Mama Knows Best

What the World Coupld Expect From

Dr. Ron Paul’s Non-Interventionist America

by: Michael Scheuer
Amidst the cacophony of everyday events around world, people outside the United States ought to cock an ear toward America States and listen closely for the quiet but resonant voice of a Texas gentleman named Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul is a retired obstetrician, a 10 term Republican congressman from the 14th district of Texas and a Republican candidate in the 2008 race for the US presidency. And if you listen closely to Dr. Paul, you will hear the only authentic American voice in a field of nearly twenty presidential candidates from both parties.

It is, these days, both trite and inaccurate to say that “America is a nation of laws and not men.” Since 1945, for example, U.S. presidents routinely have involved the United States in wars that Congress does not declare, notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution’s clear mandate that only Congress can declare war. For more than thirty years, successive U.S. Congresses and presidents have refused to enforce border control and immigration laws already on the books, thereby abetting the deterioration of America’s social cohesion, social and educational services, and national security. And for just as long, presidents, congressman, and senators of both parties have ignored the interests of everyday Americans to earn donations and retirement sinecures – both, really, barely disguised bribes – from the U.S.-based military industry, the multinational oil companies, and foreign lobbies flush with money, such as those representing Israel and Saudi Arabia. The foreign lobbies are particularly despicable because American parents pay for U.S. politicians’ kowtowing for money to these foreign entities with the lives of their soldier-children and their savings. Sadly, therefore, it is a bad joke to say that America is today a country of laws not men.

But that is why Dr. Paul’s voice is important and, increasingly, is being listened to by Americans. It also the reason that the slander machines of the Democrat and Republican parties, U.S. military-related industries and their financiers, and the foreign lobbies are working overtime to discredit and ridicule Dr. Paul. These self-appointed elites know that Dr. Paul’s voice is not only the authentic voice of Americans and their historical experience, but also potentially the voice of their doom, because impotence, shame, and drastically less war-profiteering will be theirs if the rule-of-law endorsed by Mr. Paul is reestablished in the United States.

Mr. Paul places his faith in the Constitution of the United States and the legacy left to Americans by their founding generation. The republican government created by America’s revolutionary generation was meant to be the agent of an expanding domain for freedom, liberty, prosperity, and equal opportunity at home. It was never intended to be the militarized installer of those attributes abroad. “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [the United States’] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be,” said Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, in 1821, in words that Americans are today being reminded of by Dr. Paul.

But she does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. … She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.

Dr. Paul speaks in the tradition of Secretary Adams, and in plainer words he speaks against – indeed, he damns – the bipartisan American governing class which, since 1945, has “insensibly chang[ed] from liberty to force” the spirit of the American nation and people. In his campaign, Dr. Paul draws attention to the disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan that have resulted from U.S. interventionism, and from the U.S. elite’s arrogant and foolish determination to be the “vindicator” of avaricious and ambitious foreigners who conceal their lust for arbitrary power behind the words of the American founders. He accuses and rebukes the bipartisan U.S. elite for having involved America in endless wars – especially religious wars – in which no genuine U.S. interest is at stake, and for having brazenly reached into the pockets of Americans and stolen their money to support and/or protect states – Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, etc. – that have drawn America ever more deeply into wars that are none of our business or concern.

If you listen to Mr. Paul you will hear a man devoted to his country’s welfare and his countrymen; knowledgeable about and respectful of its history; realistic about the increasingly barbaric world in which it exists; and, most of all, fully aware of the fragility of America’s republican experiment and its absolute dependence on the constant nurturing provided by the rule of law. If elected, Mr. Paul would reshape America in a direction that would be in America’s best interests.

Going to war would once again require a formal, constitutional declaration by the U.S. Congress; the world would see America involved in far fewer wars, and none started by the whim of a single man and the foreign-influenced ideological clique around him. And when war was declared, America’s foes would absorb an application of U.S. military force that would both utterly destroy them and their supporters, and serve as a warning to other miscreants bent on doing America harm.
Immigration and U.S. borders would re-subjected to the rule of law, and America would get the flow of immigrants it needs in an orderly manner and based protecting national security and, only then, on the needs of the country’s society and economy.
Foreign aid would be eliminated and defense spending better targeted to real threats so as to end the tax-tyranny of a perennially spendthrift federal government; reduce the amount of debt held by foreigners, especially that held by regimes such as China and Saudi Arabia; and encourage the reemergence of the traditional but long dormant pay-as-you-go thriftiness of individual Americans and their families.
Most important, the world would see a massively reduced U.S. voice, presence, involvement in events that have no conceivable impact on U.S. national interest. Other nations would have to begin looking out for themselves; they will have to amicably settle their religious, ethnic, tribal, and territorial spats or fight each other to the death – no U.S. cavalry will be riding to the rescue.
As you listen to Dr. Paul, you will hear his opponents describe him as an evil isolationist, but neither Dr. Paul nor America has ever been isolationist. Indeed, the term “isolationist” is merely a deceptive slur that America’s bipartisan elite hurls at those citizens who prefer not to waste their wealth or children’s lives in other peoples’ wars. Since its inception, the United States has been a trading nation and a country fully involved in economic, scientific, educational, and commercial affairs around the world. At its best, America has been sturdily non-interventionist, recognizing both that it has more than enough to do to expand liberty’s domain and the equality of opportunity at home, and that non-essential foreign adventures can only slow or even undo liberty and opportunity for Americans at home.

In an America led by the non-interventionist Dr. Paul, the world would see a more confident and less aggressive nation; a nation more humble, prosperous, and equitable; and a nation willing to let all other nations and peoples work out their own destinies, peaceably or violently, as they wish. America would get back to its own business and interests, and the rest of the post-Cold War world’s nations would be left alone to try, at long last, to grow into responsible adults.

November 28, 2007

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA.

Copyright 2007 © LewRockwell.com

By Pat Shannan

For several months you have watched the unfolding of ?The Treatment? by the news media in its attempt to make Congressman Ron Paul go away. He continues to frustrate their efforts.

The first stage of ?The Treatment? is to just simply ignore any substantial candidate who is not ?anointed? by the powers behind the scenes. Anyone who ever ran for political office wearing any label other than ?Republican? or ?Democrat? has experienced stage one, and few ever got beyond it. (A visitor from Mars can see in one day that the anointed Republican is Rudy Giuliani and the anointed Democrat is Hillary Clinton.)

Hard as the talking heads of the propaganda machine tried, they just couldn?t ignore Dr. Paul for long without continuing to make themselves look foolish. First of all, even though he attempted a shot at the presidency as the Libertarian Party?s candidate two decades ago, he has been a 10-term Republican congressman who won the early TV debates this year with simple logic, pointing out that government must obey the law, too, and the highest law of the land is the Constitution that nearly every politician not only ignores today but has never read in the first place.

So when this bona fide candidate was cleverly excluded from the Iowa debates, he showed up anyway, rented the room next door and put on a campaign rally that drew twice as many as the paltry 500 attending in the debate hall.

Therefore, a higher level of ?The Treatment? was necessitated around mid-2007, and this second stage in discrediting a candidate was displayed: that of poking fun in an attempt to make the candidate look foolish by quoting out of context or putting whole new pieces of deceptive text in his mouth that he never said in the first place.

However, when behavior sinks to a level that might provoke lesser men into swinging a punch or at least yelling a retaliatory, mindless rebuttal, Dr. Paul does not weaken. When the CNN interviewer told him that many people considered him ?flaky,? Ron just used her own words to draw some examples of the ?flaky? manner in which those in charge today are handling things in Washington.

On Face the Nation in early November, CBS host Bob Schieffer said, ?You are anti-war, anti-abortion, anti-drug administration, anti-Medicare, anti-income tax, anti- U.N., anti-Federal Reserve and World Bank. What else do you think government should do besides deliver the mail??

Composed and alert under fire, Paul calmly replied that in order to be ?anti? anything, you have to be ?pro? something else, and pointed out, ?I am pro-peace, prolife, pro-liberty, pro-hard money, and pro-states rights.?

?We don?t like $100 oil?? Paul asked and then answered, ?We?ll have $200 oil if we bomb Iran.?

In June, when Paul was explaining to the TV debates audience the lack of congressional authorization of the Iraqi war and all those preceding it since WWII and the need to get out of there, someone behind the curtain at Fox News opened up Rudy Giuliani’s microphone and allowed the former New York mayor to rudely cackle like a magpie. Then someone in charge of the computer buttons split the TV screen so the world could see Rudy childishly laughing while Paul made his points. A little later, host Sean Hannity treated Dr. Paul with disdain and a total lack of respect in the post-debate interview.

This was stage two at its best, and while many of his supporters sizzled and seethed at the two obviously pre-planned and well-organized cheap shots, Dr. Paul maintained his cool.

This comes from experience. In 1988, talk show host Morton Downey Jr. stacked his audience with some of the great unwashed hippies who, along with the discourteous host, hooted derisively (much in the fashion of today?s Jerry Springer Show) until Paul succumbed to the bait and began to shout back. His microphone?s volume was then turned down and that of the others was turned up?a common trick of the insiders?in order to prevent anyone from hearing anything he said over the cacophony.

Downey was the last to ever lure Dr. Paul into that trap, and the unfortunate experience must have bothered the candidate for a long time. Watching him today, we can readily see that he has learned the entrapment lesson well.

The congressman is a seasoned debater who, in addition to being unflappable, keeps up to date on every issue. Unlike the current president, he will never be one who will require an earpiece in order to be fed answers to questions, because those who tell the truth don?t have to memorize a script.

This may be the most likely reason that Paul?s establishment adversaries have found it necessary to turn up the heat to stage three. His raising of over $4 million in one day on the Internet could not be ignored, and his innate ability to turn their own words against them has only helped him gain ground, not lose it.

The time for spreading the lies has arrived. Some newspapers are printing ?the extensive and well documented? facts that Paul is ?dangerous? and ?has ties to the neo-Nazis.?

There was never any further evidence, however, of the alleged documentation, but we can be sure that more allegations will surface.

?Liberal-turned-conservative? and talk radio host Michael Medved looks over Paul?s supporters and finds ?an imposing collection of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, 9/11 ?truthers? and other paranoid and discredited conspiracists.?

He has not named any, but even if this is true, ?so what?? Would the other
candidates turn down any voter?

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck, another Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh sound-alike, is saying that Ron Paul and his supporters are ?a domestic enemy? and ?terrorists.? Beck claims that since the $4.2 million was raised on November 5?and they had to go back only 400 years to come up with this gem?and it is the same day when a revolutionist named Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament in England, Ron Paul must be some kind of terrorist, too. Beck?s hard evidence for his case is even more irrational: the Paul backers referred to their fund raising project on the Internet as a ?money bomb.?

The Paul camp is planning another ?money bomb? blast for December 16, in celebration of the 1773 Boston Tea Party. We can?t wait to hear the next foolish allegation regurgitated by the media following this one-day event.

Get used to it. The attack has just begun. The fourth stage is known as ?dirty tricks??likely to begin in January where Ron Paul is hopeful of shocking them again in the New Hampshire primary

Ron Paul will appear on Glenn Beck on Headline News next Tuesday, December 18th at 7p, 9p ET. Send your questions for Dr. Paul to glennbeck@cnn.com! I hope you all tune in to watch.