John Hawkins On "Why Ron Paul Can Never Be President In 12 Quotes"

A vote for the other guys (establishment candidates) means you are willingly bending over and letting Goldman Sachs have their way with you. Enjoy the butt rape!

I reserve to myself the decision of whether to leave the USA by flying to another continent, or crossing the northern or southern border.



That parts of the human race are macho and emotional, hot tempered, what have you, are very raw facts of life. We cannot solve that problem by murdering the hotheads, or patronising them. The most powerful human desire is the desire to be deferred to, the desire to have one's "amour propre" (a French term that has no English translation) catered to. The USA used to understand that this was the single most important thing when dealing with the Moslem world, but has forgotten it. (In the Eisenhower admin, the State Department was quietly pro-Arab and cool to Israel.) Israel is simply too arrogant to see the point I am making here. I am not at all surprised, because in my experience, Jews revere IQ and academic accomplishment. If you don't have it, you are safe to walk on. Our ancestors, living in feudal and hierarchical societies, understood this as naturally as they breathed. Democracy and equality of rights has made certain profound human truths very hard to perceive.



The Christianity in which I was raised emphasized that the deepest and worst sin was the sin of pride. That lesson is in great danger of being forgotten.



"Because the US is a global superpower, including economically and culturally, it is simply impossible for the US to have the same foreign policy stance as New Zealand or Finland even if it wanted to." Here you and the libertarians and Chomskians can only agree to disagree.

7. The dominance of Islam by xenophobic attitudes has prevented economic development, and the oil has allowed it to fester longer than would have been viable otherwise. In fact this xenophobic spirit is much of why Islamic civilization has been in decline for most of Islamic history. For a long time Islamic empires' fortunes were propped up artificially by the booty of conquest. When Islam ran out of new conquests it fell into a permanent state of decay.



8. I don't agree that most Afghans now feel the US presence is intolerable or that it ever reached that point in Iraq. There is a lot of heartburn in Iraq now over the fact that America is no longer there to arbitrate. especially among the Sunnis and the Kurds.



I am much more optimistic about Israel.



9. Terrorists attacked the US when we had zero bases in the Middle East. So that argument doesn't hold water. The assertion that only US support for Israel causes terrorism has been cogently addressed by many, and I don't feel up to rehashing all their points now. But Middle Eastern terrorism against Western countries not friendly to Israel has abounded. In the 1980s there was more Middle Eastern terrorism against France, a country quite unfriendly to Israel, than against the US. You can't dismiss this as surrogate attacks on the US for supporting Israel, because Muslims are well aware of the differences in policies between various countries. Germany is the most pro-Israeli European country, yet that does not seem to cause them to suffer more than their share of Middle Eastern terrorism. And the terrorist plotting has continued and increased under Obama, even though he is the first US president to take sides with the Palestinians against Israel, supporting their insolent insistence on preconditions for even deigning to negotiate with Israel. As a result, there has been no peace diplomacy under Obama, a complete deparure from the previous two decades..



Because the US is a global superpower, including economically and culturally, it is simply impossible for the US to have the same foreign policy stance as New Zealand or Finland even if it wanted to.



I decisively reject the views of Chomsky and Paul. The fact of the matter is, Muslims are extremely emotional and not at all rational in their attitudes. They are not fair-minded or sensible in their thinking. Just a few years before 9-11, the US went to war twice on behalf of Muslims against non-Muslims. The State Department has wrongly sided with Azerbaijan against Armenia on Nagorno-Karabakh. How much credit did we receive from Muslims for all this? Zero. I have never once heard even a Muslim American acknowledge these things.



However, if Muslims face a serious terrorist threat in their own country that their government cannot handle alone, then they will be more pragmatic in their attitude toward the US.



10. Americans freedom to emigrate is not abridged. I do think that for people who are fleeing so they can get away with their crimes, as has been done since the 1800s, catching them makes sense. If you really have got to get out without the government knowing you could go north.

4. I have no idea what happened here. But I can understand if Paul is unwilling to throw under the bus the editors and ghostwriters of his infamous newsletter. I agree that Paul is a manifestation of the "paranoid style in American politics."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics



5. A great problem with American slavery is that it was hereditary in perpetuity, resulting in a system that was unusually harsh by historical standards. The children of a Greek or Roman slave women were born free. I believe that American slavery could have been gradually ended by a program of relentless purchase and manumission -- I do not deny at all that such a program would have been very expensive. I believe that had nothing at all been done about American slavery, it would have collapsed when International Harvester introduced the cotton picking machine in 1950.



6. The tradeoff you articulate here is very Burkean. And the impossibility of a rational discussion you mention is simply a fact of life. As far back as I can remember, there have been things true but unsayable. Most families are like that: Dad drinks too much, Mom flirts at parties, teenage son is irresponsible, daughter is spoiled, parents say their kids are wonderful when they are mediocrities, church leaders are hypocrites, politicians mainly want to be reelected and otherwise are amoral, political movements are merely decorous means of advancing vested interests, to call sexual desire "love" is mostly a euphemism etc etc. The vision I articulate here is that of Mark Twain and H L Mencken, of course.



7. I have argued for some time that the real problem in the Moslem world is its high birth rate combined with a lack of meaningful private sector jobs, a situation that oil wealth papers over. I know of only two Moslem dominated nations touched by the Industrial Revolution: Turkey and Pakistan. Turkey is the poorest nation in the OECD. 50 years ago, Pakistan was wealthier per capita than India but is now hopelessly behind it. Young Moslem men become terrorists because they blame their having no economic role on First World hatred of Islam. I have read that there are imams who fan these sentiments in their Friday sermons.



8. It is possible that the strongest emotion there is, is "Foreigners, out!" The French learned this the hard way in Indochina and Algeria. The Soviets in Afghanistan. The US in Vietnam and Iraq. And the USA is fated to walk in the Soviet footsteps. The Arabs will drive the Jews out within 100 years. What I write here is true of Afghanistan, with or without Taliban, with or without al-Qaeda.



9. I have never trusted the Operations Directorate to do the right and sensible thing. To not make a mess of the things it attempts. I am not opposed to the FBI, but feel that the FBI is making a fool of itself by waxing indignant about the Hoover biopic that just came out. (BTW, I do not like looking at DiCaprio's mug.) You see the terrorist threats to the USA as existing regardless of what USA foreign policy is. To Chomsky, Paul, and others of that ilk, if the USA's foreign policy stance were the same as New Zealand's or Finland's, say, there would be no terrorist or other existential threats to the USA, and hence allegedly no need for the CIA.



10. I do not trust any government with any power to limit my departure from its jurisdiction. Period. The first and most important human right is the right to leave, with one's entire nuclear family. Restrictions on this right were one of the very great horrors of Communism. I want the right to enter Mexico, not because I necessarily want to live in Mexico, but as the first stop on a longer journey I do not want the US authorities to know about.



11. That there are facts and value judgements that are unsayable is a simple fact of human social existence. Freedom of speech limits the damage resulting from this fact, but does not extinguish it.



12. The country I live in legalised prostitution, adding that a prostitute who does not use a condom will be fined $2500. If the evidence for arrest is merely a client's say-so, prostitutes will immediately fall in line.

Quite a few scholars have "contemplated" legalising opiates and meth, freely admitting that doing so could lead to 10,000 - 100,000 deaths, as the underclass adapts to the reality of legal meth and the like. The USA middle and upper classes likewise had to learn to cope with legal spirits. In my youth, many women in the South were addicted to gin and tonic. Many men could not begin a social evening without bourbon on the rocks, poured into an empty stomach. Talk of spirits is gone from my social life, from the lifestyle pages of the daily newspaper, from the internet. Legal, safely manufactured, known strength, heavily taxed, little advertised. The formula works.



According to this entry, Portugal legalised the consumption of drugs 10 years ago, and Spain and Italy recently followed suit. The Argentine Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that banning drugs for personal use was unconstitutional:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_legalization



More on the debate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_and_against_drug_prohibition

3. Many people believe the moon landings were faked. Many more people believe in a conspiracy to kill JFK, even though decades of digging have failed to substantiate it. The problem from the beginning was that the Left did not want to believe the simple truth, that their hero was killed by one of their cousins, a Communist, and not by the Right.



Michael Moore is an obnoxious, corpulent, anti-American windbag whose opinion doesn't amount to a nanogram with me. In one of his books Peter Schweiker detailed Moore's immense hypocrisy. Even among the rabidly partisan and Bush-hating congressional Democrats of recent times, 9-11 Truthism has been supported that I know of only by Cynthia McKinney, a totally unserious and extremist individual of poor character. If there was anything there, those people would have gone after it with gusto. Paul and other 9-11 Truthers have a disturbing willingness to deny obvious facts and invent "facts" without any basis.



4. It is inconceiveable that a ghostwriter would have gone out on a limb to write such stunning racial remarks unless he had heard them from Paul's own mouth. And yes, everybody knows that way too many young US black men are hoodlums. But 95%? Somebody who thinks Israel may have bombed the World Trade Center is more likely to come up with a nasty idea like that than any ghostwriter. I also don't believe Paul ever failed to find time to read his own newsletter. He's too narcissistic for that, I believe. And if somebody else wrote it, why doesn't Paul tell us who? Shouldn't be that difficult to determine.



5. It's a silly argument against Lincoln because the Southern slaveowners would not have been willing to sell. Plus, the crisis of secession was thrust upon Lincoln, not in reaction to any imperious measure he took, but simply in reaction to his election.



6. Progressives don't understand (and don't want to understand) that discrimination laws are not a part of an ideal society, but amount to a willingness to incur certain evils that are deemed lesser than other evils. It is not possible to have a rational discussion of that in today's world, and someone who wants to be politically viable has to recognize that.



7. Al Qaida abhorred the existence of somewhat non-pious regimes in the Muslim world. (Micheal Scheuer is utterly and completely wrong in insinuating that the fact that those regimes are dictatorial has anything to do with al Qaida's objections.) They were frustrated that violence in the 1990s failed to dislodge those regimes. They preferred to believe that their existence and resilience could not be the fault of the Arabs, that it must be an outside imposition. But throughout Islamic history--and I know something of it--there have been governments in Islamdom that devout Muslims felt were not devout enough, and that has been an ongoing source of turmoil. The anti-Western regimes (Libya, Syria, South Yemen) were worse both from a humanitarian viewpoint and a piety viewpoint. The US was in fact al-Qaida's scapegoat. And of course blaming 9-11 on interventions that occurred AFTER 9-11 is the kind of inexcusably shoddy thinking that characterizes Paul and his foreign policy mentors on the Far Left.



8. The Taliban are a fairly primitive bunch of simpletons that was assembled by Pakistan's dastardly ISI in 1992. They don't have worldwide ambitions, but their al-Qaida friends do. Arnaud de Borchgrave said before 9-11 that it was really Bin Laden rather than Mullah Omar who was running the country. I don't think the Taliban would be capable of running Afghanistan without al-Qaida or other foreign jihadists even if they wanted to.



9. I would not forswear covert action so I am in favor of keeping the Operations Directorate of the CIA. The fact that Paul even wants to get rid of the Intelligence Directorate is just one more example of his depraved indifference to US national security concerns, shared with the Nation / Village Voice crowd and delusion-loving libertarians. I think the FBI is pretty essential especially when we do face a real terrorist threat, with new plots being exposed every month or so, and several successful attacks recently--Fort Hood and Little Rock.



10. I would like very much to send the message that the US is no longer of a mind to tolerate an invasion by illegal immigrants. You're the first person not a criminal I've heard express an interest in being able to go south as you describe.



11. Yes, the Supreme Court abandoned the Constitution to a large extent. As with a previous point one must note that some things cannot be intelligently discussed in the political environment that exists and will exist for the forseeable future.



12. Legalizing drugs and prostitution will mean more of both. A legal prostitute's blood test is worthless past her first post-testing customer. I wonder how anybody can contemplate something like meth and imagine that legalizing it would resolve its devastation.

Barry Goldwater got 40% of the vote in 1964. Ron Paul could do about as well now. I think Paul could carry up to a half dozen states like Mississippi and Idaho. In my experience, many Americans are populist libertarians like Paul.



Hillary Clinton will not run against Obama in 2012. Period.



My comments on your numbered points follow.



1) He may have resigned from the GOP, but he still votes with the GOP to organise the House.



2) I had never heard of the North American Union until reading the above post.



3) Many Americans, including that abrasive populist Michael Moore, believe that the full truth about 9/11 has been concealed from the American people. Paul is not alone here.



4) If Paul did indeed use language of that nature in his campaign literature and such, he is dead in the water.



5) When I took a college course in American economic history, I was taught that buying up and freeing the slaves would have cost substantially more than the out of pocket cost of the Civil War. (This does not include the economic loss of the lifetime production of those who died in the war.) It would also have led to an enormous transfer of financial wealth from the North to the South. Southern plantation owners would have become the American moneyed aristocracy. A 20 something male field hand was worth $2000; a woman of the same age was worth $1800. There were more than 3 million slaves. We are looking at a total cost of at least $10 billion dollars at a time when nominal GDP per capita was about $200/year.



6) I think there is a lot of common sense truth to what Paul is saying here.



7) I think that the fundamental complaint of al-Qaeda is the large military presence of NATO in the Middle East, propping up feudal regimes who are privately quite friendly with the USA, even though the USA violates Islamic propriety.



8) There is much truth here too. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are trying to remould societies. They want to get our military out of their countries. Guess which objective is more attainable?



9) Abolishing the CIA and IRS are libertarian mantras. I agree that the CIA should be absolutely forbidden to influence reality; it should only observer and report. I support a flat tax *** demogrant. This would enable a dramatic scaling back of the IRS, but not its abolition. The libertarian position is that law enforcement is a state responsibility. The FBI emerged at a time when the state police was small, underfunded, and at risk of corruption and indifference. The FBI is also a product of prohibition and the associated racketeering. There is much less need for it nowadays. The FBI under Hoover became one of the most egregious abuses of power in the entire Federal govt. That said, there is still a role for the Federal govt. in law enforcement, if only as a central data collection and processing point.



10) I think this is a valid point, even if I assign it a lower probability than Paul does. Also, a strong fence along the US-Mexican border is troubling, sends the wrong message.



11) Libertarians believe that a great deal of economic legislation is constitutional only because the Supreme Court has said it is. They conclude that the Supreme Court did so because it feared becoming intensely unpopular, and not because of any devotion to constitutional truth. I agree that much of the role of the Federal govt. that has emerged during and after the Great Depression is not the sort of government that our 18th and 19th century forbears intended.



12) The legalisation of recreational drugs and of prostitution are fair game. Drugs could be treated just like spirits already are: legal, heavily taxed, little advertised. In the world of my boyhood, adults who wanted to appear sophisticated drank too much bourbon, scotch, and gin, but those drinks are no longer in fashion.



A great deal of the social and economic problems stemming from prostitution stem from the fact that is illegal and hence covert. Making it legal means would bring it under the protection of business and employment law. And would make it easier to tax. Ron Paul is by no means the only American calling for an end to the wars on drugs and on sexual vice, on pragmatic grounds.



13) I do not like the idea that the Federal govt. might have a say in how hard it would be for me cross the border into Mexico if I saw fit to do so. Also, I do not need to value Mexico as a place to live in order to value the right to cross the southern border of the USA to enter Mexico. Mexico can simply be the first stop on a longer journey I don't want the US authorities to know about.