Ron Paul Speech After Iowa Results

Lance,

Ron Paul is an idealist. Nothing wrong with idealism, unless you confuse it with reality. It's the shade of difference between "I always think I'm right" (everyone does) and "I think I'm always right" (which only fools do).

When Paul is hit with a between the eyes reduction to absurdity question, he forges right ahead without batting an eye.

Personally, I lean libertarian, so he especially annoys me.

Take his claim that as PRESIDENT he would reduce spending by a trillion dollars. Exactly how does he propose to do so, especially since the constitution gives the budget to the congress.

Or perhaps his claims that a suicide terrorist mindset can be disuaded by the illogic of mutually assured destruction. You can't stop someone who WANTS to die by waiting for him to realize he's going to die. THAT'S THE IDEA.

Again, I lean libertarian, but trying to forge an independent position will never get you true libertarianism, because if you gave libertarians all the power they'd figure SOMETHING ELSE to spend the money on, because the problem is human nature, not which party you belong to.

So, enter the constitution. The POINT of the constitution is that human nature is flawed and will stumble into totalitarianism if you let it. The Senate would become an aristocracy. The Presidency would become a monarchy. The Supreme Court would become an oligarchy. The House would become anarchy. All the framers did was to set up competition so that the anarchists and oligarchs would keep the aristocrats and monarchs in check.

Although we've sidestepped this in the creation of political parties (effectively negating the checks and balances of the separation of powers), the answer is also absurdly simple:

You don't create a new party that will have the same fallible human pitfalls. Instead, you use the two parties to check and balance each other in the way the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches were originally designed to do. In other words, instead of seeking some miraculous 35% libertarian plurality to appear out of nowhere, all you really need is 3-5% of the electorate committed to splitting their congressional and presidential votes between the two parties so that we NEVER have all Republicans or all Democrats in control. The POINT of the constitution was to keep ANY group in check by the other groups. If Paul were a true constitutionalist he'd get that. He doesn't.

Instead he lives in a fantasy world in which he introduces 620 bills and only has 1 bill pass (something innocuous about approving the sale of a building).

He also lives in a fantasy world that HIS interpretation is flawless and that both parties are simultaneously wrong all the time. Uh, no. They are SUPPOSED to be wrong (humans are), but they are supposed to be wrong IN DIFFERENT THINGS. Hence, Democrats can control Republican obsessions and Republicans can control Democrat obsessions.

All Paul wants is his own obsessions, and he refuses to acknowledge that there can be any problem to them.

One of the things that people have attacked Gingrich over is that he points out that both parties err. Well, of course they do. Only a partisan hack thinks his party can't be flawed. Unfortunately for him, the nomination process is all about partisan hackery.

But even that is better than quackery.

I agree with 99% of the points Paul makes. I also disagree with 99% of the conclusions he derives from those points. It's really a sad caricature of idealism.

Divided government is what the framers of the constitution wanted.

Parties have created voting blocks in which divided government temporarily breaks down if you put one party in control of everything.

Again, the solution is to pit the PARTIES against each other by splitting your vote. Then we would return to the original framework in which the BRANCHES are pitted against each other.

Tim