Giuliani’s Attack on Ron Paul Falls Flat
by Jacob G. Hornberger, May 16, 2007
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0705f.asp...
Indeed, closer to home, suppose Venezuela imposed sanctions and no-fly zones on the Southeastern part of the United States and then sent in Venezuelan troops to wage the war on terrorism in Florida. After all, don’t forget that the U.S. government’s refusal to turn over accused terrorist Luis Posada Carriles to the Venezuelan government for trial is no different in principle from the Taliban’s refusal to turn Osama bin Laden over to the United States after the 9/11 attacks. In fact, Venezuela’s case is stronger than the Taliban’s because Venezuela, unlike Afghanistan, has an extradition agreement with the United States. Moreover, Venezuela, unlike Washington’s response to the Taliban regime, is ready and willing to offer evidence of Posada’s role in the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airliner, which took the lives of 73 innocent people, including the young members of a Cuban sports team.
What Ron Paul’s participation in the 2008 presidential race is accomplishing is this: It is making people such as Rudy Giuliani think about things they’ve never thought about before and causing them to view the U.S. government and its long-time paradigm of empire and interventionism in an entirely different way. It’s also why he is engendering considerable discomfort among people who have long believed that the federal government is a deity whose foreign policies are beyond reproach. Don’t be surprised to hear more calls for suppressing Paul’s participation in future debates, even while the critics continue to wax eloquent about how U.S. soldiers are killing and dying in Iraq for the sake of “democracy.”
In last night’s debate Rudy Giuliani made a mistake that is commonly made by those who view the federal government as a deity. Conflating the U.S. government and the American people, he suggested in the post-debate interview that Ron Paul was “blaming America.” Actually, Paul did no such thing. He blamed the U.S. government’s interventionist foreign policies for the morass in which our nation now finds itself. Like our Founding Fathers and the Framers, Paul understands that the federal government and the country are two separate and distinct groups, which in fact is precisely why the Bill of Rights expressly protects the country from the federal government.
Ron Paul’s answers in last night’s debate reflect how differently he approaches societal problems as compared to such politicians as Rudy Giuliani. Keep in mind that Ron Paul is, first and foremost, a physician. As a doctor, he is trained in diagnosing an ailment correctly because he knows that a correct prescription almost always depends on the right diagnosis. Equally important, he isn’t going to lie to a patient or feed him a false reality about the seriousness of his ailment. In order for the patient to make the correct decision as to whether to embark on a certain course of treatment, Paul knows that it is necessary that the patient confront the reality of his condition. Therefore, during last night’s debate Ron Paul simply was doing what he has done for many years, both as a doctor and as a congressman. He was diagnosing what ails the American body politic and prescribed the radical treatment that is necessary to heal the patient. The patient can obviously go into denial, preferring to believe instead the lies and false realities of charlatans but deep down the patient always knows that ultimately reality will not enable him to escape the consequences of having done so.
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