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03/29/2008: "Ron Paul is loved for fighting modern world"

Paul is a throwback to the frugal and isolationist wing of the old Republican Party, the fuddy-duddy GOP of Robert Taft and Calvin Coolidge. His fiscal policies evoke the idealistic Republican revolutionaries who seized control of Congress in 1994; he wants to abolish the IRS, the Departments of Homeland Security, Education and Energy, and most of the federal government. He refuses to vote for unbalanced budgets, and he has opposed spending taxpayer dollars on Congressional Medals of Honor, even for Rosa Parks or Pope John Paul II. Typically, his campaign has reported no debts, and still has more than $5 million in the bank. Meanwhile, Paul's foreign policies evoke candidate George W. Bush's call for a "humbler foreign policy" in 2000, although Paul goes much further; not only did he oppose U.S. involvement in Iraq, Kosovo and the war on drugs, he opposes U.S. involvement in the United Nations and NATO.

The controversy over a few racist articles in his old newsletters was probably overblown; there's no evidence that Paul himself was ever a racist. But he is an extremist -- partly in the Barry Goldwater
extremism-in-defense-of-liberty-is-no-vice sense of the word, but also in the wacky let's-relitigate-the-currency-debates-of-the-1820s sense of the word. The late William F. Buckley wanted conservatives to stand athwart history yelling stop; Paul seems to want to slam history into reverse.

[ So do many people who have noticed that the modern world is not on evil but pervasively so, and will continue until it has destroyed all good things in the world. ]

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1724358,00.html?cnn=yes

Unlike some of our own "Dr" MPs, Paul is a real physician, serving as a US air force doctor before delivering more than 5,000 babies as an obstetrician. He is an intransigent libertarian, who believes that
"rights belong to individuals, not groups; that property should be owned by people, not government; that government exists to protect liberty, not to redistribute wealth; and that the lives and actions of people are their own responsibility, not the government's".

All of that would make David Cameron shudder: Paul advocates low taxes, the gold standard, and "the return of government to its proper constitutional levels". Quite apart from his abhorrence of the welfare
state, many of his views will seem eccentric here, not least his belief that Tony Blair is a rabid socialist. A loopy reactionary from the boondocks, then? Not for the first time the concept of "left and right"
proves most unhelpful. Paul is called a conservative, but in British terms he is an extreme liberal-individualist in the tradition of FW Hirst and Sir Ernest Benn.

Anyone dismissing him as rightwing should look at his unflinching opposition to the Iraq war, and more generally to the foreign policy of George Bush and previous presidents. Ten years ago Paul called "the
fateful" Iraq Liberation Act "a declaration of virtual war", as it proved. In 2002 he voted against the coming Iraq war, or more accurately the pre-emptive abdication by Congress of its constitutional right to
declare war. He opposed the equally shameful Patriot Act and, to his credit (and my delight), the granting of a Congressional gold medal to Blair - on the thrifty ground that "forcing the American people to pay tens of thousands of dollars to give a gold medal to a foreign leader is
immoral and unconstitutional", and because he thought Blair a mountebank.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/27/uselections2008.usa