The Ron Paul Factor

In the famous Robert Bolt play “A Man for all Seasons” there’s an interesting quote by Sir Thomas More. It is a reply to what may be described as William Roper’s “Dirty Harry” inclinations of “cutting down every law to get at the Devil.” More rebukes the idea with the rejoinder, “and when the last law is down and the Devil turns round on you where would you hide?”

The implication is clear: the Law exists to benefit us all, even as it may sometimes benefit those forces of evil among us. (think: waterboarding) It’s a tempting argument, but one that fails the practical test of a higher calling. The ordained authority of law and government exists to punish evil and to protect the innocent. Sometimes this power must be wielded outside the normal channels of our constitutions and laws in order to serve the higher ideals of our sense of justice. Serving the law at the expense of justice may seem honorable in the twisted logic of Liberals in their pursuit of legalistic perfectionism, but it’s not serviceable for the Rights of the helpless victims who become victimized twice by an unfeeling and uncaring judicial system that allows “the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

U.S. Congressman Ron Paul of Texas is a Republican candidate for president. Although his support remains a flat line of single digits in the polls, his followers are very committed and persistent in their devotion. His campaign, though unlikely to win the nomination, is making ideological waves in the national debate.

Paul has received incredible contributions amassing as much as $6 million in one day, and collecting $18 million in three months. He is a past candidate for president on the Libertarian ticket and generally holds to a firm non-interventionist policy for both domestic and foreign concerns.

Paul likes to talk about the Constitution and rightly describes our drift away from the principles of our Founding Fathers. He’s for abolishing the IRS, the Dept. of Education, the War on Drugs, foreign aid to Israel, the Federal Reserve and a host of other programs on the federal level. He’s opposed to the war in Iraq and would bring troops home immediately despite the conditions and consequences for that region. He’s also interested in disengaging ourselves from almost every trade deal, NAFTA, GATT, etc. and would bring troops home from bases all over the globe including Korea and Europe too.

I find a lot of philosophical agreement with Paul on a variety of these and other issues. He’s pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, pro-Sound Currency and pro-active on reforming Social Security and other Entitlement programs. But, there’s an important difference in academic purity and real-world pragmatism.

In the world of purists like Paul, we can have a federal government as small and limited as the pre-Civil War days. By the way, Paul is no Lincoln fan. He would rather have the Idealistic Purity of States Rights over Unionism in all of the chaos that would result, rather than the type of united government Lincoln left us with. Remember, Lincoln had to suspend parts of the Constitution (habeas corpus) in order to save it. Alas, Sir Thomas More would not be a fan of Lincoln either.

Paul is proud to have voted against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, but he fails to acknowledge the consequences of doing nothing in the face of Islamic Fascism and rogue states like that of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. If we hadn’t gone to war with Iraq we would have surrendered to defeat in terms of the first Gulf War and in terms of allowing Saddam to shoot down our planes in the No Fly Zone. History teaches us that appeasement doesn’t work, it only encourages evil from the likes of tyrants such as Saddam. And, as we now know, it was weakness- i.e. Clinton’s retreat from Mogadishu- that inspired Osama bin Laden to attack us on 9/11/2001. Has anyone noticed? There hasn’t been a similar attack on our shores in the six years since then. I think President Bush and his policies deserve at least some of the credit. Don’t you?

Paul reminds me of another presidential candidate- Michael Dukakis. In one of the 1988 debates Dukakis was asked if he would support Capital Punishment in the instance where someone raped and murdered his wife. Without flinching, and reflecting the dogmatic rigidity of Sir Thomas More, Dukakis coldly stated his unwavering opposition to the Death Penalty in all cases. Such idealistic convictions may win high praise in the court of liberal, academic Puritanism, but it’s brutally disastrous in the court of presidential politics!

Ron Paul is a great debater and a wonderful Constitutional scholar worthy of much serious consideration, but his devotion to the “letter of the law” in the face of real world threats like Islamo-fascism makes him unfit to be Commander-in-chief. (send comments to WFC83197@aol.com, or POB 114, Jacksboro, TN 37757)