Paulistas to take ball, go home
Somehow I got this link in my email today, but it’s from Ron Holland on Lew Rockwell.com who declares that if the Republicans don’t crown Ron Paul their candidate, they wont vote in November. Oh, noes!!!
It is time for a groundswell of Ron Paul supporters to quietly, respectfully but firmly make their position clear to the mainstream media and the GOP establishment. Simply put, “No Paul on the ticket means no vote for the GOP in November”.
The Ron Paul Campaign has the GOP establishment stuck between a rock and a hard place even though they have not won a single state in the primaries to date. Every Paul supporter knows the underhanded tactics used by the Republican leadership at the state and national level as well as the organized smear and news blackout campaign carried out by the mainstream media.
Yeah, every week, the Paulistinians call for a “groundswell of support” for something or other and it never materializes. I’m sure this will be another popcorn fart. Of course, the reason they can’t win at the ballot box is because of some unidentifiable “underhanded tactic” and media blackout. As if no one has heard of Ron Paul in the six years he’s been campaigning.
The Republican Party desperately needs the votes of Ron Paul supporters in order to win in November against Obama.
Why? Most of Ron Paul’s supporters voted for Obama in the last election, because, foreign policy-wise what’s the difference between Obama and Paul? Look at the people like Adam Kokesh (IVAW) and Jake Diliberto (Rethink Afghanistan) who support Ron Paul for his foreign policy.
Yeah, sounds like sour grapes to me. And more of that disillusioned chest pounding we’ve heard from Paulistas since 2008.
Category: Ron Paul
Ronulans weren’t going to vote for the GOP candidate?
Color me shocked. No, really.
Happy Trails Paultards…
Don’t let the doorknob hit ya in the ass on the way out…
I wish I could be as sanguine about these threats, but I was at a MO Caucus last Saturday (though a less contentious one than the St. Charles County one that was forced to shut down). These guys are nuts – they declare outright an intention to bring chaos down on the national convention and throw the election to Obama if they don’t get their way. It’s going to be vicious and ugly.
Alice–they said the same thing in 2008. Didn’t happen then, won’t happen now.
They’re a bunch of petulant little children who’ll act all butthurt until the next shiny object comes along.
I still don’t understand the fascination with Paul; I mean on this site. Paul has just about zero impact on the selection by the party of Romney as the guy who’s turn it is. I’m not down with his foreign policy, but I surely wish the viable candidates had a fraction of his stand on entitlements and the role of the federal government.
Jonn, do you have a source for “Most of Ron Paul’s supporters voted for Obama in the last election”?
Not too worried about it Alice, there is alot more bark than bite in their posturing. Besides that, I would have to be the blindest optimist on the planet if I thought for a minute Obumbles wasn’t going to get his second term. 🙁
I’m with CI here…
I mean, Paul is the only candidate that seems to have an interest in preserving personal liberty…
So, you don’t think what happened in MO will transpire elsewhere, in greater or even just similar effect? Or you don’t find reports of what happened worrisome in itself? My recollection of 2008 does not include anything like this. (Hope the link works – I selected the least dramatic telling of events.)
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/03/missouri-caucus-anecdotes-arguments-arrests-and-a-good-day-for-ron-paul/
Alice, you must be in Boone county. I live down in Jeff City, work in Columbia, and heard all the craziness that took place. The Paul supporters calling into The Eagle were…interesting.
@5: I have been saying the same thing. I don’t agree with his foreign policy, but his domestic policy is pretty good. The problem, as I see it, is twofold:
1) his attraction to everything being a conspiracy and the fault of the CIA/Mossad.
2) most of his supporters are nuttier than he is.
I don’t personally find the reports worrisome because I don’t personally think any of it matters.
I’d love to see just about anyone other than Obama sitting in the White House, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen regardless of who runs against him.
Extortion, always a good tactic
REALITY HAMMER: Even the finest domestic policy elements don’t mean shit if we can’t protect and defend the place.
Zero – True, but I would also rather have a Republic worth defending.
My dislike for Paul was solidified during a CNN debate when he responded to Santorum, who was talking about strengthening trade and relations with S. American countries who do not have far left governments, by asking Santorum where he was going to get the money and troops to invade these countries. Wish I could find the clip.
That’s his problem though, not domestic policy, but the fact the he seems disturbingly fixated on some military conspiracy nonsense.
I guess being batshit crazy has nothing to do with it…
The level of Paul’s guano loco makes Santorum sound like Bob Hope.
I DO not like Ron Paul’s foreign policy…at all…but take a look at what we as soldiers/Marines/Airmen/sailors swore an oath to uphold and protect.
Well that same document is under attack daily by this administration, and every administration before it for the last 100 years.
Ron Paul is REALLY the only one willing to stand for what’s right people….even if his foreign policy is silly.
So, the Paulbots are threatening not to vote at all in November, and last time they voted for the current incumbent? For those that want to see him gone, perhaps it’s better if the Paulbots make good on their threat.
Paul’s “foreign policy” is more naive and idiotic than a 1st grader could come up with. It has the hallmarks of North Korea’s, without the nukes or Troops to keep others out. It completely ignores the fact that so much of our Nation’s wealth depends on exports, as well as so many jobs depend on that.
Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about a serious possibility of a Paul nomination for another 4 years.
Meanwhile, the paulbots will continue yapping like a dogpound full of chihuahuas.
Paul’s foreign policy includes no more spending trillions on overseas bases. Obama’s is clearly the opposite of that. How are Paul’s and Obama’s foreign policies anything alike? Obama is posturing for war with Iran, and Paul is opposed to it. It’s easy to smear anyone’s name by equating it with Obama’s.
The foreign policy debate is one thing, but this idea that a nation that has never attacked another nation and doesn’t quite have the military power to even do so, especially to attack a nation like the U.S. which has the highest military budget in the world and the most advanced defenses and the most comprehensive intelligence network in the world, is just too much for me. I just don’t believe Iran would attack us, and I know if they did we would squash it. I also think that if they closed off the strait of Hormuz (sp?) we would easily have enough crude oil in the U.S. to support ourselves. Also, it seems kind of stupid that we’re beating the same war drums and getting the same response from the public despite. When people were supportive of the war with Iraq it was because Saddam had WMDs. Now it’s because Iran is building a nuclear weapon, and the evidence is of about the same quality.
And for me domestic policy far outweighs foreign policy, especially when you see Obama signing into law the same type of shit Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s.
If you let Ron Paul talk about MONEY, and nothing but MONEY, and finance, he is a brilliant guy…
Past that, he’s nuttier than a squirrel turd, and his followers are even worse..
Oh… no… whatever shall we do? Thank God we got Lew Rockwell is on the case, he always catchs the conspiracies Ron doesn’t.
5#”I still don’t understand the fascination with Paul; I mean on this site.” Paul himself is little more then a whacky nuisance, if it was just him it would be tolerable. It’s his cult, most of whom are not Republicans, which they constantly attempt to mask. They can not fathom his lack of support(its his policies numbnuts)amongst the base and their frenzied antics to prove otherwise is the chronic problem.
Bah Bodenkurk:
It’s kinda hard to spend “trillions” on overseas bases when Federal expenditures on DoD and the VA combined are well less than $900B annually. The vast majority of that is spent on domestically on salaries, hardware, and supplies.
You also need to review the law of supply and demand. Strait of Hormuz closed = spike in oil prices worldwide like you’ve never seen before. How does gasoline at $7 a gallon sound?
Dude, that’s what I’m talking about: the strait of Hormuz thing is just another beat on the war drums. I know what supply and demand is. We have hundreds of years worth of oil in our own country that simply isn’t being drilled. If they blocked off the strait, we would have plenty of crude oil to use. And I don’t know if you noticed, but every time gas prices skyrocket the oil companies seem to make record or near-record profits. It’s not like a sandstorm in the Middle East drives oil prices up and everyone in the oil industry feels the burden, it’s just us- the consumer- feeling it.
And $900 billion times a ten year war equals about 9 trillion, roughly, right? I mean, those aren’t the exact numbers, sure, but that’s a lot of money to be spent, especially when we’re borrowing money from the Chinese.
I just realized soemthing. You know what they call people who are so dependent on something they are willing to attack other people who get in their way of that thing? Crackheads.
we would have plenty of crude oil to use.
And what do we do in the 5-7 years it would take to drill for it, build the pipelines, refineries, and other infrastructure required for it?
And $900 billion times a ten year war equals about 9 trillion, roughly, right?
Not only are your numbers greatly inflated, not all of DoD budget goes for stuff outside CONUS. Not. Even. CLOSE.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BUDGET-2012-TAB/pdf/BUDGET-2012-TAB.pdf
FY2002-2011 (10 years) Defense budget AND VA budget: Just a RCH above $6.3 T. Before you get your little Ronulan panties in a wad, consider that’s barely 20 percent of federal expenditures, and LESS than 5 percent (and on the way to barely 3 percent) of GDP for a Constitutionally mandated function. And no, not anywhere NEAR a majority of that went to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not even close.
You remember the Constitution, don’t you? That thing you claim you know oh-so-much-better than the rest of us as you tell us to “read a book”?
Next thing you know, you’re going to dig up Jefferson and tell us he was against the Constitution as well for fighting an undeclared war against the Barbary Pirates as well as going and doing something so rash as the Louisiana Purchase.
Ron Paul is a loon, plain and simple. Yeah, let’s go back to the gold standard, which will 1–destroy our economy for the better part of a generation, 2–tie our economy to a bunch of South African gold miners. What a country that’ll be then!!!
Ya nailed it, NHSparky. I’d guess that less than 10% of the DoD budget goes for “overseas bases”. But I’ll take a few minutes and run the numbers now that you’ve given me a reference to a decent set of detailed data for a 50 year period (1962-2011).
Well, I extracted and ran numbers associated with base maintenance for DoD from 1962-2011 from the doc NHSparky linked above. And as I suspected, our damnfool troll (Bah Bodenkurk) doesn’t know what in the hell he’s talking about. There are 7 major categories of funding listed for the DoD budget: Military Personnel, Operations and Maintenance (O&M), Procurement, Research/Development/Test/Eval, Mitary Construction (MILCON), Family Housing, and “other” (probably associated with foreign military sales, reimbursements to/from foreign governments, and depot operations – which are funded differently than most other parts of the DoD via a mechanism called the “working capital fund”, and a few other minor “dog and cat” categories). Of these, only three – O&M, MILCON, and Family Housing – are involved in maintaining bases. The other categories go to entirely different functions and by Federal law cannot be used for base maintenance. Of DoD’s O&M funds, I’d guess that maybe 15% goes towards overseas base maintenance. The O&M category also pays for all civilian salaries, buys fuel, travel costs, spare parts, equipment repairs, etc . . . . Based on this, I allocated 15% of the 50-year O&M total to overseas base costs. I’d guess that about 1/3 of DoD’s MILCON is overseas, so I allocated 35% of the 50-year MILCON total to that. I was generous and allocated 40% of family housing costs to overseas bases. The total is probably lower (a fair number of folks overseas don’t or can’t take their dependents with them), but costs may be higher – so I erred in our troll’s favor here. Making the above allocations and doing the math, the estimated total DoD has spent on overseas bases from 1962-2011 is approx $787 billion – or over 50 years, an average of about $16 billion per year (in 2011, the DoD spent $768B). That’s well under the “trillions” that our “esteemed guest” Bodenkurk threw at the wall to see if it would stick. I guess he didn’t expect the dung he flung to bounce back off the wall and hit him in the face. (smile) I also calculated the total 50-year DoD… Read more »
I like Paul better than the other candidates, as you guys know. Some of it’s the foreign policy, but more of it’s the domestic policy. Paul is not the best libertarian, but he’s the only pro-Constitution candidate out there. He’s ideologically pure.
Do I wish there was a candidate who was ideologically pure /and/ not crazy? I sure do. But the question is raised: who to vote for? Never Obama, not after what he’s done in terms of expansion of powers. And the rest of the Republican crowd is either offensive or secretly a robot. So what’s to do?
Hondo, btw, responded to you in that other thread.
Army Sergeant: suit yourself. Paul’s proposed foreign policy is IMO horribly naive and foolish, but to each his/her own. Economically I can agree with him on many things (perhaps not the regarding returning to the gold standard, though).
But the fact that Paul’s tolerated (if not actively sought) anti-Semitic and racist folks as supporters and published racist crap with his name/signature attached (and later tried to claim it didn’t exist or was “taken out of context”) 100% disqualifies Paul to be POTUS in my book. A quick look at some of Paul’s old newsletters from the 1990s was enough for me. And to my knowledge, Paul has never disavowed those old newsletters.
I won’t vote for socialists, and I won’t vote for racists.
He’s ideologically pure.
You owe me a new monitor and keyboard. I’m never getting the coffee out of them now.
http://www.americanindependent.com/160697/ron-paul-one-of-only-four-house-republicans-to-request-earmarks-for-2011-budget
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was one of only four House Republicans to break rank from the party and request earmarks despite a Republican Conference earmark moratorium. Paul sent 41 earmark requests totaling $157,093,544 for the 2011 Fiscal Year. His largest single request was $19,500,000 for a naval training ship at the Texas Maritime Academy in Galveston, followed by a $18,126,000 to provide maintenance on the Matagorda Ship Channel.
For Fiscal Year 2010, Paul requested 54 total earmarks, adding up to $398,460,640 in pork that the former presidential candidate sought to bring home to his district. These requests were made prior to the House Republican Conference’s voluntary ban on filing earmarks.
Not very fiscally conservative, if you ask me.
And do you want to get into his policy of anti-Semitism, racism, etc?
Of the five U.S. House members who brought home more total earmarked money than Paul, three were defeated in the November elections — Democratic U.S. Reps. Chet Edwards, Solomon Ortiz and Ciro Rodriguez (who all have large military installations in or near their districts.)
Whoops.
I like turtles.
Sparky, why is it that every time I have a discussion about ron paul, dickheads like you get all super uptight about it? Look, if you’re right about something, you’re right about it, and I get it. But you have to be a snide little asshole about it. What’s your fuckin problem?
Sorry, just read the rest of your comments. I’ve been reading this blog for a few months, and I’ve made some comments about a lot of things. I’ve commented on a few Ron Paul entries. I challenge you to go back and read through every comment I’ve made and try and find one time where I said I knew the Constitution better than you or anyone else, or I told anyone to read a book.
Hondo, he’s disavowed those newsletters for a while now. It’s always come up in the news, and he’s been asked about it a lot, and every time he’s said he doesn’t condone the material. And I’d far rather tolerate a racist than some of the other things out there, but that’s just me. Thanks for the info, by the way. Now I know. Also, thanks for also being a dickhead, like Sparky with your troll comment.
Ah, so anyone who brings up criticism of lying bullshit artists who claim they’re “true conservatives” are now dickheads?
Got it. Check. Thanks for playing.
No, my problem isn’t so much with Paul–although his problems are legion–it’s his dickhead supporters (like you) who want to try to bully, threaten, and intimidate people who call out your beloved constitutional Elmer Gantry.
Like the person on another now-defunct board who called the HR department at my work and tried to get me fired, claiming I was stalking or “threatening” her for having the fucking audacity of criticizing the little fucking lying anti-Semetic addled pipsqueak.
THAT’S my fuckin problem, dickhead. And you fuckers haven’t changed your tune one fucking note.
He doesn’t “condone” the material, but it was HIS fucking name on the newsletters. Kinda hard to distance yourself from that shit when your name is plastered all over it.
Source for disavowal, please. The interviews I’ve seen and other information I’ve read recently indicated otherwise.
You’re welcome for the info. As for me being a “dickhead”, well, you’re entitled to your opinion. But frankly you’re in no position to accuse others of that. Wanna see a dickhead, try looking in the mirror – after re-reading your own comments 25 26, and 35 nabove.
Someone was talking to me about Paul, and asked whether I would like it if he actually won.
It made me really think about my support for him. And the answer is no-I don’t want Ron Paul as my president. But I like some of his ideas. Why do I support him, then? In part I think it’s because I know he has no chance of winning, so I can vote for him without feeling like I’m helping to put someone I hate in power. I think I support Paul, in part, because now people are able to have discussions about a lot of those ideas.
As I’ve said, I wish the libertarian ideas had better standard bearers than they presently do. I really, really wish that. My heart wants to break whenever I look at the current crop of candidates, though.
Who are you guys planning on voting for?
Addendum: make that a verifiable and credible source for the disavowal Bah Bodenkurk.
@40 – If you’re not going to vote for Romney, you can always cast it for the LP candidate. He’s a better standard bearer [in my estimation] than Paul.
Not that it matters a hill of beans, but I’ll be voting for RJ Harris, Army Sgt.
Army Sergeant: As it stands now, I’ll almost certainly vote for whoever the Republican party nominates – provided it ISN’T Paul. Paul is IMO a naive (and probably bigoted) idiot who’s proven he’s incapable of running a political newsletter, much less serving as POTUS.
The current Occupant 1600 Penn Ave is IMO little more than a Socialist calling himself a Democrat, so there’s no way in hell I could vote for him. I also think he’s more talking head than
qualified.
If by some crazy twist of fate the election ends up being between Paul and Obama, I have no idea who I’ll vote for. If that happened, for the first time in my life since I became eligible to vote I just might not cast a vote for POTUS at all – or might cast a write-in protest vote instead.
Hondo, if you found yourself in that unlikely position, why wouldn’t you vote for someone like RJ Harris?
I did allow the possibility that I’d cast a protest vote, Jacobite. In virtually any US election, either the Democratic or Republican candidate will win – so a vote for the Libertarian candidate (or other 3rd party candidate) is virtually always just another form of protest vote. I might well choose to do that in protest vice write in a name.
@42 – I meant to add that prospective nominee Gary Johnson, is a better standard bearer. That’s what I get for trying to post as I’m logging off and leaving work.
Yeah, Sparky, you see me threatening you and everyone else on this blog all the time, right? You saw clear threats in my comments in this thread, right? Oh wait…
Hondo, videos of him clearly saying so count?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQTM6aBWBHQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LywD6gXBudc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNNPNga0CYg – Skip to about 3:45
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVOuWXLX0Tw&feature=relmfu – skip to 1:30
Hope that helps. The thing about this issue is it’s like the issue of whether Obama is a Muslim or not. He says he’s not, lots of people are saying he is in an accusatory way, and the fact is it’s a non-issue.
Sparky, do you feel threatened by anything I said? Do you see me threatening you anywhere on here? I brought up some points, and you brought up some points and some snarky remarks. THAT’S your problem.
Hondo, videos count?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVOuWXLX0Tw&feature=relmfu – skip to 1:30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNNPNga0CYg – skip to 3:45
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQTM6aBWBHQ – skip to 3:15
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5LtbXG62es&feature=related – skip to 1:20
Sorry to double post.