By stubbornly parroting a pro-war line, Giuliani and co are sealing their party’s electoral fate, says alexander cockburn |
 |
Put together Murdoch's Fox News, a mid-May debate between Republican presidential candidates and the state of South Carolina and you have a hotbed of stupidity.
But to the fury of the Republican organisers there was an intrusion of rational thought, in the person of Ron Paul, a US congressman from Texas, classed as a rank outsider in the nomination race.
Texas used to send true individualists to Washington DC. One of the brightest moments of my early years, visiting the nation’s capital, was watching Rep Wright Patman, head of the House Banking Committee, tell the red-faced Chairman of the Federal Reserve that he deserved to be locked up in the penitentiary.
Paul is the last of the breed. As a small-
|
|
 |
 |
|
| Ron Paul votes, sometimes alone among the 535 members of Congress, against war funding |
|
|
government tight-money Republican this gynaecologist-obstetrician (4,000 babies claimed as a career total) regularly votes 'No' on pork barrel projects that would put money into his own district.
But as a Republican in the isolationist, libertarian tradition he also votes 'No', sometimes alone among the 535 members of the US Congress, on war funding, on laws allowing presidents to order arbitrary imprisonment, 'coercive interrogation' and suspension of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.
The throng in Columbia, South Carolina, cheered Giuliani, Romney and others as they roared their support for torture and rule by emergency decree. In the 'war on terror' anything goes. Only Paul told the crowd and the TV cameras that No, torture is wrong and the Constitution is paramount.
Paul was asked if 9-11 changed anything. US foreign policy, he answered, was a "major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attacked us because we've been over there; we've 
|
Dispatches from Alexander Cockburn
