Are you old enough to remember the false promises and siren song of John Anderson in 1980? I am. They said he was the new hope and that young people would flock to him…. They didn’t.

Perhaps you are old enough to remember Ross Perot. Maybe you even voted for him. And yet all Ross Perot did for the U.S. is allow Slick Willy and his shrew wife to win the Presidency not once, BUT TWICE!

Now, little ole Ron Paul, A LIBERTARIAN, comes along and all you utopians jump on the bandwagon and would drive it over the cliff one more time.

I don’t care how many generations of your family were Republicans. I had a Grandmother who voted for Franklin Roosevelt so many times before she saw the light. She learned from her mistakes and later embraced Reagan.

Something you apparently are unable to do.

Seems you’ll have to learn the hard way.”

So a guy who went to Columbia (that noted bastion of conservativism) and studied under Carter’s NSA, and then…went to work for the E.P.A. (snicker) wants to tell me what a Republican is? I’m younger then you, but I voted for Bush, both times…the first time I liked what he said about Social Security, tax cuts, etc. I don’t want to be burdened with the Boomer’s retirement, or worry about the vitality of SS (privatizing it wholly would be better).

The second time around I had more misgivings but I held my nose and voted for him over Kerry in the interest of ‘party unity’ and the belief that the Democrats would be worse. Now we’ve got a Democratic Congress, and an absolute waste of a president with no domestic agenda except to ‘let it ride’ on budget deficits. So the GOP deserves the Ron Paul phenomonon. I don’t feel sorry for them at all. Paul won’t win the nomination but he will expose weaknesses in the (eventual) nominee…if that leads to a Democrat in the White House so be it, maybe they will appreciate the need for fiscal discipline next time around.

Some more history for you: Reagan ran against Ford in 1976 which severely weakened him in the General Election, the result was the election of Jimmy Carter (one of your heros presumably), and bad economic policies. Reagan ran again and was better appreciated by the Republican party and the American people.

“President Bush has presided over the largest
overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal
spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after
excluding spending on defense and homeland
security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president
in 30 years.”

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa543.pdf

Republican, conservative? Maybe to an EPAer.

Are you old enough to remember the false promises and siren song of John Anderson in 1980? I am. They said he was the new hope and that young people would flock to him…. They didn’t.

Perhaps you are old enough to remember Ross Perot. Maybe you even voted for him. And yet all Ross Perot did for the U.S. is allow Slick Willy and his shrew wife to win the Presidency not once, BUT TWICE!

Now, little ole Ron Paul, A LIBERTARIAN, comes along and all you utopians jump on the bandwagon and would drive it over the cliff one more time.

I don’t care how many generations of your family were Republicans. I had a Grandmother who voted for Franklin Roosevelt so many times before she saw the light. She learned from her mistakes and later embraced Reagan.

Something you apparently are unable to do.

Seems you’ll have to learn the hard way.

P.S. Again, how old are you?

Ron Paul is Fool’s Gold!

You people wouldn’t know a “real” conservative if one bit you on the ass.”

I like your appeal to authority and your hasty generalization fallacies, and now you’ve added ad hominenm (Ron Paul is Fool’s Gold) to it, good let’s see how many more logical fallacies you can rack up. For the Record I am a 5th Generation Republican, back when being a Republican actually stood for something instead of budget deficits and Wilsonian foreign policy…but hey whatever you gotta tell yourself.

Ronald Reagan is pure 24 karat gold!

Ron Paul is Fool’s Gold!

You people wouldn’t know a “real” conservative if one bit you on the ass.

Yeah that story made you famous…not.

Famous? If I wanted to be famous don’t you think I would be putting my whole name out there with pictures and promoting myself?

Man your a weirdo.

Yeah that story made you famous…not.

And no I’m not a “Truther” why do you have to lump all Paul supporters into that category…is that all you got?

“And Traffic? That’s all you got?”

Hey numbers don’t lie.

“You guys always make me chuckle.

I think this is a good time to quote my favorite comment from this thread:

It will be a glorious day when Ron Paul is NOT elected. His name will be a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.”

It will be a sad day for conservatives if Paul isn’t elected, if you have half abrain you may want to read Burke, Kirk, Santyana, Adams, the old Buckley to find out what real conservativism is all about and contrast it wiht your hero Bush and Paul and see who is more Right.

“In 1988 he ran against Bush 41 as a Liberatarian BECAUSE he disagreed with Reagan policy and believed Bush 41 would continue with Reagan’s strong stance on the USSR and many of his now proven domestic initiatives. He was against standing up to the USSR. So enough with ArPee trying to ride on the coattails of the Founding Fathers, Goldwater, Reagan, and the Constitution. ”

He ran against Bush 41 because Reagan wasn’t conservative enough (no gold standard, high inflation, high budget deficits, more government growth etc.). As for foreign policy Reagan ducked out of Lebanon (smartly) fairly quickly, he utilized proxies efficiently (Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua), he was generally suspicous of the UN, and in fact, when one looks at the Reagan Administration’s military involvements overseas, they were all very modest and, with the exception of Grenada (which was over quickly and US troops back home)didn’t entail a lot of troops being used.

You want to talk about a casual link to terrorism based on our foreign policy here is an interesting article by Ivan Eland (PH.D, CATO institute alumn)

http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb50.pdf

“Reagan, Buckley, Goldwater, Ashbrook, Schlafly

If you went point-by-point over the views espoused by each of these figures to see how much agreement there was with Ron Paul’s platform.”

You could of course CHERRY PICK “point by point” and find some common areas of agreement. But to say that Ron Paul is a conservative in the same way as my mentors above is LUDICROUS!

That would have really gotten people’s attention.

Go crawl back into the woodworks and watch out for those black helicopters, junior.

When it comes to Reagan’s foreign policy, Ron Paul is no Reaganite.

Consider RP’s own book, Freedom Under Siege, Ch 2 on foreign policy. His own language does not support a Reaganesque view, so it is dishonest to go around promoting oneself as the heir-apparent to Reaganism, to pander for the Reagan Republican votes.

Barry Goldwater was very aggressive about foreign policy as well, believing that there is no substitute for victory. ArPee comes across as a loon to me, when he thinks that because Iraq (hypothetically) was the wrong war and entered into under false pretenses, that the answer to “fixing it”, is to just leave immediately. How irresponsible is that? With no consideration to the here and now, and the consequences of such an ill-conceived action. It’s fitting when the Kucinich/Code Pink peace fascists demand it; but when it’s coming from a conservative, it’s embarrassing.

Hot Air

This is boilerplate you apparently made up without reference to sources, judging by its vagueness. Well duh, yeah, you run against someone because you disagree with their policies. But to be fair sources on something this obscure are a lot of work to dig up; I may try later. From memory (I saw Paul speak in 1988) his emphasis was on balanced budgets, an end to the welfare state, an end to the War on Drugs. It was the War on Drugs that caused his temporary departure from the Republican party (does that count as a proven domestic initiative?).
I also know that Paul opposed the grain bailout of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, which on that score at least makes him more anti-soviet than Reagan (see here for a more-conservative-than-Reagan take on the bill). However, I don’t know what his position on military spending was at the time.