(By Sean Shepard, Originally posted at Shepard on Politics and Policy)
Conservatives have a real problem in Texas congressman Ron Paul.
Ron Paul doesn’t think the United States should claim to be all about “freedom” and “democracy” while sending billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to foreign dictators. The people of Egypt just rose up and booted out Mubarak whom the U.S. sent billions of dollars to each year. The Ba’ath Party in Iraq was supported early on by the U.S. and Saddam was all buddy-buddy with America for many years before we sought “regime change”. In 1979 the people of Iran tossed out the increasingly brutal Shah Pahlavi whom the U.S. and Britain had put put in power, replacing their secular (non religious) democracy in 1953.
I mean, it’s not like the people in these countries aren’t backwards cave people who don’t know that the United States has funded and supported the same governments and leaders that have secret police kidnapping political dissenters off the streets, won’t let women drive or vote or sometimes even punishes them with whippings, jail or being stoned to death for having gotten raped.
Former Pakistani President Musharraf, a military dictator, whom the U.S. sent billions and billions of dollars to each year just had an arrest warrant issued for him over the assassination of his political opposition, Benazir Bhutto, prior to the election. Yay! Hey, thanks U.S. Government for sending my tax money to a murderous, anti-democracy dictator who has women assassinated.
Ron Paul doesn’t think the Federal Reserve should be able to just print money out of thin air, decreasing the value of the money already in circulation (including our savings) so that they can cover the massive deficits and out of control spending of our ridiculously bloated government while the rest of the world laughs at us. Has anyone else noticed the rest of the world starting to demand that the U.S. Dollar no longer be a key reserve currency and even China, a Communist Country whom we will borrow our entire military budget from (and then some) this year, is starting to rethink how far they will let us extend ourselves with them.
div>Ron Paul doesn’t think that the Federal Government should be regulating religious rituals like marriage that a lot of us really think should be controlled by each person’s respective church or religious beliefs. Nope, he doesn’t think that the opinions of some people should be forced, by threat of government violence, on everyone else.
Ron Paul really means it when he talks about shrinking the Federal Government, making sure it minds its own business and actually protects not just the personal safety and freedom of Americans but our economic freedom and security as well.
A lot of conservatives like to talk about how they want the U.S. Government out of their lives and wallets. Yeah, well people in other countries want the U.S. Government out of their lives and wallets too. You want to stop terrorism against the United States? Heaven forbid we consider starting by not pissing off a whole region of the world with a hypocritical foreign policy.
Small government conservatives shouldn’t be calling for the Government to not only take over marriage from the church; but, as the proposed Constitutional Amendment in Indiana would call for – actually banning voluntary, contractual agreements between people that might look too much like some kind of arrangement similar to that married people have. Yeah, banning voluntary, contractual agreements between consenting adults is exactly what small government conservative folks should be promoting. Idiots.
One of the elected politicians that represents me in the Indiana State House, and one of the few I respect quite a bit, pointed out how some of the same people who praised Governor Mitch Daniels’ great speech at CPAC spent the very next day blasting and criticizing CPAC for Ron Paul’s victory in their Straw Poll. Well, just keep this mind. As a Facebook post pointed out, “Ron Paul won that straw poll with 30% of the vote by INSPIRING people to be there. Mitt ‘RomneyCare’ Romney came in second place with 23% by PAYING people to be there.”
Nobody else garnered more than 6% and, thank goodness for small miracles, Sarah Palin only got 3% with the much more deserving Mitch Daniels ahead of her at 4%.
For all of the railing against the government takeover of healthcare under Obama where was all the fuss when George W. Bush pushed through the trillion dollar prescription drug benefit to Medicare? Where are the loud calls and protests to repeal that? Where is the acknowledgment about Mitt’s involvement with Massachusetts so-called “RomneyCare” program? Hey! If the CPAC results are any indication 23% of conservatives agree that government takeovers are okay so long as a Republican does it!
So, yeah, there are a bunch of us out there who want a little (or a lot of) intellectual honesty and consistency from our politicians and our government. But, until we get it from the followers and supporters of the two major political party cults (and that’s what they’ve devolved into), we aren’t going to have it from government. And, so, people like Ron Paul pose a problem because he continues to point out the inconsistencies in the current political dialog and our own hypocrisy. Supporters of the status quo, of an oppressive global American empire or people who want to use government to push their hateful, religious anti-gay people agenda really, really hate that.