Before doing the right thing and endorsing Rep. Ron Paul, Andrew Sullivan gives us a glimpse as to why he’s been so misguided over the years (he’d never admit to learning by following those of us who’ve gotten it right). Sullivan first slobbers over McCain:
“I admire McCain in so many ways. He is the adult in the field, he is attuned to the issue of climate change in a way no other Republican is, he is a genuine war hero and a patriot, and he bravely and rightly opposed the disastrous occupation policies of the Bush administration in Iraq. The surge is no panacea for Iraq; but it has enabled the United States to lose the war without losing face. And that, in the end, is why I admire McCain but nonetheless have to favor Paul over McCain. Because on the critical issue of our time – the great question of the last six years – Paul has been proven right and McCain wrong. And I say that as someone who once passionately supported McCain’s position on the war but who cannot pretend any longer that it makes sense.”
Andrew has always done proud to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club combined. And since when has the mummified McCain’s opposition to Iraq been anything but tactical? At least Sullivan doesn’t pretend he wasn’t once firmly in the McCain camp with respect to Iraq. Why would he need to pretend? When the American punditocracy is wrong, which is almost always, it doesn’t incur adverse effects. Being a party to the neoconservative-Centre-Left coalition means never having to say you’re sorry (or being dismissed).
Another indictment of McCain came today in the form of an endorsement from Joe Lieberman. Ideologically, very little distinguishes neoconservatives such as McCain, or other big government, open-borders Republicans from the center-Left.
Sullivan doesn’t make much more sense when he gets to Dr. Paul, although the overall endorsement is a good thing:
“The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration,” he salivates.
The current Republican Party is based in freedom and toleration? It has not stood for these principles in many decades, and, as some argue, never, since this is the party of Lincoln.
Andrew improves when he praises “Paul’s federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government…”
Derb’s Da Man
National Review’s John Derbyshire, once a skeptic (and here too), finally endorses Ron Paul:
“If you think that our efforts against jihadist terrorism constitute World War Four (I don’t), you will not want Ron Paul for president. (Jonah Goldberg’s article “The Tradition of Ron Paul” in the Dec. 17 issue of National Review is key reading in that context.) If you think there would be a whole world of difference between what Hillary Clinton would accomplish in the Rome-of-the-Borgias down there on the Potomac, by comparison with what Rudy, or Fred, or Mitt would accomplish, you won’t be supporting Paul.
If, however, you think that much of the underbrush that has grown up around our national institutions this past 40 years needs to by pulled up by the roots and burned, before it chokes the life out of our Republic, then Paul’s your man.”
As I said, Paul isn’t perfect, but he’s very good indeed.
Ron Paul Unplugged With John Stossel
The Stossel Socratic Method makes this a particularly wonderful interview. And, naturally, the principles and ideas articulated so well here by Dr. Paul.
Third World Immigration and Islam
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy had better start flexing his muscles. “The darling buds of France—her raging Muslim youths” are at it again, and this time they want to taste blood.
Here’s a refresher of the last bloody outbreak. Nothing has changed since, in “Rah-Rah For Rioters,” I detailed the “reasons” for the fury:
“What have the French ever done for “les beurs,” now rioting in 300 French cities and towns, having destroyed more than 6,000 cars, burned busses, businesses, shops, schools, police stations, libraries; beaten bystanders, and snuffed out at least one life?
They’ve replaced the mud huts of their ancestors with subsidized housing and modern plumbing, given them schools, job-training institutes, cradle-to-crypt welfare, and, my personal favorite, the Musée du Louvre.
To listen to their enablers among the media, however, not much. Whether the mediacrats are applying their cerebral sinew to individual or group-orchestrated crime; to psychological or sociological “causal factors,” bad deeds are invariably caused—never committed. And they are caused by factors outside the perpetrators. …
…French Muslims endure untold oppression. France’s holidays are largely saints’ days. School cafeterias serve fish on Fridays. Restaurants still serve wine and pork, and souvenir shops peddle porcelain pigs. As the Times Literary Supplement recently complained, “Nuns do not have to remove their headscarves for passport or driver’s license photographs; Muslim women do.” Oh the indignities! My favorite newsman (and co-religionist) Jon Stewart, added his invaluable perspective as an “alienated” minority: “Do you know what it’s like to be sent to a Christian school every Passover with a hardboiled egg?” (Italians would have similar stories of “survival.”)
By the way, this will eventually unfold at a theatre near you. We Americans love to delude ourselves to the contrary, but it is a matter of time.