Ronald "I Can't Recall" Reagan.
how many children have you sacrificed for the animals in the middle
east?
On Jan 3, 8:52 pm, Keith In Tampa <keithinta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am literally laughing out loud! "The Greatness of Ron Paul"?
>
> Put the crack rock pipe down MJ.....I didn't even get to the author, much
> less the article....
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> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 9:17 PM, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
>
> > *The Greatness of Ron Paul
> > **By introducing moral imagination to the foreign-policy conversation,
> > the Republican candidate is doing the nation an important service.
> > *By Robert Wright
> > Jan 3 2012, 5:59 PM ET
>
> > A dispute has broken out<http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/01/is-ron-paul-setting-b...>among fans of Ron Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy about whether
> > he's a strategic liability. Paul, says<http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/crackpots-messengers>Kevin Drum, is such a "toxic, far-right, crackpot messenger" that "the only
> > thing he's accomplishing is to make non-interventionism even more of a
> > fringe view in American politics than it already is."
>
> > It's certainly true that Paul's hawkish critics are using his weirder
> > ideas and checkered past to try and make non-interventionism synonymous
> > with creepiness. But, whatever their success, Paul is making one
> > contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value.
>
> > It doesn't lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I'm
> > largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them.
> > Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine
> > how the world looks to people *other than Americans*.
>
> > This is such a radical departure from the prevailing American mindset that
> > some of Paul's critics see it as more evidence of his weirdness. A video
> > montage <http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/01/diss-1.html>meant to discredit him shows him taking the perspective of Iran. After
> > observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about
> > Iranians, "Why wouldn't it be natural that they'd want a weapon?
> > Internationally they'd be given more respect."
>
> > Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about
> > Iranian motivation? Wouldn't it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having
> > seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi,
> > to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more
> > respectful treatment?
>
> > Paul's error is clear: He's departed from approved
> > Republican-presidential-candidate talking points, according to which the
> > only explanation for an Iranian nuclear program is a desire to destroy
> > Israel. (Even Jon Huntsman, supposedly one of the more sensible Republicans
> > on foreign policy, seems to be a slave to the talking points: It's the
> > Huntsman campaign that created the video montage in question!)
>
> > A favorite Paul pedagogical device is to analogize foreign situations to
> > American ones. A campaign ad<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/ron-pauls-in-our-...>promoted by a Paul-supporting super PAC begins by asking us to imagine
> > Russian or Chinese troops in Texas. The point is that this is how our
> > occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan look to locals.
>
> > I've long thought that the biggest single problem in the world is the
> > failure of "moral imagination"--the inability or unwillingness of people to
> > see things from the perspective of people in circumstances different from
> > their own. Especially incendiary is the failure to extend moral imagination
> > across national, religious, or ethnic borders.
>
> > If a lack of moral imagination is indeed the core problem with America's
> > foreign policy, and Ron Paul is unique among presidential candidates in
> > trying to fight it, I think you have to say he's doing something great,
> > notwithstanding the many non-great and opposite-of-great things about him
> > (and notwithstanding the fact that he has in the past failed to extend
> > moral imagination across all possible borders).
>
> > Paul's hawkish detractors may succeed in using him to taint a
> > non-interventionist foreign policy. Even so, if in the meanwhile Paul gets
> > enough people exercising their moral imaginations, maybe doves will get the
> > last laugh.
>
> >http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/the-greatness-of-...
>
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