I haven't written much about Ron Paul, but my last post prompted a few email exchanges about him. Why is it that I could never support Ron Paul? A) It's like listening to a 9/11 Truther. He said: Just think of what happened after 9/11. Immediately before there was any assessment there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq. Glee?Nobody in the administration got away from having a friend, colleague, or relative killed or directly affected by 9/11. Glee? I'll tell you this, if you're a Ron Paul supporter after knowing that about him, and you still support him, wtf... After speaking at the first tea party in Des Moines, the Truthers (hereafter known as the "imbecile brigade") started talking to us and asking us questions about whether we were going to ask about 9/11 from our government. As it happened, Craig, one of my cohorts who helped me paint the 8' x 12' Declaration of Independence sign we created, did his master's paper on the destruction of the towers from a mechanical engineer's perspective. He found himself debating the imbecile brigade who spewed repeated "fact" after repeated "fact" and Craig dispensed of each one with physics and chemistry. It was impressive, and it was sad. Because they clung to their ignorance in the face of truth. Ron Paul is like that when it comes to 9/11. It's offensive and bewilderingly dumb. There are a lot of smart people who buy into his nonsense, but that's what we get for trusting "smart" politicians. B) He embraces the Occupoop movement. You can read about that in my previous post, if you haven't already. I'm a capitalist because I'm a freedomist. Though he's written of capitalism in the past, no capitalist would embrace the Occupoopers. That's a huge and odious oxymoron. C) What Ron Paul would do domestically isn't worth the demise of Israel. Love many things about Ron Paul's domestic agenda, but Israel needs our devoted friendship as the only freedom-loving democracy in the Middle East. Shrugging at Iran and working to fathom their motivations is dumb. 9/11 was not a crime. It was terrorism. Don't know the difference? A crime is what happens when someone attacks an individual or a group to profit for self-interest. Terrorism is what happens when someone attacks an individual or a group to scare the living shit out of the entire population and is willing to martyr themselves for the cause. To equate the two and use the word "crime" to describe 9/11 is to be without any clue as to the motivations of anyone who orchestrated or operated in the 9/11 attacks. Really. If you can do that, you're hopelessly ignorant and don't deserve any position of leadership, least of all President of the United States. Gaza is "like a concentration camp?" Hardly. Yet if you walk down Gaza City's main thoroughfare -- Salah al-Din Street -- grocery stores are stocked wall-to-wall with everything from fresh Israeli yogurts and hummus to Cocoa Puffs smuggled in from Egypt. Pharmacies look as well-supplied as a typical Rite Aid in the United States. Ron Paul is the wrong guy as a supplier of facts regarding Israel.I'm as anti-big-government-spending as you can be, but spending money in support of Israel to foster freedom-loving democracy in the Mid-East is money well-spent. If Israel goes away, as Iran wants it to do, then we lose influence in the region, which we need. He's been right about many things, and his agenda would be correct in many ways. But he's completely the wrong person to nominate for the presidency, and that's why I can't vote for him. I disagree with everyone in the GOP field on something (Newt's big government solutions tendencies, Mitt's big government everything, Bachmann's and Santorum's stance on implementing social statism, Perry's inability to clearly enunciate limited government and increasingly faith-pandering campaign, etc) but I can live with them. Economy and defense are huge for me, and embracing Occupoop and not understanding who your enemies are throws Ron Paul completely out of the mix - so there's my answer. Besides - I think he's likely to go third party anyway... | 
