NUTBAG PROVES IT ONCE AGAIN – AT 8:48 A.M. ET:  Ron Paul, the "Republican" (not really) congressman from Texas, and father of newly elected senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, demonstrates once again why we have a right to worry about issues of sanity in some elected officials.  From John Hinderaker at Power Line:

Attentive readers may have noticed that I am no admirer of Ron Paul. In fact, I once dubbed him the Pee-Wee Herman of the Republican Party. Paul illustrates, in my view, the dark side of libertarianism. The Achilles heel of Paul's brand of libertarianism is foreign policy. You could describe him as an isolationist, but I think he is worse than that: during the Bush administration, his antiwar rhetoric took on a vicious quality.

Today Paul showed once again why he is outside of the conservative mainstream. The House of Representatives voted 402-1 to congratulate Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo on her Nobel peace prize. The one congressman who voted no was Ron Paul.

Was the vote purely symbolic? Of course; which makes Paul's no vote even worse. For an American politician not to favor freedom and democracy abroad, even in principle, is simply perverse.

COMMENT:  It certainly is.  Ron Paul is a true RINO (Republican in name only).  While the term is normally applied to Republicans who tilt too far to the left, in Paul's case the tilt is too far to the nutbag regions of the delusional right.

Because of seniority, Paul will chair a subcommittee in the new House dealing with the Federal Reserve, whose existence he opposes.  But Paul's potential for damage lies mostly in foreign policy, where he has been an extreme isolationst, and has defended terrorism against the United States, claiming it's our fault.  There is an old notion in political science that the extreme left and the extreme right meet at some point, and Paul's foreign-policy positions are uncomfortably close to those we find on the Marxist left.

And all that makes us wonder about the true views of his son, just elected to the Senate from Kentucky.  Under pressure, Rand Paul made some responsible noises on foreign policy during his campaign, but I have the gut feeling that he's a chip off the old blockhead.  There is still an isolationist fringe in the Republican Party that apparently learned nothing from the isolationist disaster of the 1930s.  I'm afraid we'll be hearing from this crowd again.  There may not be enough straitjackets to go around.

December 10, 2010