thanks for the links.
I knew Sarah had good things to say about Ron Paul, and that scores points in my book. I do appreciate the links.
I hope your thanksgiving was happy.
Ah ha! I could tell from the tenor of your great questions that you are a fellow Ron Paul lover. And now that I see the link in your handle to the Von Mises Institute, I have confirmation. Hail and well met, fellow libertarian!
My support for Palin had a lot to do with what I have come to see as the major reason why our foreign policy continues to go in the direction of empire. And that's our lack of energy independence.
I have listened to liberals cry for the last four years, "no wars for oil". And, let's be frank, we would not be in Iraq if their chief export was broccoli. We didn't care all that much about the genocide in Rwanda because Rwanda's chief export was coffee and tea. Even old Greenspan has admitted in his memoir that it was largely about oil. Sure, that was not the only reason and perhaps not even the chief reason why went in there. There were many other reasons – even reasons which were honorable in intention. But oil was a big part of it. We need oil -- not just for our cars, but for EVERYTHING. We need them for jets and generators. We use petro-pharmaceuticals and petro-fertilizers. We can't get food and goods from point A to point B with oil. Even if we made cars that run on banana peels, we would still need to drill for oil. So, do we continue to plant bases all over the globe and get into shooting matches over little countries like Georgia because we need to protect gas pipelines? (And all the while we'll claim that we're defending Georgia for democracy's sake! As if anyone really believes that...) Or do we drill here and now and pursue an "all of the above" approach to drafting a long term domestic policy for energy independence?
We can keep doing that or we can drill our own oil and make ourselves that much freer from the need to police the world's natural resources. The only candidate really talking seriously about this was Gov. Palin.
In her pre-vp nomination interviews her criticism of the Iraq war centered on her frustration that we are not following a course of energy independence to make us less reliant on dangerous foreign regimes. That sounds like good solid stuff to me.
I also supported her because of the culture war issue. We libertarian leaning folk know that there is often not a dime's worth of difference between the parties on fiscal matters. But the culture wars do really separate them. Sure, it's true that the GOP uses social conservatives once every four years and then throws us under the bus, but at least we all come together every four years to shout "no" to the culture of death.