As The New American's Jack Kenny noted here a couple of days ago in his article, “Campaign Could Get 'Downright Ugly' if Paul Wins Iowa,” the Big Government Republicans are sharpening their knives for a bloodfest.
But they’re not waiting for the results of the January 3, 2012 Iowa caucuses to get ugly.
Over the past week, the apoplectic attack dogs of the neoconservative kennel were unleashed for a rabid, howling blitz against the Texas Congressman. It’s testimony to Dr. Paul’s squeaky clean personal and political life that the attackers have been forced to fabricate issues with which to clobber him. No sex scandals. No political payoffs from Freddie Mac or favoritism for Goldman Sachs. No political flip-flops on issues. No sellouts to special interests. So how do you attack a straight arrow such as Dr. Paul who is a constitutional purist and has doggedly stuck to his convictions for over three decades of public life? Well, they’re dusting off their playbook from the 2008 presidential campaign, and adding a few new twists. The smear bund is harping on several memes, hoping that sufficient repetition from multiple voices will convince voters that Ron Paul is “dangerous,” “crazy,” a “pacifist,” an “isolationist,” a “conspiracy crank,” and a “grumpy old man.”
And, let’s not forget, most of all, the “racist” and “anti-Semite” labels the smear bund is attempting to affix to Ron Paul. In adopting this tactic, the neocon attack dogs have torn a page from the Obama/Democrat/MSM “progressive” playbook. Will this tune play in Des Moines, Davenport, Cedar Rapids — and beyond? Perhaps, with the woefully uninformed; but for the Tea Party conservatives in Iowa who form a large part of the Paul support base, this will sound precisely like the false charges which Tea Party activists have been subjected to for the past several years.
Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post ran a furious diatribe by National Review’s Rich Lowry on December 19 decrying Paul as “a ‘blame America first’ Republican” that “has taken a principled anti-government position and associated it with loons and bigots.”
According to Lowry, Paul is an “irritable, absent-minded-professor” with “a poisonous view of America” who is guilty of “race-baiting and rancid Israel-bashing.”
For his ad hominem attack on Paul as a racist and anti-Semite, Lowry cites as a source the intellectually dishonest James Kirchick of The New Republic, the “progressive” magazine that has endorsed and promoted Big Government socialism for nearly a century (and endorsed Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for President).
Kirchick, who is recycling material from his 2008 anti-Paul campaign, was given space in the neocon Weekly Standard’s December 26 issue (which appeared several days earlier in the online edition) to rail about “The Company Paul Keeps,” in which he condemns the Congressman for “decades-long promotion of bigotry and conspiracy theories.”
Matt Barber penned an op-ed for the Washington Times on December 21, 2011, deriding Ron Paul as “cute, but unstable” because he is unwilling to take America into another war against Iran. Says Barber:
I personally like Mr. Paul. He’s that affable — if not a little “zany” — uncle who has the whole family on edge at Thanksgiving. “Oh boy; what’s Uncle Ronny gonna say next?”
Still, you wouldn’t give Uncle Ronny the carving knife for the turkey, much less the keys to the Oval Office.
David Frum, the Canadian neocon and speech writer for George W. Bush, has been churning out regular anti-Paul rants at his Frum Forum that end up being quoted and reposted across the blogosphere. This past week he featured “Ron Paul’s Useful Idiots,” and in the previous two weeks blasted Paul in several columns. One of those columns attacked Paul for criticizing Newt Gingrich’s global warming commercial, in which Newt and Nancy Pelosi sat together on a couch to promote Al Gore’s green socialist regime for the planet, ostensibly to save us from human-caused, catastrophic climate change. Newt now says the ad was “dumb,” and is trying to distance himself from his “Green Conservatism.”
But Frum, a true believer in the global warming “crisis” — despite Climategate, the avalanche of data contradicting anthropogenic global warming (AGW), and the huge number of scientists opposing the draconian “solutions” — says, “Newt, Your Ad With Pelosi Wasn’t Dumb.”
Says Frum: "What's so objectionable? Is it the notion that climate change is occurring? There is a vast body of evidence that it is, in the form of a long-term rise in average global temperatures. There is also ample evidence that this change is due primarily to anthropogenic carbon emissions.”
Ergo, he says, it makes sense for the federal government to push and promote “clean” alternative energy, to replace dirty old oil and coal. (Yes, we need more Solyndra debacles that reward politically connected insiders with billions of taxpayer dollars for solar, wind, and ethanol boondoggles.)
Yet Frum, who supports Big Government and foreign intervention (almost) everywhere, is a darling of the Republican establishment and Big Media. The ultra-left Frank Rich of the New York Times, for instance, is a big fan, describing Frum’s book Dead Right as “the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement.”
NBC’s Domenico Montanaro took after Ron Paul on December 21 on a catalog of his “controversial” stands and statements, including his opposition to the FDA’s persecution of dairy farmers who sell raw milk to customers who want it.
Blatherskite blogger Adam Yoshida seems to be wholly fixated on the threat that the Ron Paul revolution presents to Big Government programs, policies, and institutions that traditional conservatives oppose but neoconservatives embrace.
In his December 21 attack in American Thinker entitled, “The Madness of Ron Paul,” Yoshida blasts Paul, among other things, for wanting to abolish the Federal Reserve System. The “extremist views held by Paul,” he says, “are very dangerous.” In fact, claims Yoshida, they are “in truth, destructive to the ideals that he claims to hold dear.” Yoshida goes on to defend the Fed, an institution advocated by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto but wholly incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. According to Yoshida:
The primary virtue of the Federal Reserve and its printing presses is its flexibility. By maintaining control of the money supply, the Fed is able to exercise broad control over the direction of the economy…. Obviously this gives the Fed immense power over the economy, and certainly that power has been, is being, and will continue to be abused from time to time. However, that does not change the fact that these powers are vitally necessary.
“The time has come for a libertarian voice to make itself heard on national affairs,” says Yoshida. “Ron Paul, however, does not represent that cause. He is little more than a cranky old man espousing failed ideas that were obsolescent even when he was born.”
However, it is Ron Paul’s foreign policy that has most of the neocons in a dither. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt, Andy Dean, and the rest of the Bush league talk radio choir have been in overdrive, launching non-stop frenetic fusillades suggesting that Ron Paul would strip the nation of its defenses and bring catastrophic disaster upon us.
However, a calmer, rational look at Ron Paul’s foreign policy reveals a non-interventionist (not isolationist) policy in accord with the Constitution and America’s founders.
“Like every other conservative, Paul believes that America must have a strong national defense — he simply believes we can no longer afford our current irrational offense,” says Jack Hunter in “Why conservatives must adopt Ron Paul’s foreign policy” in a December 19 column in The Daily Caller. Hunter, who blogs for the Ron Paul campaign, raises important issues and challenges the usurpation of the “pro-defense” and “patriot” label of the neocons, who support perpetual and ever-expanding global war. Not only is that economically unsustainable, but immoral and counterproductive. Hunter writes:
Unfortunately, unlimited Pentagon spending remains the big government too many Republicans still love. During the Reagan era, when we were fighting a global superpower that possessed thousands of nuclear weapons, this made sense. It does not make sense anymore. Today, we are fighting individuals, or collections of individuals, with infinitely less military capabilities and no particular attachments to nation-states. Ask yourself this: What, exactly, does having thousands of troops stationed in Afghanistan do to prevent some sick individual from trying to blow up his underwear on an airplane? Just as important, ask this: Does having thousands of troops in places like Afghanistan make it less likely — or more likely — that some sick individual will try to blow up his underwear on an airplane? Our own military and CIA intelligence tells us that our overseas wars actually encourage terrorist attacks. A majority of the members of the U.S. military agree, or as a Pew Research Poll of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans published in October revealed: “About half (51 percent) of post-9/11 veterans say that the use of military force to fight terrorism creates hatred that breeds more terrorism."
Says Hunter: “Paul continues to make the same argument that former Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff Mike Mullen has made: that our debt is the greatest threat to our national security.”
Nevertheless, as the Iowa caucuses draw nearer, the anti-Paul attacks and smears are certain to escalate — and get even nastier.
Related articles:
Ron Paul and the Racist Newsletters
The Neoconservative Philosophy
Neoconservatives vs. Conservatives: Who Are the Real "Extremists"?
Faux Conservatism: Fox Gets It Wrong
