I'm not a big Ron Paul fan. I appreciate his taking a courageous stand against the Iraq war and for a non-interventionist foreign policy to a generally hostile GOP audience, and I wholeheartedly support his defense of our civil liberties embedded in the Constitution. And the work of his supporters in outfundraising all the Republican fat cats and demonstrating the potential of grassroots organizing has been truly inspiring, going even Howard Dean one better. Coming from the left side of things, it's a matter of some embarrassment to me that the anti-war left has not rallied behind Dennis Kucinich the way the anti-war right has behind Paul.
But ultimately, I find the libertarian point of view rather stupid and simplistic. It's the ideology of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Alan Greenspan, and we're reaping the fruits of it now. Were Paul to actually become president, the withdrawal from Iraq would be a good thing, but in most other respects I think four years of an avowedly libertarian agenda would be a disaster and would end up burying the philosophy once and for all.
That said, I thoroughly enjoyed Paul's performance on Meet the Press today, parrying each of Tim Russert's attempts to find a gotcha moment with honesty and conviction -- two things Russert was obviously unpracticed in dealing with. There's the old saying about it being better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt, but that's not quite true. Russert and other self-important, bloviating TV pundits like Wolf Blitzer and Chris Matthews get paid millions of dollars to remove all doubt. What a pleasure it was to watch Paul reveal that truth for all to see.
