Ron Paul’s supporters have often complained, sometimes with justification, that their candidate has been ignored by the media.
That certainly isn’t the case anymore; he’s made the Editorial Page of the Washington Post:
Though his campaign may owe its energy to 21st-century technology, Ron Paul is no innovator. To all the difficult questions of a complicated, interdependent world, he offers pretty much the same prescription that such right-wing American isolationists as Patrick J. Buchanan have offered in the past: The nation must disengage from international affairs so as to concentrate on the real enemies at home. To be sure, Mr. Paul, who would end the war on drugs, does not seem to want a Buchanan-style culture war. His demonology, inspired by idiosyncratic economic theories, centers on the Federal Reserve Board, as well as “elites” who might be plotting something he calls “the NAFTA superhighway” across Texas. Mr. Paul proposes a “golden rule” for foreign policy — treat other countries as we would have them treat us. But as Mr. Russert forced him to admit, this bromide offers no help in such real-world scenarios as a North Korean invasion of South Korea, a democratic country with which we trade $72 billion worth of goods each year. Mr. Paul implied that it would be none of our business.
Mr. Paul goes so far as to express understanding of Osama bin Laden’s antipathy toward U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, which, Mr. Paul says, created the “incentive” for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “It’s sort of like if you step in a snake pit and you get bit,” he told Mr. Russert. “Who caused the trouble?” During the Cold War, the late Jeane Kirkpatrick chided Democrats for “blaming America first” in foreign policy. That may or may not have been apt. But in 2008, there is one candidate to whom her words definitely apply: Republican Ron Paul.
I’ve always had a problem with Paul’s foreign policy positions, so I’ve got to say that the Post has it mostly right on this one.
