Ron Paul has got some strange foreign and defense policy ideas, that’s for sure. I do not understand his cultists – he is a lousy public speaker, has no charisma, comes across as an old  crank and is a rather unattractive fellow. His performance during the debate was embarrassing and it is a crime to have to waste time rebutting his nonsense.  Had he been around in 1941 he would have opposed going to war with Japan after Pearl Harbor.

by Philip Klein

Jim Carney is a great reporter and a wonderful colleague. But I have to voice strong disagreement with his column making the case for taking Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex., more seriously, given that he came within 153 votes of beating Rep. Michele Bachmann in the Ames Straw Poll.

In his column, Carney asks:

Why do the mainstream media and the Republican establishment persist in ignoring and dismissing Paul?

There is no one answer. You cannot chalk it all up to Paul’s perceived long-term viability problems: I know no serious forecaster or GOP operative who gives Bachmann a significant chance of being the Republican nominee, yet she is showered with coverage at every turn.

There are legitimate reasons why Bachmann should be getting more attention. Though she may not have a “significant chance” of winning the nomination herself, she has a significant chance of affecting the ultimate outcome. Bachmann’s rise has already had an impact, both by narrowing the opening for Sarah Palin to get in, and by forcing one-time top tier candidate Tim Pawlenty to drop out. She is currently the frontrunner in Iowa, and if Bachmann wins there and remains in the race for a long time, she could split the conservative vote and make it more difficult for Texas Gov. Rick Perry to overtake Mitt Romney. Should she lose Iowa and drop out early, it improves the chances that Perry will be the nominee. By contrast, no matter how close he came to Bachmann in the straw poll, Paul does not have a realistic chance of winning the Iowa Caucus. And if he stays in or gets out, it really doesn’t affect the outcome of the race. Paul’s support isn’t large enough and to the extent that it exists, a lot of his more libertarian voters find the rest of the field unacceptable. In other words, for many of his supporters, it’s Ron Paul or bust.

But that just speaks to the reasons why Bachmann is a legitimately more important political story. Carney also advances the argument that Paul’s ideas should be taken seriously because his warnings on economics and foreign policy proved to be prescient. Let’s just focus on foreign policy, because that’s the area that separates him most from the Republican mainstream. Even if I were to grant that he was right about Iraq and Afghanistan (refighting the arguments over these wars is beyond the scope of this post), that still doesn’t validate his extreme foreign policy views.

Paul doesn’t just support pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but wants to close U.S. bases all across the globe. He not only wants to withdraw all foreign aid, and end our “entangled alliance” with Israel, but he’s spoken out against Israel’s efforts to defend its citizens against terrorist groups. When Israel invaded Gaza to prevent Hamas rocket attacks in 2009, Paul recorded a video calling it a “sad day for the whole world.” He said Palestinians were living in a “concentration camp” (a thinly-veiled attempt to liken Israelis to Nazis) and said terrorists had just “a few small missiles.”

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In last Thursday’s debate, Paul dismissed the significance of Iran getting nuclear weapons (a radical regime that has called for “Death to America” and wiping Israel off the map). To be clear, it isn’t a matter of him being against sending troops to Iran, or bombing Iran — he is even against imposing sanctions, or taking any other actions to attempt to stop them from getting nukes. He also warned that assassinating terrorists would “translate our rule of law into a rule of mob rule.” In May, Paul said that he wouldn’t have ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden because “it was absolutely not necessary.” This is just a small inkling of the positions he’s taken recently.

And none of this gets into Paul’s penchant for indulging fringe characters – from flirting with 9/11 truthers to allowing racist newsletters to be published under his name.

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I feel for Tim. It’s probably frustrating when the candidate who comes closest to espousing your worldview sounds like a complete whack job to most people who don’t reflexively agree with him. But that’s no reason for the rest of us to take Ron Paul seriously.

Read the rest – No, we shouldn’t take Ron Paul more seriously