Paul For President

I watched the Republican Presidential debate last night and V for Vendetta earlier this evening. Though the pairing was not planned (the movie just happened to make it to the top of my Netflix queue a few days ago), it was apt.

The most poignant part of the debate, I thought, was the happy defense by most of the candidates of torture. Only John McCain and Ron Paul finished their answers still looking human to me.

Earlier in the debate, Paul pointed out that the 9/11 attacks were largely a reaction to the military policy that the United States had followed in the Middle East for the previous several years, especially the bombing of Iraq. Rudy Giuliani responded, surely lyingly, that he had never heard anyone say such a thing and called on Paul to take back what he had said. Paul did not back down.

FOX News' post debate coverage included a text-messaging poll which asked viewers to vote for the candidate they thought won the debate. Paul finished second - behind Mitt Romney and ahead of Guiliani - in the poll, though he was in first place through much of the polling period. Most of FOX's commentators and guests condemned Paul's telling of the truth. Some demanded that he not be allowed in future debates. They dismissed the text-message poll as irrelevant, saying that it didn't really measure anything significant. (FOX's own Sean Hannity was among the polls detractors, though he didn't explain why FOX would sponsor such a silly poll and feature it so prominently as a part of their post debate coverage.)

For more on the reactions to Ron Paul, see:

Plenty of reasonable people can disagree about foreign policy. What's really strange is when one reasonable position is completely and forcibly excluded from the public debate.
Such was the case after 9-11. Every close observer of the events of those days knows full well that these crimes were acts of revenge for US policy in the Muslim world. The CIA and the 911 Commission said as much, the terrorists themselves proclaimed it, and Osama underscored the point by naming three issues in particular: US troops in Saudi Arabia, US sanctions against Iraq, and US funding of Israeli expansionism.

From Lew Rockwell's "Ron Paul Said It"

It’s a good thing for him that Russell Kirk didn’t have to live to see the deranged caricature of itself that American conservatism has now become. Kirk, one of the key architects of that movement, spent the last years of his life opposing every military adventure of the U.S. government. The average conservative today, on the other hand, who knows only what the government and its neocon shills tell him, would be at an utter loss to account for that.

From Thomas E. Woods, Jr.'s "Ron Paul Violated the Rules"

What Ron Paul’s participation in the 2008 presidential race is accomplishing is this: It is making people such as Rudy Giuliani think about things they’ve never thought about before and causing them to view the U.S. government and its long-time paradigm of empire and interventionism in an entirely different way. It’s also why he is engendering considerable discomfort among people who have long believed that the federal government is a deity whose foreign policies are beyond reproach. Don’t be surprised to hear more calls for suppressing Paul’s participation in future debates, even while the critics continue to wax eloquent about how U.S. soldiers are killing and dying in Iraq for the sake of “democracy.”

From Jacob G. Hornberger's "Giuliani’s Attack on Ron Paul Falls Flat"

V for Vendetta mirrors many of the themes that were discussed in the debate and evoked by its coverage. Of course, real world villains and heroes mostly seem pretty plain when compared to their cinematic counterparts. Maybe, if Ron Paul would wear a Guy Fawkes mask to the next debate....