Bronze-level articleRon Paul

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Ron Paul enjoyed significant support from the Rebel Alliance during his 2008 Presidential campaign.
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You see, Mr. Powers, I love goooooold! The look of it! The taste of it! The smell of it! The texture! I love gold so much that I even lost my genitalia in an unfortunate schmelting accident.
Goldmember Ron Paul

Dr. Ron Paul was a Congressman from the 14th Congressional District of Texas. Having ended a bid for the Republican Party's nomination in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election on 8 March 2008 after obtaining only 15 delegates out of 2,360 (although he did garner 5.7% of the vote in the Republican primaries that year), Ron Paul loitered around the lunatic fringe before entering the 2012 Republican nomination process in 2010. He was supposedly gaining popularity thanks to the work of his fanbase, affectionately known as "Paulbots," "Paultards," or "Paulites," and most have, by now, seen the rabid shrieks of "RON PAUL 2008 2012!!1!!!" at least once on the Internet.

It took him absolutely nowhere. In early January 2013, Ron Paul announced his retirement from politics.[1]

Contents

[edit] Political positions

Ron Paul can smell gold at ten kilometers.

Ron Paul is frequently described as a conservative with many libertarian ideas, giving him the label of paleolibertarian.[2] However, given that he is not so much interested in reducing governmental powers as shifting them from the federal government to the states, the term "anti-federalist" would be more accurate.

Anywho, he is a strict constitutionalist, and believes in "limited government"[3] to the point of abolishing the IRS and the income tax, slashing most federal spending, reintroducing the gold standard, and abolishing the Federal Reserve (not to mention that that would eliminate Medicare/Medicaid and castrate Social Security). He also voted against the Darfur Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007,[4] which would have banned federal contracts with firms doing business with the Janjaweed militia of Sudan.[5] He was the only Congressman to do so.

On the other hand, he wants to end the War on Drugs, supports medical marijuana, and opposed the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Following the recent TSA act, he was the one standing up to say that taking nude photos of passengers, and feeling up people's grandmothers, is not making anyone safer.[6] He proposed a simple law which would essentially say that government officials have to go through the same screenings the rest of us do, in an effort to wake them up. He has even spoken in defense of WikiLeaks, a whistleblowing website that has among other disclosures exposed government corruption.[7]

However, even in areas of foreign policy, Paul has demonstrated that he is not to be trusted; a month after 9/11, he proposed H.R. 3076, which would place a $40 billion bounty on top Al Qaeda members who were brought to the government dead or alive. Essentially, it would hire a group of private mercenaries to handle the Afghanistan War their own way.

For some reason, he seems to not like the idea of jus soli – the granting of citizenship to those born in America.[8]

[edit] Homosexuality and the Religious Right

It has been suggested that Paul is in league with the Dominionist and Christian Reconstructionist movements.[9] Paul introduced the We the People Act into the House of Representatives twice. This bill would strip the Federal courts of jurisdiction in cases involving abortion, same-sex marriage, privacy related to sexual behavior, and Establishment Clause issues, leaving them to the states...which is exactly what the Religious Right wants to do. He has engaged in outright dishonesty in support of this agenda, for instance claiming that prayer has been prohibited in schools.

How does Ron Paul reconcile dominionism with libertarianism?[10] It seems he wants the church to be strong and the state to be weak:

The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian... America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance.[11]

Ron Paul's radical views on "states' rights" also extends into homosexuality. Ron Paul believes that these rights include the ability to regulate sex, specifically arresting homosexual individuals for having sex. This is another case where he abandons the right to privacy for a group he doesn't like:

Ridiculous as sodomy laws may be, there clearly is no right to privacy nor sodomy found anywhere in the Constitution. There are, however, states' rights — rights plainly affirmed in the Ninth and Tenth amendments. Under those amendments, the State of Texas has the right to decide for itself how to regulate social matters like sex, using its own local standards.
—Ron Paul, Federal Courts and the Imaginary Constitution

While he wants to abolish the death penalty at the federal level, apparently it doesn't matter when supporting pastor Phillip Kayser who advocates the death penalty for gays.[12][13]

In short, cross-examining both Paul's explicit positions and proposed legislations, his program would result in the strengthening of a theocratic agenda, not by passing laws in Congress (downright impossible due to secular opposition), but by preventing the federal government from stopping establishment of religion or anti-gay legislation at the local level. Not in all of the country, but in Jesusland at least.

Paul is also associated with Dominionist kooks such as Gary North (a former Paul researcher back in the 70's); North was recently appointed Director of Curriculum Development for Paul's new homeschooling program.[14]

[edit] Extremism

There has been some controversy over support for Ron Paul by extremist groups, tax protesters, and neo-Nazi organizations such as Stormfront.[15][16] In fact, Stormfront.org administrator and noted white nationalist Don Black donated $500 to Paul's campaign.[17][18] Paul's campaign has expressed dismay over these associations, although critics hold that he has not adequately distanced himself from them.[19]

Ron Paul has also used his notability among fervent libertarians to endorse a number of candidates for office on a more local level. One of the candidates he initially endorsed, Bill Johnson, turned out to be a white supremacist[20] who had written a proposed constitutional amendment that would have deported people based on racial criteria.[21] He endorsed the fundamentalist loon Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party in 2008[22] and in turn endorsed and was endorsed by noted crank Arthur Robinson.[23][24] He was also supported by Neo-Fascist Willis Carto.[25]

[edit] "Economics"

Paul is associated with the Austrian school of economics. Long-time Paul associate and staffer Lew Rockwell founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which runs columns by Paul. This is the reason for all of his goldbuggery and other crank economic ideas. Paul first proposed legislation to return to the gold standard in the early 1980s,[26] but after Ronald Reagan proved the monster of inflation could be killed[27] Paul bolted from the party and ran against Reagan as the Libertarian Party candidate for President in the 1988 general election.

He doesn't just want to audit and end the Fed, but also to audit Ft. Knox's gold reserves, just in case someone replaced them with metal bars that are merely painted gold.[28] In August 2012 the U.S Treasury, at the behest of a German court, began doing just that.[29]

Paul, along with Bernie Sanders, were the driving forces behind the audit of the Fed that revealed its so-called "backdoor bailouts" during the finacial crisis of 2008.[30]

[edit] The Ron Paul (insert descriptor here) Report

Soon after his election to Congress in 1978, Ron Paul began putting out a newsletter. Originally entitled the Ron Paul Freedom Report, then the Ron Paul Political Report,[31] and finally the Ron Paul Survival Report, it was full of homophobia, racism, sexism, and paranoia. The Ron Paul Report was roughly equivalent to the John Birch Society in its kookishness. The Report particularly seemed to hate Barbara Jordan, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela.[32]

Ron Paul has since said that he didn't write everything for the report, but a consistent pattern of writing for the better part of the late eighties and early nineties (i.e., when the nuttiest stuff was printed in the newsletter) suggests that he at least knew what was in it. Movement libertarians have fingered Lew Rockwell as the culprit who ghost-wrote the reports. He predictably denies authorship of the letters as well. Nonetheless, in previous interviews he has defended several of the statements as both being written by himself and being "statistical" instead of racist.[33][34]

Nelson Linder, former president of the Austin division of the NAACP, has known Ron Paul for over twenty years and vehemently denies that he is a racist, and in fact admires his work in defence of blacks in the criminal justice system.[35] Naturally, the existence of a single African-American who thinks Ron Paul isn't a racist proves that he indeed isn't.

Ron Paul has made noises which suggest that he has back-pedalled from the racism he embraced previously:

Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty, a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims.[36]

Reconciling this with his views on homosexuality is left as an exercise for the reader.

All of this, and considering he's an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, leaves us with a couple of theories as to why Ron Paul seems to be a magnet for nuts:

  1. He's desperate for supporters;
  2. He's horribly ignorant of who he has ties to; or
  3. He's a horrible bigot and doesn't want to admit it.

[edit] Teabagger irony

Ron Paul was actually the first to start using the "Tea Party" iconography back in 2007 and during his "moneybomb" days. In a massively ironic and hypocritical move, the Teabaggers ran multiple candidates against him in the 2010 midterms.[37]

[edit] Electoral success

Ron Paul ran for President on the Libertarian ticket in 1988, and obtained about 0.5% of the popular vote. His running mate Andre Marrou ran again in 1992 and obtained 0.28% of the popular vote. After this poor showing, Ron Paul went back to the GOP with his tail between his legs.

Ron Paul attempted to run for the Presidency a third time in 2012, and gained more media attention than the first two times. Unfortunately for Paulbots, only won two caucuses (Minnesota and Maine), though his supporters insisted he was second in delegate count.[38] While it became statistically impossible for him to grasp the nomination, his supporters hoped to win a plurality of delegates in at least 5 states to allow him to carry his campaign all the way to the Republican convention. Though supporters were able to garner a majority of the delegates in 6 states by the time of the convention, the RNC changed the minimum requirement to 8 states, finally ending his long-shot campaign.

When it became evident his 2012 campaign was hopeless and Mitt Romney's nomination was inevitable, a number of Paulbots amazingly discovered the true Master Plan behind Paul's campaign: to garner enough sympathy and support for Paul's son, Senator Rand Paul, to be chosen as Romney's running mate. Strangely, that pipe dream also turned out to be nothing but a dream.

Though his domestic policy views are hard to justify, it was amusing to see other Republican candidates getting owned on some matters of foreign policy and social issues in the debates.

[edit] Science

Dr. Paul neither knows nor cares about science. He believes that a lack of understanding of basic science shouldn't matter in choosing a president.[39] Although an MD, he has said evolution is "just a theory" and that he does not accept it.[40][41] He's also a climate change denier.

[edit] Woo promotion

"Already, Paul introduced a bill (The Health Freedom Protection Act) that would strongly and positively affect Mercola.com and many other natural health organizations and advocates, along with the field of natural health in general." – Dr. Joseph Mercola

"Only Ron Paul believes in genuine health freedom. He's the creator of the Health Freedom Protection Act, a bill that would reestablish Free Speech provisions for makers of superfoods, herbs, nutritional supplements and other natural remedies." – Mike Adams of NaturalNews[42]

In other words, Paul, who is an actual MD, supports freeing the chains that bind the sellers of quack remedies and unproven nostrums from lying to their potential customers. And you wonder why laissez-faire has so many critics.

[edit] His son

His son, Rand, is a Republican Senator from Kentucky. If anything, he's even crazier than Ron.[43] Surprisingly, Rand Paul is apparently not named after libertarian icon Ayn Rand.[44]

[edit] Athletics

Ron Paul is also the only person to ever hit a home run out of the park in the Congressional Baseball game.[45]

[edit] Sweet, sweet irony

Ron Paul has been rated as one of the most corrupt members of Congress because he has this habit of double billing his expenses. Basically, as a member of Congress he doesn't have to pay for his flights between his district and Washington (and other places if they're part of research), so when he has to travel he can send in the bills for reimbursement. This is allowed, but he has this thing about "accidentally" sending the bills in to various Libertarian groups (like the Liberty Lobby) and his campaign fund. This is not allowed. And he's done this with 60% of travel claims, while either refusing to respond to inquiries about this, or saying any possibly double billing is an accident that he does more then half the time he travels[46].

Now, there is general irony about the fact that a person who is anti-government is working for the government at all (remember, he has plenty of avenues to spout all of this rhetoric outside of working AS the freaking government he claims to hate so much), but with Paul it gets a little... deeper. From 1999 to 2009, the spending in Paul's district has quadrupled. It went up four times. It doubled, and then the doubling doubled. And it isn't like other congressmen are doing this to him against his will, he's doing this. He has this thing about taking wildly popular bills that are going to pass regardless of what happens, and sticking in an earmark (basically, a footnote to the bill that can dictate which specific contractor receives money and thwarts the open bidding process), funneling money to beneficiaries in his district. Then, he votes against it knowing it doesn't matter. Additionally, in 2010 the GOP decided that they voluntarily not use any earmarks. The reasons for that are another matter entirely, but Paul was one of four of the nearly 200 GOP Congressmen who did not do that.

Some of these projects are pretty horrible too. He claims to be against public transportation, but got the feds to spend $750,000 on a public transit center in his district. He's against federal emergency management, but got the feds in 2008 to build houses for those in his district displaced by Hurricane Ike (completed in 2011). And once upon a time he bitched that House Speaker Tip O'Neil would drive around Washington in a government Lincoln Towncar. He currently drives in an official Lincoln Towncar.

Ron's decision to not run for re-election in 2012 may have been politically motivated as well: he probably cannot get re-elected there anymore, not for his raving hypocrisy and corruption, but because his district has changed:

...this year, the Texas Legislature redrew the district to include a swath of Democratic-leaning Jefferson County and larger parts of Galveston County. Paul's turf, once predominately rural, now must draw more conservative votes from the metastasizing Houston suburbs around League City...many voters in those places look to the government to provide quality roads, public schools, and law enforcement.
—Motherjones[47]

Basically, Ron Paul is the same as every corrupt asshole in every other district, he's just so good at lying to you about it, that he makes everyone else think he's the opposite of the corrupt asshole that he is.

[edit] Paulbots

"Paulbot," a portmanteau of "Ron Paul" and "robot," is the most common nickname for the devoted, drone-like supporters of the former Congressman. They usually scan online platforms for mentions of Ron Paul and then descend on those discussions with hostile invective and over-the-top praise for him, accompanied with various rude behavior including shouting down disagreement and accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being a statist or fascist. Despite being real people (with real cognitive issues) they have been called 'bots' because their comments often have the non sequitur-like quality of computer generated spam. Many Paulbots are often conspiracy theorist cranks as well, and believe that Paul was the only "hope" America had of not going down the path of a New World Order, but since the American sheeple were too distracted by Obama and his bread and circuses to consider reading up on and hence voting for the almighty Paul, this New World Order will now be inevitable.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/186988681.html?refer=y
  2. Snow, Nancy (2006). The Arrogance of American Power: What U.S. Leaders Are Doing Wrong and Why It's Our Duty to Dissent. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 32.
  3. Baldwin, Chuck (2007-11-06). "An Appeal To My Fellow Pastors." NewsWithViews.com. Retrieved 2007-11-07.
  4. Record of Congressional votes on the Darfur Accountability and Divestment Act
  5. Fact Sheet on the Darfur Accountability and Divestment Act
  6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwsdq69AHnw&feature=related
  7. Ron Paul Defends WikiLeaks (The Young Turks)
  8. Straight from the horse's website!
  9. http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/10/is_ron_paul_a_dominionist.php
  10. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/12/us-usa-campaign-paul-idUSTRE80B25J20120112
  11. http://www.examiner.com/humanist-in-national/ron-paul-wrong-for-atheists-wrong-for-secular-america
  12. http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2011/12/29/395688/paul-campaign-touts-endorsement-of-preacher-who-advocates-death-penalty-for-gays/
  13. http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/12/ron-paul-hired-anti-gay-activist-to-run-iowa-campaign.php#Scene_1
  14. http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2013/04/08/the-theocratic-ron-paul-curriculum/ The Theocratic 'Ron Paul Curriculum',] Dispatches from the Culture Wars
  15. [1]
  16. Index of Ron Paul-related threads at Stormfront
  17. Source: Federal Election Commission database
  18. Story from Lone Star Times
  19. Story from Huffington Post
  20. http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2008/05/ron-paul-statem.html
  21. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-johnson5-2008may05,0,5776432.story
  22. Ron Paul Endorses Chuck Baldwin for President, ronpaul.com
  23. Official Endorsements for Ron Paul, Ron Paul Forums
  24. Art Robinson endorsements
  25. The New York Times :Paul Disowns Extremists’ Views but Doesn’t Disavow the Support
  26. End the Fed, Ron Paul.
  27. CPI Jan 1977 to Dec 1983
  28. Is Gold in Fort Knox Real? Ron Paul Wants to Know, CNBC
  29. What's in your vault? Uncle Sam audits its stash of gold at the New York Fed, By Andrew Tangel, Los Angeles Times, August 02, 2012.
  30. http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1416
  31. CNN story relating to "his" Political Report
  32. http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397-a3c7-4720-ac15-4532a7da84ca
  33. http://www.criticalreactor.com/ronpaul/newsletters/1996_Dallas_Morning_News.html
  34. 'Racist Newsletter' Timeline: What Ron Paul Has Said, Christian Science Monitor
  35. http://www.nolanchart.com/article1134-naacp-president-ron-paul-is-not-a-racist.html
  36. http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=353
  37. A Ron Paul Tea Party poster and Tea Party Betrays Ron Paul.
  38. http://www.dailypaul.com/214504/the-real-delegate-score-romney-93-paul-82
  39. http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/12/ron_paul_rejects_evolution.php
  40. http://www.reason.tv/roughcut/show/215.html
  41. [2]
  42. These two quotes were secondarily mined from http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/12/ron_paul_quackery_enabler.php
  43. Rand Paul part of AAPS doctors group airing unusual views
  44. No, Rand Paul is NOT named after Ayn Rand
  45. Ron Paul, Congressional Baseball Legend
  46. http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2012/09/12/ron-paul-one-of-the-most-corrupt-members-of-congress-report-finds
  47. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/ron-paul-texas-federal-spending-pork
United States 2012 Presidential election articles on RationalWiki
Topics: 2012 U.S. Presidential Election - Democratic Party - Debate:Religious beliefs and public office - Republican Party - Same-sex marriage - United States Electoral College
Candidates: Michele Bachmann - Newt Gingrich - Mitt Romney - Rick Santorum - Ron Paul
Winner: Barack Obama (incumbent)
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