I have now watched last night's Republican presidential debate. First thing to note, as many of the participants did, the FOX performance was far superior to the atrocious Chris Matthews and MSNBC. Thus it is disappointing that for stupid political reasons the Democrats will not appear on FOX, although FOX is clearly the superior cable news outlet. It is hard to imagine a more professional team than Britt Hume, Chris Wallace, and Wendell Goler.
On substance I'd say that Giuliani had a good night. McCain still is a little too much like your crazy uncle, and every time I see Mitt Romney I find myself waiting for him to say, "Rod, tell us who the next contestant is on The Price Is Right." I also continue to be impressed by Mike Huckabee and Duncan Hunter. On the other hand, Jim Gilmore, Tommy Thompson and Tom Tancredo really have no business being in this race.
Ron Paul is another matter. He is getting beat up over his statement last night that US bombing of Iraq inspired the 9/11 attacks. Giuliani reacted strongly, as Paul seemed to be blaming the US for the 9/11 attacks. There is a problem with the protestation against Paul: he happens to be right, in a certain manner of speaking. If you watch the debate (and FOX has a link off of this news story) Paul is clearly referencing Osama Bin Laden's own statements about 9/11 which point to US intervention in Iraq in the 1990s as justification for terrorist attacks against America. So Paul is factually correct. But he does draw the wrong lesson from this fact. He argues that America should withdraw from the world and thus will be on friendlier terms with rival powers. He indicates that the Islamic terrorists attack us because of what we did in the 1990s, not who we are. Bernard Lewis disputes this notion in today's Wall Street Journal. If we follow Ron Paul's foreign policy, we allow other weaker and less benign nations to set our policy and to define justice for the world. His policy of non-intervention turns a blind eye to injustice and threats to American interests until they are a direct threat to the American mainland. That suggests a complacency toward evil that does not become a great power and an ignorance of the fact that catching evil before it metastasizes is often key to eradicating it (classic case: the appeasement of Hitler only made him more aggressive). The problem with Ron Paul is not that he is "blaming America first," but that he does not understand the nature of evil nor, in what would require another long blog post, the US Constitution.
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