Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Rand Paul's Neocon Vision For The Empire

By, Chris Rossini

The hits just keep coming.

HuffPo has a piece on Rand Paul's views regarding the shutting down of U.S. military bases on foreign soil.
“I’m not saying don’t have any,” he said. "I'm just saying maybe not 900. I mean, I’d rather have one at Fort Campbell and Fort Knox than one in Timbuktu.”

And it turns out Paul is not opposed to keeping military bases in Iraq, or in that part of the world, for the foreseeable future...

"I think having some places and bases where we could orchestrate attacks if we had to, if there's a regrouping of people, wouldn't be too unreasonable. But I think out patrolling the villages after 12 years, the Afghans should be doing that," Paul said...

"Some libertarians argue that Western occupation fans the flames of radical Islam -– I agree," Paul said in that speech. "But I don’t agree that absent Western occupation that radical Islam 'goes quietly into that good night.'”
So Rand knows that occupation fans the flames...But seems to think that he has the recipe for the precise amount of fanning that needs to be done.

And what of Rand's views on Radical Islam?

Well, back in Feb. (prior to the #StandWithRand-palooza), Justin Raimondo wrote a scathing piece, called Rand Paul’s War Against “Radical Islam”.

In it, Raimondo said:
Rand Paul and his advisors have made a political decision to align themselves with the furthest-right fringe of the GOP. We’re not talking here about the most radical of his father’s followers, who tend toward the secular – and hate him for endorsing Mitt Romney at the GOP’s Tampa Bay convention, just as the elder Paul’s convention delegates were being stolen out from under him.

His new allies are the folks he recently traveled with to Israel, a gaggle of born-again fundamentalists active in the American Family Association: the Mississippi-based AFA is one of the more extreme Christian Right groups, whose spokesmen have said "the jihadists on 9/11 were the agents of God’s wrath in order to get our attention as a people,” and likened gays to Nazis...

Although he never gives religious import to this foreign policy views, this lunacy is really the basis of Sen. Paul’s "realism."
It makes me wonder, what does Rand have to do? What does he have to say? How far does he have to stray from the ideas of Liberty for libertarians to throw in the towel?

Each week, Rand seems to keep pushing the envelope further and further.

Perhaps he thinks that the libertarian votes are in his pocket and he can get away with anything. Let's hope that isn't the case.

What a shame if the story ends up that libertarians help (either directly or through a Rand endorsement) install another Neocon into the Oval Office. And what an "up yours" the Neocons could deliver to Ron Paul as a result.


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3 comments:

  1. I'm not shocked at this at all. I was still very skeptical of Rand even after his whole drone speech.

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  2. Rand is politically ambitious. As such he needs to (and has) suck up to the israel lobby and the heretical nutball christian zionists. On matters of foreign policy he is simply not to be trusted, and if he will sell out whatever principles he has there, where does it stop?

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  3. We're having trouble throwing him under the bus because he's still one of the best politicians going right now...and that just speaks volumes for the sorry set of circumstances we have. I can only think of maybe 2 or 3 others that I would pick over him at this time.

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