Curious. You say your intent is to ridicule and not to engage. You then mix your nasty invective with postings & rebuttals that you obviously want taken seriously. You then retreat to ad hominem polemics.

Brilliant, ain’t it? But where was I nasty?

It’s the ebb and flow of the comment stream. The post itself was just to get under your skin (it worked, didn’t it?). A few understood, and played along. Others needed to grow a sense of humor.

When the conversation became more serious, I made some serious replies, this is true. But do you notice the dates? After a dozen or so posts, posts naturally get pulled “off-topic” from their original intent, in the comments section. After a while, you forget the original intent. I’m not going to waste my time answering every single Paulistinian that comes waltzing in here, demanding my attention, 4 months too late.

You quote extensively from an FDR fireside chat about Nazis.

I did? Where. My memory goes blank, after 3 months, and 100 posts later. Refresh me, please.

Funny thing is, this sort of thuggish mockery was a classic Nazi propaganda tactic.

Some of you Ronulans seem to know quite a bit about Nazi tactics, don’t'cha?

What is your next cartoon going to be – an unshaven Ron Paul with a big hooked nose leering at young girls?

Sorry. Unless there’s some substance to your suggestion, I’ll pass on that one.

Here at FA, our ridicule is grounded in reality.

You quote extensively from an FDR fireside chat about Nazis. Funny thing is, this sort of thuggish mockery was a classic Nazi propaganda tactic. What is your next cartoon going to be – an unshaven Ron Paul with a big hooked nose leering at young girls?

Grow a sense of humor; and please….do try and keep up, will you?

Just so we’re clear; I’ve never supported the left. Never in my life. I used to refer to myself as a Republican before I became apathetic and just quit caring. In recent years I have discovered that I am more in the middle on the issues. When I learned of libertarianism, I was amazed at how closely their stance on the issues matched my own. And I still can’t figure out why libertarians are referred to as nutty. It really baffles the mind. But I guess that one rejects and despises what one doesn’t understand.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had a lot of the same views as Ron Paul, yet I see no one calling THEM “kooks”. In all actuality, their set of beliefs are what sparked and inspired the Republican party.

If being a blood-thirsty, war-hungry, holier-than-thou, “my country is better than your country”, mindless sheep is the earmark of a “true patriot”….well, I’m quite happy being labeled insane. So…thanks for the compliment.

This country is nowhere near as great as everyone thinks, and you damn yourself to a life of imprisonment if you think anyone else cares about you and me. WAKE UP AMERICA.

I now know what many of the “pumped up” “passionate” Ron Paul supporters remind me of: Amway salesmen. I had a roommate who fell into this pyramid scheme, and it was weird. I can just picture a roomful of Ronulans at a RP infomercial clapping their hands as if they were at a religious revival or dancing on top of their chairs as if it were a Tony Robbins seminar.

There really is something “cult-like” in the following of RP.

Ever wondered why on earth the CFR/Bilderbergers and the Bush/Clinton
dynasties want to betray
their country and create a ‘North American Union’?

Wonder no more.

http://www.ron-paul-business-directory.com/cfr-nau.html

RP08 !

Our intervention in foreign affairs has done nothing to increase the oil supply, in fact it has had the exact opposite effect, and decreased the global supply, which has lead to the price of a bbl of crude more than TRIPLING!

I “blame” us, only insofar as we were unable to secure the country from saboteurs in the form of al-Qaeda and other foreign elements and former Saddam loyalists and insurgents.

Removal of Saddam, ultimately, will have been a good thing for the world.

AS far as this “War” goes, I do not give a damn about Iraqis. I could not care less if they all kill themselves,

Maybe you should read this.

Nevertheless, altruism aside, you really need to look at the big picture, here. “Not caring” about the state that we should leave Iraq in, that we should leave behind us in our wake, a stable government that can defend itself, how would that make us safer in the world? What does that do to America’s credibility? To our allies, who live in Iraq? Our allies in the Middle East, who joined us in fighting the war on Islamic terror?

Self-interest should always be our number one reasoning behind implementing our military forces. But sometimes, that also means caring for those in other parts of the world. Sometimes you do things because it’s the right thing to do. And that’s in our self-interest, too.

all I care about is that they keep that oil pumping.

As an aside, due to recent success with the surge, so far it looks like Iraq may be headed for an Economic”>http://www.rebuild-iraq-expo.com/newsdetails05.asp?id=2987“>Economic Growth of more than 6% this year, predicted by the International Monetary Fund. That should be good news.

If all you care about is the price of oil, I’m sure we could have gotten sweet oil contracts from Saddam, too, like certain other countries….

Yet America was sooooo greedy, we decided to invade Iraq to steal their oil, supposedly.

Bush has proven that its far cheaper to just buy the oil rather than fight incredibly expensive wars for it.

Waitaminute….are you one of those who does actually believe it was always all about the oil?

We knew before the war, that it would be far cheaper to get oil by doing business with Saddam, than to overthrow his regime. Yet we didn’t. Now why do you suppose that was?

The House of Saud seems pretty capable of keeping its oil wells pumping and those pipelines flowing. Ol’ Saddam wasn’t the best oilman in the business, but he was doing a sight better than they are doing in Iraq now.

Our intervention in foreign affairs has done nothing to increase the oil supply, in fact it has had the exact opposite effect, and decreased the global supply, which has lead to the price of a bbl of crude more than TRIPLING! Not to mention that our foreign adventurism has provided fertile ground for commies like Hugo Chavez and Islmofascists like Ahmadinejad to play the devil’s advocate and do their own little saber rattling, which spooks the markets so traders are afraid to short sell oil futures and instead start speculating on a supply interruption which drives the price up through the roof.

With all this money to made made in the commodities market, why invest in business? The fast money has been in futures, so in attempt to spur the economy, the fed keeps on dumping money into the system, but the traders keep on getting that money and playing the futures market with it, which is just driving prices further. Sure some of it trickles into the stock market, and there is economic growth, but the money supply is increasing faster than our economy is growing so the value of our money goes down.

I wish I could say that this trend is coming to an end and that the US dollar is now under valued, but that’s not the case. The dollar is still overvalued and there is still a lot of money to be made by getting rid of your dollars and buying just about any other currency under the sun.

Forget for a moment that Bush is a Republican, and imagine if he were a Democrat what sort of reaction you would have to the Bush presidency. We elected him as a Republican, and he’s been acting like a democrat ever since.

As I recall, we elected Bush to get us out of Socialist Security, but instead we get this huge prescription drug entitlement program. We had confidence that Bush would not resort to nasty ol’ Keynesian Economics, and would instead rely strickily on Laffer, but NO! When we were threatened with recession, Bush uses both Laffer and Keynes creating all these other big stupid government garbage.

We hoped that Bush would get rid of the Department of Education, but instead we get No Child Left Behind, which like every other stupid government bureaucracy has been an outstanding failure. After 9/11, certainly a good Republican would not have fallen back to a centralized Bureaucracy for Homeland Security, but Bush creates a whole New Department Named the Department of Homeland Security, just making a bigger centralized mess of everything!

I’m sorry fella’s but I want to send a President to the white house that I can trust to do his best to kill this beast that has become the Federal Government, and the only Republican that I hear talking about killing the beast is Ron Paul. All of the rest are Big Government guys, and even if they had the possibility of winning against Hillary, which they don’t, but if they did all we could trust them to do is give us a slightly less socialist government than Hillary would.

AS far as this “War” goes, I do not give a damn about Iraqis. I could not care less if they all kill themselves, all I care about is that they keep that oil pumping. Bush has proven that its far cheaper to just buy the oil rather than fight incredibly expensive wars for it. There is no threat in all of the middle East that the US Navy cannot take care of from the safety of the Ocean, or that our stealth fleet cannot destroy in 24 hours.

Now about your argument for us Protecting Saudi… We do not need to protect Saudi, we sell expensive ass weapons so they can protect themselves. Even still we do not get a lot of our oil from Saudi, we make most of our own oil that we consume, then Canada, Mexico and Venezuela supply most of the rest, so yeah if for some reason Saudi quit pumping it would make oil prices sky rocket, but it would not cause any sort of major supply disruption, and would not force us into a recession.

The US needed the French Navy during the Revolution because we did not have one back then, but we have the Worlds greatest Navy now which is plenty capable of keeping the trade routes of the World open for business. Putting boots on the ground is hardly ever needed.

This is where the mindless Paulbots get lost “rational self interest”

For example?

If US intel indicates that a foreign nation is setting up nuclear missiles…is it in America’s interest to act? If not, then the Cuban Missile Crisis was not worth risking war, and if so, then it’s time to start bombing Iran-Paulbots lead the way. btw, that Cuban missile crisis…turned out the US had no intel at all that nukes had been mounted on the missiles in question, but 40yrs later…turned out between 60-90 had already been mounted on missiles hidden in the jungle, and the Soviet general (retired) said he had every intention of launching if he saw a single site bombed or an invasion threatened.

So how about if our vital resources are threatened? Should the US have acted to protect Saudi from Iraq in 1990 as oil is undoubtedly a vital American resource for which there is no alternative we can switch to in less time than it takes to cast the nation into depression? If YES we should have protected Saudi, then you just invited the 911 attacks, and if NO (as Ron Paul as already said), then you’d better be able to flip the nation to a new fuel source overnight (literally), or there will be no food planted (need tractors, etc), no food harvested (need big gas-guzzlin harvestors), no food processed (need oil to make the machines that clean, cook, can, or wrap in oil-based plastic), or delivered (as trucks, trains, and ships need oil). Cut off that supply, and the US loses oil in 30-60 days. No oil=no food in another 30 days. Nice strategy. Perhaps forming and joining an intl coalition is the trick-err, wait, no, that’s exactly what non-intervention is as described in earlier Paulbot posts.

Face it, non-interventionism doesn’t work. We need the resources of the rest of the world, and we need to trade for them. As long as we’re trading w the rest of the world, we’re fighting to defend global resources and to build allies in case we need to defend global resources.

Hiding between oceans was never a viable policy. If it were, the US wouldn’t have needed the French Navy to end the revolution.

Boy Howdy, I looked at that last post and all I could read was blah, blah, blah, blah blah….blah, blah.

Aaah…you really should read it. You probably did…but then realized Scott was making too good a point.

It’s well-worth the read.

Scott points out what I already knew about wikipedia, so I’m ashamed I used it in this post.

I agree with Scott when he typed:

Military non-interventionism IS a form of isolationism

Scott’s other points echo this comment from The Jump Blog, which I had linked and quoted in my Isolationist post:

So, we shouldn’t entangle ourselves in foreign affairs…except of course to trade with them. And travel to them. And have diplomatic relations with them. Which of course would lead to things like trade treaties. Which lead to real treaties. Which lead to military obligations and charges of American Imperialism and makes a target of our trade partners. Which would put us right back where we are. If, that is, the terrorists didn’t just decide to start knocking us off back here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Which of course they would.

We kicked their ass, let them put themselves back together. The US military is a sledgehammer. Its purpose is to destroy, not to police the world or to build nations.

Historically, that’s not true. Our military has always found itself in the roll of “nation-building/occupation”.

Our mistake in Afghanistan was leaving a vacuum there after the Soviets were defeated, allowing the Taliban to come build the schools that would teach and promote their brand of Islamic interpretation; and having taken over the country, instituted their fundamentalist approach to governance.

I reprint here a quote from Max Boot which I used in a previous post (in which you also commented…yet maybe you also skimmed what it said as “blah, blah, blah”; so here it is again for your edification):

Soldiers follow orders, and presidents have often found it convenient or necessary to order the armed services to perform functions far removed from conventional warfare. Throughout U.S. history, marines at home and abroad have found themselves providing disaster relief, quelling riots, even guarding mail trains. Soldiers also have often acted as colonial administrators- in the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Veracruz, to say nothing of post-World War II Germany and Japan or the post-Civil War South.

In fact occupation duty is generally necessary after a big war in order to impose the victor’s will on the vanquished. If ground forces win a battle and go home, as the Powell Doctrine advocates and as actually happened in the Gulf War, the fruits of victory are likely to wither on the vine. Only boots on the ground can guarantee a lasting peace.

More from johnnyB:

You folks just don’t seem to get it, so I will not bother wasting my time,

You’ve been doing a lot of that here….wasting time not “getting it”, because you don’t want to “get it”. You are just interested in pushing RP as THE candidate. After all, I think I read somewhere, a comment you left regarding a thousand dollar donation to the RP campaign, and that “it felt good”.

You are emotionally and financially invested and bogged down in RPist ideology. You’re no longer interested in truth-seeking. Just agenda-driven.

So, since you won’t bother “wasting your time here anymore”, are you throwing in the towel because you’ve ran out of arguments to put forth?

Ron Paul is the last chance for the republic, and when he fails to get the nomination, I am going to sit back and laugh while the democrats beat the crap out of the Republicans in yet another election, then I’m going to cry whn the democrats turn this country into a commie hell hole.

Yep, you retards are doing a real bang up job here at flopping aces, take my advice and kill yourselves.

Sounds like reality of having thrown a thousand dollars down the toilet is beginning to sink in.

Don’t worry. It’s only money. The best you can do for yourself, is learn from your mistakes and not buy into the hype of an inconsequential candidate selling snake oil politics, in the future.