Ron Paul, Our ONLY Hope!
The Skinny:
The ONLY GOP candidate who voted against the war….
Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic, nine-term lawmaker from southeast Texas, took the first step Thursday toward a second, quixotic presidential bid _ this time as a Republican.
In 1988, Paul was the Libertarian nominee for president and received more than 400,000 votes.
Paul limits his view of the role of the federal government to those duties laid out in the Constitution. As a result, he sometimes casts votes at odds with his constituents and other Republicans.
He was one of a handful of Republicans to vote in 2002 against giving President Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq, contending that only Congress had the power to declare war. At times, he has voted against funds for the military.
Paul bills himself as “The Taxpayers’ Best Friend,” and is routinely ranked either first or second in the House by the National Taxpayers Union, a national group advocating low taxes and limited government.
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Ron Paul Vs. Rudy:
5/15/2007
Rudy Giuliani made clear in Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate that he is not ready to let the facts get in the way of his approach to foreign policy
The most heated moment in the debate, which aired live on the conservative Fox News network, came when the former New York mayor and current GOP front-runner angrily refused to entertain a serious discussion about the role that actions taken by the United States prior to the September 11, 2OO1, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have played in inspiring or encouraging those attacks.
Giuliani led the crowd of contenders on attacking Texas Congressman Ron Paul (news, bio, voting record) after the anti-war Republican restated facts that are outlined in the report of the The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
Asked about his opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Paul repeated his oft-expressed concern that instead of making the U.S. safer, U.S. interventions in the Middle East over the years have stirred up anti-American sentiment. As he did in the previous Republican debate, the Texan suggested that former President
Ronald Reagan‘s decisions to withdraw U.S. troops from the region in the 198Os were wiser than the moves by successive Republican and Democratic presidents to increase U.S. military involvement there.
Speaking of extremists who target the U.S, Paul said, “They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East [for years]. I think (Ronald) Reagan was right. We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. Right now, we’re building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting.”
Paul argued that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are “delighted that we’re over there” in Iraq, pointing out that, “They have already… killed 3,400 of our men and I don’t think it was necessary.”
Giuliani, going for an applause line with a conservative South Carolina audience that was not exactly sympathetic with his support for abortion rights and other socially liberal positions, leapt on Paul’s remarks. Interrupting the flow of the debate, Giuliani declared, “That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11. I would ask the congressman withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”
The mayor, who is making his response to the 9-11 attacks on New York a central feature of his presidential campaign, was joined in the assault on Paul by many of the other candidates.
But congressman did not back down, and for good reason. Unlike Giuliani, the Texan has actually read the record.
The 9-11 Commission report detailed how bin Laden had, in 1996, issued “his self-styled fatwa calling on Muslims to drive American soldiers out of Saudi Arabia” and identified that declaration and another in 1998 as part of “a long series” of statements objecting to U.S. military interventions in his native Saudi Arabia in particular and the Middle East in general. Statements from bin Laden and those associated with him prior to 9-11 consistently expressed anger with the U.S. military presence on the Arabian Peninsula, U.S. aggression against the Iraqi people and U.S. support of Israel.
The 9-11 Commission based its assessments on testimony from experts on terrorism and the Middle East. Asked about the motivations of the terrorists, FBI Special Agent James Fitzgerald told the commission: “I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”
Fitzgerald’s was not a lonely voice in the intelligence community.
Michael Scheuer, the former Central Intelligence Agency specialist on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, has objected to simplistic suggestions by President Bush and others that terrorists are motivated by an ill-defined irrational hatred of the United States. “The politicians really are at great fault for not squaring with the American people,” Scheuer said in a CNN interview. “We’re being attacked for what we do in the Islamic world, not for who we are or what we believe in or how we live. And there’s a huge burden of guilt to be laid at Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, both parties for simply lying to the American people.”
It is true that reasonable people might disagree about the legitimacy of Muslim and Arab objections to U.S. military policies. And, certainly, the vast majority of Americans would object to any attempt to justify the attacks on this country, its citizen and its soldiers.
But that was not what Paul was doing. He was trying to make a case, based on what we know from past experience, for bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq.
Giuliani’s reaction to Paul’s comments, especially the suggestion that they should be withdrawn, marked him as the candidate peddling “absurd explanations.”
Viewers of the debate appear to have agreed. An unscientific survey by Fox News asked its viewers to send text messages identifying the winner. Tens of thousands were received and Paul ranked along with Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as having made the best showing.
No wonder then that, when asked about his dust-up with Giuliani, Paul said he’d be “delighted” to debate the front-runner on foreign policy.
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Guiliani, A BIT CONFUSED!
Last night in the Republican presidential debate, Rudy Giuliani was asked if he had an “ open-ended ” commitment to Iraq. He failed to directly answer the question, and instead advocated staying in Iraq in order to fight terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here. He referenced the foiled Fort Dix terrorist plot as an example. Giuliani said, “These people do want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago .”
Giuliani’s claim that the Fort Dix terrorists are an example of why we need to stay in Iraq is extremely flawed. As TalkLeft noted , the individuals arrested at Fort Dix had been in the United States well before the Iraq war, some of them for more than 23 years.
After the debate, Giuliani went on Fox, where Alan Colmes pressed him on this point. “Three of the brothers came when they were one and six and in single digits chronologically. They didn’t come here to commit jihad. They came here when they were kids . They grew up in the United States,” Colmes said. Flummoxed by the question, Giuliani visibly stuttered and could only offer, “This whole thing is a tremendous danger for us, abroad and here.”
Click Here to Watch Vvideo Compilation
Giuliani also said last night, “These people [al Qaeda terrorists] came here and killed us because of our freedom of religion, because of our freedom for women, because they hate us. … The reality is, if you are confused about this , I think you put our country in much greater jeopardy.” Sadly, it is Giuliani who is confused in his diagnosis about the root cause of terrorism.
Counterrorism expert Michael Scheuer has correctly noted :
Osama doesn’t hate our freedom: The fundamental flaw in our thinking about Bin Laden is that ‘Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather than what we do.’ Muslims are bothered by our modernity, democracy, and sexuality, but they are rarely spurred to action unless American forces encroach on their lands. It’s American foreign policy that enrages Osama and al-Qaida, not American culture and society.
Source Here.
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Guiliani caught in BIG lie!
May 30, 2007
On Tuesday, members of a 911 truth activist group confronted former Mayor Rudy Giuliani at a New York fundraiser about the fall of the World Trade Center.
“How come people in the buildings weren’t notified?” asked one member of the group. “And how can you sleep at night?”
Giuliani’s politely-phrased response, caught by WNBC newscameras filming the event, was “I didn’t know that the towers were going to collapse.”
That response contradicts remarks the former New York City mayor made about being warned about the collapse during a phone interview with onetime ABC anchor Peter Jennings on September 11, 2001, as shown in a transcript WNBC obtained from the Giuliani 2008 campaign.
Giuliani told Jennings, “I–I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the police commissioner, the fire commissioner, the head of emergency management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building, so we were trapped in the building for 10, 15 minutes, and finally found an exit and got out, walked north, and took a lot of people with us.”
The following video from We Are Change and Infowars.com juxtaposes the two quotes.
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Ron Paul Place FIRST on Fox News Poll!!!!!
5/15/2007
Approx. 11pm ET.
Sean Hannity announce that RON PAUL placed FIRST in a Fox News Poll of Republican candidates with a whopping 30% of the vote!
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Thank You, Ron Paul
Ron Paul, a Republican congressman running for president, is saying what needs to be said about the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war. Clearly, his rivals and the news media can’t handle the truth.At the most recent Republican debate, Paul not only repeated his opposition to the illegal and unconstitutional war, but he also identified 50 years of U.S. intervention in the Middle East as “a major contributing factor” in al-Qaeda’s attacks in 2001.
“Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack[ed] us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East,” Paul said.
Paul thus becomes the first person in mainstream politics–he’s been in Congress many years–to acknowledge that U.S. foreign policy has had bad consequences not only for people in the Middle East but for Americans at home as well. A government cannot take sides in so many deep-seated conflicts for as long as the U.S. government has without acquiring enemies and provoking retaliation.
It doesn’t take much knowledge of history and human nature–not to mention the official 9/11 Commission report–to see this. It’s about time it was said in such a prominent forum.
Of course, the reaction was stunningly absurd.
FOX News questioner Wendell Goler said in follow-up, “Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?”
Let’s examine the question. To invite something is to desire the thing invited. Paul suggested no such thing. And who is “we”? Goler’s question implies that Paul was saying the American people or “America” invited the attacks. But Paul was talking about American policymakers, not the American people. So the question was way off the mark and may have been an attempt to bait Paul.
He wouldn’t take the bait. “I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it,” he said. In other words, the people who masterminded the attack did not say they did it because we Americans are rich or free or non-Muslim. Their grievances relate to systematic U.S. intervention in the region: in particular, the presence of troops near holy sites in Saudi Arabia; a 10-year bombing campaign and killer embargo on Iraq (beginning in 1991), which cost hundreds of thousands of lives; and support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Rudolph Giuliani, also running for the nomination, responded demagogically, “That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq…. I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”
Of course, Paul never said “we invited the attack.” And he didn’t back down under Giuliani’s grandstanding: “I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about ‘blowback.’ When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.”
In saying “blowback,” Paul was using the CIA’s term for the unintended bad consequences of a government operation. He specifically mentioned Iran in 1953, when the Eisenhower administration sent the CIA to help drive an elected secular prime minister from office and return the despotic shah to power. The result was the 1979 Islamic revolution, the seizure of the American embassy, complete with hostages, and close to 30 years of hostility, with war perhaps to come.
U.S. imperialist polices in the Middle East have been good for special interests and power-loving politicians, but bad for the American people. Someone in government has finally had the courage to say so.
Thank you, Ron Paul.
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