Despite the claims of the husky pony-tailed blogger, Ron Paul and his acolytes wield no power in the Republican party. The vast majority of Republicans and conservatives reject his isolationism, his tendencies to blame America first, his not so veiled antisemitism, and his repugnant moral equivalence. We do not need Ron Paul but we can return to our roots which are low taxes, balanced budgets, strong national defense, appointing law & order judges, and a regulated immigration policy. For all the publicity he gets, how many delegates did Paul get in 2008?
by David Harsanyi
What are we to make of the Republican Party’s future now that libertarian Rep. Ron Paul won the presidential straw poll at the well-attended Conservative Political Action Conference last week?
Is the GOP about to transform into the party of the gold standard?
Let’s, for a moment, forget Paul (and how I wish this could be a permanent condition, considering the congressman is neither a serious politician nor — and I can’t stress this enough — a serious thinker).
Libertarianism offers conservatives — many of them new to political activism — an earnest ideological alternative to the process-heavy politics that dominate Washington.
It allows Republicans to cleanse themselves of the GOP’s failure to deliver on promises of smaller government and fiscal restraint.
None of which is new. The 1964 Barry Goldwater would be considered a libertarian today by many measures. The National Review constructed a “fusionist” effort to bring the parties together. Ronald Reagan explained to Reason magazine back in 1975 that “the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
[…]
Does that mean we need Paul?
“Congressman Paul is committed to bringing the conservative movement back to its traditional platform of limited government, balanced budgets and a foreign policy of nonintervention,” claims Jesse Benton, Paul’s spokesman.
If only it stopped there. Paul isn’t a traditional conservative. His obsession with long-decided monetary policy and isolationism are not his only half-baked crusades. Paul’s newsletters of the ’80s and ’90s were filled with anti-Semitic and racist rants, proving his slumming in the ugliest corners of conspiracyland today is no mistake.
Read the rest here: The Ron Paul delusion
Tags: Ron Paul
