Right-Wing Consensus Won’t Let You Forget: Rand Paul Might Not Be as Warry as You’d Like!

Readers of Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post, be
ready for a lot of repetition of this point as the 2016
election season dawns: Hey Republicans! Even Hillary is
more ready to
start a war than this Rand Paul guy! Don’t vote for
him, because we all know that getting into more wars is what
America needs to stay strong, or “protect our interests” or
something, we’ll figure it out!

Excerpts:

[Rand Paul] has
gone far to the left of Clinton and even Obama on a number
of issues. He advocated in a detailed budget proposal eliminating
all foreign aid, including aid to Israel. He claimed that we had no
dog in the fight in Iraq and that any action there would be helping
terrorists. (Later he said he’d favor aid to Iraq, but it’s not
clear why we should if he believed we had no interest in Iraq. By
the way, his no-foreign-aid pledge would have made this
impossible.) He wanted to go much further than the Obama team in
dismantling the National Security Agency surveillance program and
compared the traitor Edward Snowden to Martin Luther King Jr. He
opposes droning American jihadists overseas unless there is an
imminent threat.

There is a reason that left-wing MSNBC commentators fawn over
Paul on foreign policy. He offers a philosophy more in tune with
their own philosophy than even Obama. He is now getting a taste of
the criticism he will face not only from hawkish opponents and
pundits, but also from ordinary voters and grass-roots activists in
early primary states. 

Hillary expounds on
how much tougher she is than Obama, as related in
New York Times today.

While I like to believe in our hoary self-congratulatory
myth that we as American people are a pacific and kindly folk,
content to lie low until struck, I think history shows that when
the federal government decides it really wants war, it’s pretty
good at convincing the rest of us to go along, at least long enough
to get started, and then what? Cut and run??
I wrote last year on the
frequent irrelevance of public opinion to the start of
wars.

At least a Reason-Rupe Poll found 58 percent
not yearning for war in the Ukraine on our part in April. But
remember it took well over a year for half of those polled by
Gallup to turn
on the Iraq War.

But I’d like to believe that voters don’t need their
candidates nationally to be fully supportive of our complicated and
deep financing of bloody chaos in Israel/Gaza or waging war to try
to stanch the problems we generated last time we waged war in Iraq.
But Jennifer Rubin may understand her audience all too well.

Previous blogging from
April of this year and
March of last year on Rand Paul’s potential problems
selling his foreign policy to the GOP base, to America, and even to
libertarians if he slips too far from Ron Paul’s impassioned
non-interventionism.