Robbing Peter to Vote Paul?

Trey Smith

It’s a little strange to see people who inveigh against Obama’s healthcare compromises wave away, as a detail, Paul’s opposition to any government involvement in healthcare. In Ron Paul’s America, if you weren’t prudent enough or wealthy enough to buy private insurance — and the exact policy that covers what’s ailing you now — you find a charity or die. And if civil liberties are so important, how can Paul’s progressive fans overlook his opposition to abortion and his signing of the personhood pledge, which could ban many birth control methods? Last time I checked, women were half the population (the less important half, apparently). Technically, Paul would overturn Roe and let states make their own laws regulating women’s bodies, up to and including prosecuting abortion as murder.

Add in his opposition to basic civil rights law — he maintains his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and opposes restrictions on the “freedom” of business owners to refuse service to blacks — and his hostility to the federal government starts looking more and more like old-fashioned Southern-style states’ rights. No wonder they love him over at Stormfront, a white-supremacist website with neo-Nazi tendencies.
~ from Ron Paul's Strange Bedfellows by Katha Pollitt ~

Pollitt wants to know why ANY progressive would even think of supporting or -- heaven forbid! -- voting for Ron Paul for president in 2012. The answer has less to do with Paul than it does with our screwed up, money-grubbing electoral system.

The sad fact is that -- despite Paul's abhorrent views on a good deal of the issues that progressives and lefties hold dear -- he stands to be the ONLY viable candidate who will work to put the brakes on American imperialistic designs throughout the world AND protect the civil liberties of Americans here at home. These positions alone are enough to cause many progressives and lefties (including me) to consider supporting him.

It is sad that we can expect no such talk from the Democratic incumbent -- one Barack Obama. To be sure, Obama will hint at these themes, but we've already suffered through 3 years of one broken campaign pledge after another. By now, most thinking progressives understand that Barack is all flowery talk and no substantive do. Ron Paul, on the other hand, has been amazingly consistent in his views and has voted his views for quite some time.

I would be overjoyed if there was a truly progressive candidate for president that had a snowball's chance in hell to impact the outcome, but there isn't one and there is almost no chance whatsoever that one will come riding into the scene on a white horse at the last minute. Even if one did appear, the mainstream media would completely ignore him or her and that would doom their opportunity for even a modicum of viability. So, that leaves many of us with the less than perfect option of Ron Paul.

While there are many, many issues I care deeply about -- ones in which Ron Paul thumbs his nose at -- the one that drives my political fervor the most these days is that I no longer want to abet a murderer. And that is what the US has become: a serial murderer of epic proportions!

Through a variety of means, my nation wantonly murders men, women and CHILDREN to enrich the bottom line of the already wealthy elite. Our foreign policy is based on immoral and unethical suppositions. We kill because we can and we do it with a callous disregard for human life and suffering.

We have become a fire breathing dragon and so we need a heroic knight to put out the fire. Ron Paul seems to be the only knight willing to take up this cause. So, imperfect as he is, a lot of people have decided to give him a chance.

What other realistic choice is there?