mathematics of three planes in each of the a-bomb missions... coupled with 10’s of thousands killed in an instant, large cities utterly destroyed by one bomb... and the civilian opinion of Japanese invincibility finished shifting to an extreme fear of what the Americans could and would do.
The same thing has to be done to the suicidal mentality of the Islamists: The wholesale slaughter of huge numbers of Muslims with industrial ease. After we’ve killed a a couple million to a couple dozen million, the light bulb will go on in the heads of Muslims who support the extremists (like the Salafists, the MB’s, et al) and they’ll say “Brother Mustafa, we aren’t going to re-establish the caliphate. It just isn’t going to happen. The world has moved on. We’re going to have to figure out something new.”
The clue for me was seeing the reaction to the killing of OBL: Quite muted. We’ve seen riots in the streets for cartoons... yet when we sent in a crushing mission force, killed people with no screwing around, violated national sovereignty without so much as a passing apology, etc... we see not a peep out of the “Arab Street.” The Arab world respects brute force. That’s the only thing they respect. Halfway measures and attempts to apply modern western ROE to spare civilian casualties afford us no advantage whatsoever.
No one in DC is ready to admit this at this time. So let’s quit pissing money away on halfway measures and stalling tactics and put our resources into getting our industrial economy going again so we have the wherewithal to go to a complete war footing in the future... when we’ll quite likely need to do so.
I agree. It should have been done in Korea and Vietnam also but bleeding heart liberals, many Christians and pacifists would fight any attempt.
they are4 already destroyign him- even hte right is turning on him
What’s up with his hair?
He’s also pro-amnesty.
This issue is that if Congress passes amnesty this spring, as they intend, it’ll effectively be off the table for 2014, 2016 and beyond. The GOP will also be a perpetual minority party.
Still, if somehow we could put enough pressure on our Congresscritters and delay its passage, there’d be an opportunity for a genuine, enforce-the-law, anti-amnesty candidate. But who shall that be? Palin, unfortunately, has always said she’s with McCain on illegal immigration, and she’s said nothing of it now that it’s stirring toward passage.
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