Unfortunately, I also realized that with a wife and three kids, owning a small law firm, sitting on two boards, and volunteering for the pro-life movement, I simply cannot afford to engage in these day long discussions. It is too addicting.

I also think I can be a bit clearer on three issues that seem to upset people. First, as to why I liked Ron Paul so much. Quite simply, I believed him on the issues that matter most to me personally, which was sufficient to overcome my disagreement with him on issues that I didnt care as deeply about.

I believed he would be fiscally conservative.
I believed he would be pro-life.
I believed he would promote states rights (or the people’s rights), especially in areas I care about. (2nd amendment, social issues, school choice).

There was not another candidate in the field that I believed on all of these issues. I believed Romney and Thompson and Giuliani would have been fiscally conservative, and to varying degrees, that they would protect states rights. I believed Huckabee would have been pro-life. I didn’t believe that any of them would have hit all three of these areas. I never had any faith in McCain in any of these areas, to do anything but be a few degrees to the right of Hillary Clinton.

When I voiced the need for radical conservatism, I think I was expressing the fact that it was Ron Paul’s radical convictions (along with his record) that made him so believable. I talked yesterday to another non-freak friend of mine who supported Ron Paul, and his was the same conviction. He didn’t believe many of the republicans on issues important to him. We need to be convinced, and we want a candidate who convinces others of their conservatism, instead of running in the middle.

This dovetails into my second point, which is the call for Red Stater’s to embrace instead of ridicule Ron Paul supporters. I think what some Red Stater’s are missing is that there are many many former Ron Paul supporters who gave their support because they believed Ron Paul to be what the other candidates were claiming to be. These are people who are extremely like minded with most or all of things you care about deeply. Of course in some areas, they may disagree, and they may do so naively or mistakenly in some cases. But, if their core issues are your core issues (which I am convinced they are in some if not many cases), then they should not be shunned.

This dovetails into my final reflection. It seems that most of the rabid response I got was because I was perceived or rather all Ron Paul supporters are perceived as isolationists. As a premise, it is important to note that one of the items not listed as an issue above, is a strong national defense. The absence from the above list is not because a strong national defense is unimportant to me. The reason it did not play a huge role in my evaluation of the candidates is because I believe that every single Republican candidate (including Ron Paul) would have been excellent in that area.

So the difference between the reason the crazy chimps wanted to bite my face off for supporting Ron Paul, and the reasons that I actually supported Ron Paul is a much narrower divide than it appears to be. This is for two reasons. First, as long as national defense is covered to my satisfaction, I am going to be much more concerned with pro-life, fiscal conservatism, 2nd amendment, etc. than I am with the state of the wars we are fighting in other countries. As I said in an earlier post, I could probably go either way on many of the conflicts we have engaged in. Not because Ron Paul is my God either. For one thing, as I get older, I have come to trust my Pope much more, certainly more than my president, and he was against the war in Iraq.

Another reason is that I tend to believe, right or wrong that less spending on foreign wars, would in fact improve our national defense, because we could allocate defense spending towards national defense. I would probably rather see us spend billions or even trillions on an impenetrable missile defense shield than spending an equal amount of resources re-building Iraq. In some ways, this also ties into the paragraph above and reliance on my Pope. As many of you know, the new and improved Iraq has resulted in the persecution and ousting of millions of Iraqi Christians, because as bad as Sadaam was, he tended to leave the Christians alone. These were some of the oldest Christian communities in the world. This persecution got almost no media attention because the Republicans didn’t want bad news from the war, and the Democrats don’t really care about the persecution of Christians. So I did become jaded about this war, I did begin to believe that the new boss will likely be the same as the old boss and for a myriad of complicated reasons that had little to do with blind support of Ron Paul, I did turn against the reasons for this war.

I never supported a timetable for withdraw, and I did not support Ron Paul’s idea to just end the war on a dime. I didn’t believe Ron Paul would actually accomplish an immediate and total withdraw, however, even if Ron Paul could have ended the war on a dime, the fear of that happening did not outweigh my big three issue listed above, because I still believed Ron Paul would be strong on national defense, and I was less concerned with civil war in Iraq than I was those issues.

I always hear republicans talking about throwing pro-lifers under the bus, in order to get more votes. As my number 1 issue, my party loses my loyalty by that suggestion. My belief is that this argument is a fake argument from those who want to be pro-abortion anyway. The amount of pro-choicer’s out there who hold a deep conviction on the issue is smaller than the pro-lifers who hold deep convictions. The number of deeply convicted pro-choicer’s who would ever vote Republican is next to nothing (IMHO). However, the numbers of people who are for a strong national defense, but that are against engaging pre-emptive wars (after the Iraq experience) is substantial. I think Ron Paul proved that a good chuck of those people will in fact vote republican.

I am not suggesting the grand compromise that creates consensus between all Ron Paul Republicans and conservative republicans who abhor Ron Paul. However, there is another group of republicans out there who nominated John McCain as the Republican candidate for president. If the Ron Paul conservatives and the non Ron Paul conservatives can agree to disagree cordially on a few positions, we may overcome the John McCain republicans in the primaries to come. The gap is not as big as it is perceived to be.

PS: If you hate this post, please know that calling me a “tool” just makes me feel sorry for you.

He talked about blowback, which is just as bad.

If instead he said it was unwise, a bad risk–to bet on democracy in the ME, his opposition would not have aided and abetted the loony left

But he has a lot of good things to say. People cant complain about lack of principles and complain about Ron. Right or wrong, he is highly principled and really puts the Consitution first.

There is a lot of groupthink among conservative sites. sometimes. An echo chamber. I live in boston and see Dems do it all the time and it bugs me when Repubicans do it. I like posts that mix it up, challenge convention and add something new as opposed to – Reagan is awesome, Fred is awesome, Freedom rules, socialism is evil. Yeah, we get it. Talk about preachingto the choir.

I also like Pat Buchanan. He gets beat up so much for no towing the Republican Party platform. But so much of what he says is prescient. His Death of the West preceded Steyn’s America Alone, but covered the same topic, yet he gets no credit. He was often right about his criticism of Iraq war and empire, but did so in a patritoic manner. Yet, he was crucified. His 1992 convention “culture war” speech was derided by the MSM and establishment Republicans, but again he was proven 100% right. He was fighting the culture war when Democrats were immersed in it and most Republicans had no idea it was going on.

My belief is that it is not as difficult as we would have it to bridge that divide. First I think that the rhetoric creates some of this divide. IMHO most RP supporters are not isolationists and most other conservatives are not warmongers. I think We argue the strawmen at the extremes and tick each other off. Unfortunately, I have made myself a bit of strawman for this post. So be it. It wasn’t the most articulate initial post.

But, we are not likely to be in the middle of this war in 4 years. Sure there may be others, but there is a good chance that we will be in peactime in 4 years, and a united right might be able to avoid dealing with the nuances of just war.

BTW to your later post, I do not and have never support a “timetable” for withdraw.

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