Krauthammer: Ron Paul’s misunderstanding of history is simply staggering

I found it interesting that Krauthammer referred to blockades as an act of war.

Thank you for setting Dave straight on the facts.

What do you think is going to happen with all of the chaos in Egypt? These are truly scary times, especially for those that live in Israel and everything going on in the region which surrounds them. My thoughts and prayers go out to them. I wish our government would show more empathy for their situation.

Well, what you are missing .. is that even Ron Paul understands that the President is not the one who decides whether we go to war or not. This point ins’t emphasized enough in his speaking, but it is mentioned in the latest CNN interview with Gloria Borger. You have to remember that the Constitutional position is that this nation is founded on the principal of Self-Government, and that the Federal government is an agent of the States, authorized to do specific tasks by their bidding. The States are sovereign. They are like nations in of themselves, and the united States is a Federation of Republics. The Federal government does not have the moral right to conscript the resources and men and women from the States, unless it is decidedly in the interests of those States, such as self defense or national interest, and the States are the ones who decide that.

… If the Congress votes for a Declaration of War, as per the will of the States and of the People, then the President is merely the person who executes that decision, he’s not supposed to be the one “deciding” whether we go to war or not. And Ron Paul, if he had that kind of mandate from Congress and the People to go to war, he would do his very best as Commander in Chief. NO President would dare go against the will of the people and the States who have declared it is in our interest to go to war.

For one thing is his his coverage of the American Indian relations. He focuses on a minority case of John Elliot to give the impression that religion was not imposed on them. Elliot was a good man, and he even protected Indians during King Philip’s War, but he was a minority case, but Woods’ focuses on him and not on the rest.

He also misses the point about the Pequot War…implying that it was not genocidal because the Pequot population was small from the beginning….This omits the fact that the war cut the population in half…and also most notably, it omits the Mystic River massacre.

For one thing, he gives false impressions about the 3/5 clause. He gives the impression that because abolitionists didn’t want to count slaves that made them more racist than slave holders— What he left out was that the abolitionists did not want to count slaves based on the slave holders own logic: To slave holders, they were just live stalk, and yet they wanted them counted anyway for congressional representation. The abolitionists pointed out the inconsistency of this by saying that since slaves were considered live stalk and they were to be counted, then lets also count sheep, horses and goats.

His treatment of the Civil War is a bit slick. He is a Neo-Confederate sympathizer…but at least I can say he does not make a lot of the careless mistakes that DiLorenzo makes in HIS book which is entitled “The Other Lincoln.”

Woods’ book does have strong points though. His section on the New Deal and how FDR prolonged the Depression is pretty good. —- His other book 33 Questions About American History You’re not Supposed to Ask is actually much better…though the chapter on the Civil War still is a worry for me.

For a better discussion, I’d recommend you look here: http://www.la-articles.org.uk/woods.htm

No – not at all. Hannity had some jerk fill in for him the other night and the guy is doing nothing at all but smearing Paul. Smearing takes place when the attacks are unsubstantiated – and he was a total idiot. Hannity is a coward sending someone in like that. I’d rather he did it himself.

Paul has absolutely no concept of defense, and no use for it. Somehow he thinks there is an audience for that, outside of his fanatics. That does not reflect well on his cleverness. Even Obama has benignly ignored the military even as he expects to fund his next social green experiments out of its former budget. Just who in the Republican party, the TEA “party” or even the RINO contingent would actually accept a Ron Paul I could not imagine. He has done a good job of repelling those with religious fervor with his clear dissing of any Israel factions. I heard someone is tracking his money sources and finding them emanating from Soros, whose devious Alinsky tactics could use a false flag third party of Paul partisans. Which in this case is faulty, since the usual Paul voter would not have shown up for any other candidate anyway.

Well he certainly didn’t scare you 4 months ago when you were a Paul Bot at the Atlantic Wire. Crazy how all 6 of your posts here have been shilling for Ron Paul, and posted within the last 15 minutes…

Sorry, thought we were still talking about Dad. Rand is okay, generally.

Tom S seems to know a lot of things about Ron Paul that Ron Paul has denied or revealed inadvertently. Why is it necessary to be a sycophant for anyone so clearly marginal, anyway. There are exactly as many Ron Paul fanatics as there will ever be, and they will all continue to follow that fool like lemmings. Dialogue with them or from them is pointless.

Glenn Beck has a good track record for prediction. Next to nobody else has identified what was going on, and who in the world has been driving it. I would accept his candidacy sooner than almost anyone else running.

The defense analysts and the State department were issuing warnings about those attacks, too. LONG Before 2001, EVERYONE was declaring that Iraq and other states in the Middle East were dangerous, had large armies, and probable WMD. Many Democrats expressed concern about future attacks.

Then Bush decided to go in, and suddenly all the Democrats claimed they never said any thing of the sort. Because the people must be stupid enough to believe them.

The fact is, anyone who was paying attention knew attacks were not only “coming”, but had in fact been going on for YEARS. The jihadists and their State sponsors started this war, and they could end it by simply stopping. Yet some idiots still think the same people who started it, and kept it going for years while we were peacefully trying to stop them, will somehow cease hostilities if we turn tail and run.

Paul’s “argument” (actually, more of a rambling mishmash of poorly understood concepts) has no more credibility than Mao’s little red book.

Not to invade a country, but to get the people responsible for 9/11. I’m sure you know this. Just thought I would throw it out there.

I was responding to the inference that Paul’s history was grossly inaccurate due to his “calling up Khrushchev” comment. I didn’t hear him make a point about Paul denying Kennedy’s forceful positioning. Leaving it out of a quick answer in a debate does not justify a statement that Paul denies it. There were probably a lot of details about the event that Paul didn’t mention.

I watched it again, and I see your point. There is one difference in that Iran is not a nuclear power, and we talk about invading them. Though Kennedy took aggressive action toward the Russian missile threat in Cuba, that was another country acting as an aggressor and directly putting the US in imminent harm. Which Paul has said that force would be justified in this case.

With that said, I would admit that Russia, in this instance was not the best example because there is a stark difference between Russian then, and Iran now. Yet that was Paul’s original point. That Iran is not an imminent threat to the US, has no proven nuclear weapons, and is surrounded by countries that do.

His point that we were able to communicate with Khrushchev to avoid war was correct. We did it through a UN proxy and through the back channels. The “phone call” comment was the primary inaccuracy. Though I would admit that his statement was fairly flippant in making it sound like we just “called him up”.

Paul admits his supporters are OWS in his interviews all the time. Any time OWS is brought up when he is interviewed, he says they are aginst the “Wal-Street JOOOOOOOOWWWS errr Bankers”. He endorced Cynthia McKinny! Queen of OWS.

If they had been on their game, the could have asked him from a different perspective, saying that he admitted to writing some of them in the 90s, and that his name is shown as editor on some of them.

That would have been a revealing line of questioning. But she never asked that so I can see why it seems repetitive to him.

Remember, Ron Paul was also the only candidate who showed a modicum of class while the media was tearing down Herman Cain, openly saying that the media and voters shouldn’t be concerned with tawdry sexual harassment allegations, but rather focus on Mr. Cain’s policy.

If we assume that the sentences or phrases so often cited in these newsletters remain as racist as they appear when read in the context of the entire article from which they’re pulled (which doesn’t seem to be the case) AND that Ron Paul either wrote these articles himself or fully endorsed the racism they are purported to support, there still remains no hint of racism in any of the bills Ron Paul has sponsored or in speeches he’s given in the entire length of his 30+ year political career.

So either Ron Paul is not a racist after all, or he’s a racist who doesn’t allow that to affect the policies he advocates as a public servant.

He acted like a baby! Every candidate in the field gets grilled over and over about the same things! RP is no different than he rest and should be a man and take the heat. Talk about a thin skin!! Obama and the dems would bury him!!!

You’re making the mistake of saying “I know some Muslims who are peaceful, so therefore Islam is peaceful”. The standard of whether the ideology is peaceful has to be dependent on what it sanctions and mandates, how Muslims have acted throughout Islamic history, and on what its founder (Muhammad) did and said. If you do this, then there is no other option other than to declare that Islam is and has always been an incredibly violent ideology that sanctions and mandates warfare against unbelievers.

Yes, many Muslims today are “peaceful”, but you have to take into consideration that Western civilization is at a major advantage (militarily, economically, technologically) compared with Islamic civilization, and that if Muslims were as violent/warlike as they were in the 7th-17th centuries, then the West would obliterate all Islamic states, leaving them utterly defeated. Muslims KNOW they cannot beat us ‘the old ways’, which is why they engage in terrorism and small scale warfare against non-Western states (such as those in Africa).

Know this one thing: If the tables were turned and Muslims were at the advantage to the West, then I guarantee you that their 1.2 billion population would not be peaceful, but would be completely aggressive/violent towards all unbelievers, and every Islamic state would be engaged in overt military warfare with any non-Islamic people/lands they could attack, for the purpose of conquering them.

The reason why all this is so important to know is because if we are going to stop “jihadism” one and for all, then we’re going to have to defeat the ideology of Islam once and for all. You just can’t separate jihadism from Islam. It’s either Islam exists and we don’t, or we exist and Islam doesn’t. Islam leaves no middle ground, and so neither should we.

It seems that your understanding of US interventionism does not extend beyond 2003. First, I assume you’re aware of the US supporting Hussein’s rise in Iraq to temper the Iranian presence in the region, supplying him with chemical and biological weapons with which to wage his 8-year war against Iran. But of course Iran deserved to be attacked right? After all, they did take all those US hostages in 1979 before the formation of the Islamic Republic. Yes, that’s true, but if you go back further to 1953 when the CIA supported a coup (TPAJAX Project) to oust the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and install the authoritarian Shah of Iran, you’ll begin to understand how years of oppression caused the locals to get a teeny bit angry with their Western puppet. US intervention led to the Islamic Republic in Iran, and a 22-year dictatorship in Iraq. Of course the 10 years of sanctions didn’t work out as planned, did they? A million people killed by some estimates, with Hussein living in luxury right up to the invasion. I think the thought of imposing sanctions on a country in order to impel desperate people to overthrow their government somewhat immoral.

Can you please provide some context on the opportunities offered to Hussein to avoid war. According to my understanding, he was complying with the UAEA weapons inspectors right up until February 2003. Are you counting the almost daily bombing of that country over 10 years as part of US negotiation? Is that how you get people to see reason?

What credible intelligence do you cite. You’ve probably never heard Scott Ritter, chief UN inspector during the 90s, say that the entire world’s intelligence community knew that Iraq’s capabilities of producing nuclear weapons had been reduced to almost zero. There were people screaming this left, right and centre, yet the complicit media ignored these voices and instead echoed the hysterical warnings of a war-mongering administration.

A perceived threat? Perceived by you perhaps, but it is well-documented that the books were cooked to heighten the threat posed by Hussein. Part of the “evidence” presented by Colin Powell at the UN was plagiarised from the paper of some graduate student. And of course, you’ve heard of the Downing Street Memo Scandal, which revealed that Bush was determined to attack Iraq but didn’t have a strong case to support it. But I think you said it best with the country being in “high anxiety”. Yes, just like Ron Paul said in last week’s debate: you don’t want a president that’s going to over-react in a time of crisis. Had he been president at the time, he’d have seen this charade for what it was and the disaster of the last decade would not have happened.

Finally, Ron Paul is a deeply respectful man. You’d know this if you’d ever seen him speak. I’m sure if he had read your comment, he’d say you were misguided or misinformed, but I doubt he’d be so inflammatory as to call you a “nut” or a “kook”. I’m not sure where your resentful tone comes from because, say what you will of his political positions, his gentlemanly nature does not deserve such casual name-calling.

Peace.

“The land of Palestine was virtually desolate in the 19th century. Jews built up the land and the Arabs migrated as a result.” What is your source for this?