Some of my friends have been speculating whether Ron Paul (R-TX) could win the 2012 election.
Considering the disaster the Democrats are fielding, Mickey Mouse could win the election.
And yes, even a foreign-policy kook like Ron Paul could conceivably win, if he got the Republican nomination.
Paul said today (Fox News Sunday) that, if he did not get the Republican nomination, he has no intention of running as an independent, and doesn't want to.
He also said that he believes that imposing heavy sanctions against Iran, would be effective in stopping them from getting nuclear weapons. And he said that almost in the same breath as his statement that if we look at what happened in Iraq, we imposed heavy sanctions against them, people starved and a few little kids died, and it pushed them into war.
When I hear Ron Paul talk about foreign affairs, sometimes I wonder if the man is completely sane.
If Ron Paul is elected President, within his four-year term we would see an attack by Iran against Israel, either with nuclear weapons or with conventional weapons backed by the credible nuclear threat. And that war has a good chance of spreading into the nuclear Armageddon that the world has so far been able to avoid despite all the nuclear proliferation that has taken place.
Ron Paul's unquestioned integrity and admirable fealty to the Constitution, will do us litte good once his foreign-policy naivety produces the results it must. He will quickly become the United States' version of Neville Chamberlain... with the crucial difference that Nazi Germany didn't have nukes, and still intended to trade with the people it had conquered once they won that war.
Fortunately, the blinders-on Ron Paul kooks, while voluble, are very few in number - barely enough to win straw polls of a few thousand people when vigorously regimented and shuttled from place to place. Once the main drive for the election gets under way, they will be drowned out as their scarce numbers always are, and Paul will be once again relegated to the fringe of conservatism. It's kind of a shame, really - his loyalty to the Constitution, and integrity to his own ideals, is sorely missed by this country. But his strange naivety in foreign affairs, and blinders-on refusal to examine the long history of Eurasia, completely trumps his many good points, and would make him a disaster as President.
