Last night on Fox News Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter discussed the sorry state of the GOP primary. (Video here.)
I share Coulter’s analysis:
1. Governor Mitt Romney and Rep. Michele Bachmann are the most conservative candidates in the race.
2. Bachmann resembles Sarah Palin too much (just as Governor Rick Perry recalls George W. Bush) and neither have the political skills to win a national contest.
3. Thus we resign ourselves to Romney as the least-worst option who may actually beat Obama and may actually govern a center-right nation differently than how he led a center-left New England state. (And I affirm this as someone who signed an anti-Romney pledge back when Newt Gingrich sat at the bottom of the polls and the genuine Tea Party candidates had yet to implode.)
4. Gingrich and Rep. Ron Paul are the least conservative choices.
My only concern with Coulter and Hannity’s analysis is a more general problem that continues throughout the Conservative Movement: a lack of clarity when talking about Paul.
Last night Coulter and Hannity identified Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy as their primary disagreement. They — and most conservatives it seems — tend to have the attitude, “Well if only Paul would just get over these goofy foreign policy ideas then he’d be great!” But Paul’s “non-interventionism” is only a symptom of a far more serious intellectual and spiritual disease. I present these 3 impolite facts about Paul and three relevant books in support of them from some of his movement’s most vocal advocates. Don’t take my word for it — read their books for yourself.
1. Paul’s intellectual mentor Murray Rothbard was the founder of anarcho-capitalism and opposed the legitimacy of all nation-states, including ours.
2. Paul openly proclaims himself a revival of the Old Right, the movement which opposed our entry in World War II. He and his followers proudly reject the New Right tradition established by William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and Barry Goldwater.
“When I was deciding whether or not to run for President as a Republican, I re-read Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right and it gave me hope—that the anti-interventionist, pro-liberty Old Right, which had once dominated the party, could and would rise again. Here is living history: the story of an intellectual and political tradition that my campaign invokved and reawakened. This prescient book, written in 1993, could not be more relevant today.”
— RON PAUL, Ten Term U.S. Congressman (TX) and 2008 Presidential Candidate
3. Paul is an antisemite.
This is not a complicated point (as some polite conservatives might think it is.) And it has nothing to do with Paul wanting to end foreign aid to Israel and all other nations. (I know plenty of passionate Zionists who think the same thing for different reasons.)
If you believe that the ideas of the Old Right have great value and that we should have followed a “non-interventionist” path during the rise of Nazism then you are an antisemite. You know good and well that the practical consequence of American inaction would have meant an even higher body count in the Holocaust. But dead Jews are apparently not something that concerns you much.
Just as today Paul doesn’t care if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arms the Islamic Republic of Iran for a nuclear-charged assault against Israel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDvaTqLlZlA
Yet when conservatives talk about Paul they just politely note that they disagree with Paul’s policy of standing by while the next Holocaust begins.
When will the Conservative Movement finally finish the job Buckley started and stop tolerating the racist, anarchist, useful idiots for Jihad in their midst? Ever?
Update: Ex-Conservative Andrew Sullivan endorsed Ron Paul for the GOP nomination today. Perhaps I’ll have a response later…
Join the conversation as a VIP Member