Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, September 26, 2009 11:55:51 PM
As contemptible as this is, I’ve got two good reasons to spare you a harangue about it. One: I’ve already written that harangue,
and after the summer coup in Tehran and another year of
cheat-and-retreat on their nuclear program, it’s truer now than it was
then. And two: Thankfully, this old crank’s isolationist denialism is
so fringe on the right that not even mainstreamers who are sympathetic
to his broader agenda, like Glenn Beck, will go near it. It’s almost
not worth bothering about. But suffice it to say, in the unlikely event
that the three-percent rEVOLution ever commands the foreign-policy
agenda of the GOP, I’ll run — not walk — into the Blue Dogs’ arms
A few more choice quotes from Think Progress
I’m not sure what “lie” it is we’re being told about Iran, but then
this is a guy so eager to see American “lies” at work vis-a-vis enemy
powers that he’s been known to accuse the feds preemptively of telling them. Anyway, the point to take away about his Iran shtick is that it’s not an argument about strategy, i.e. “They’re a threat but non-intervention is the best way to stop them.” It’s an argument about facts,
i.e. “There is no threat,” which it has to be because once he admits
that Iran is dangerous his isolationist “solution” becomes impossible
to sell. In that sense he reminds me of opponents of waterboarding,
forced to insist that coercive interrogation never ever works
because once they admit that it does, their absolutist opposition is
politically dead on arrival. Conservatives complain frequently about
Paul’s penchant for blaming America — and here, too, in the blockquote
above, he’s already laying the groundwork to say “we started it” if and
when Iran tries something — but his foreign policy, such as it is,
leaves him with no other choice. The only way isolationism works is if
literally any form of intervention against an enemy is morally wrong
and just cause for disproportionate reprisal. Which is another way of
saying it doesn’t work. Happy viewing.