The Jews Had Kinky, The Libs Have Ron Paul

Maybe it's because I'm steeped in Russian revolutionaries lately, but every time I see the name Michael Badnarik I think of Michael Bakunin:

efore Paul became an antiwar hero, his support consisted largely of libertarian activists–people like Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party's 2004 presidential nominee. Badnarik refuses to get a driver's license (even though, he conceded to me, "I have my car operational") and warns against anyone who might try to force a smallpox or anthrax vaccination on him. ("You bring the syringe, I'll bring my .45, and we'll see who makes a bigger hole.") Badnarik recounts rallying support for Paul at a recent conference of the Free State Project, a group of libertarians who have relocated to New Hampshire in the hope of concentrating their power and more or less taking over the state government. "I asked how many people would drive without a license and not pay income taxes, and three-quarters raised their hands," Badnarik recalls. "I'm choking up. I've got my heart in my throat. And I said, 'We need to do something–and Ron Paul's campaign is the shining star. We need to contribute the full two thousand dollars now. Tell all your friends.'"

Here's the guy behind the Too-Hot-for-the-White-House phenomenon of Sen. Ron Paul. If you were watching the last Republican debate, you might have got the mistaken impression that Rudy Giuliani, a sort of pop-gun playing at pezzanovante, scored his best shot in response to Paul's claim that 9/11 happened because the U.S. bombed Iraq: "That's an extraordinary statement. And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that." Like taking candy from a baby, unless of course you're a brooding laissez-faire ultra who puts as much stock in wars of choice as you do in the U.S. Postal Service.

According to Michael Crowley at TNR (author of the above excerpt), Ron Paul, coming off that exchange, discovered his base among the new millennium's Buchananite right. Pat himself will tell you that Paul speaks "intolerable truths" about the root causes of Islamic terrorism, at least as it elects for its target American citizens at home and abroad. Closer to the quite tolerable truth would be to say that Paul speaks frustrated sophistries about those root causes: If only we'd leave the Middle East alone, runs the argument, the Middle East would leave us alone, too. (My Russian revolutionary kick again: Trotsky once remarked, "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.)

Castles in the sky have a way of crashing down on your head if you're not careful, and history is simply not on the side of isolationists, who make it a point of pride — or haven't you noticed? — of actually wanting to be ignorant of what goes on in the rest of the world.

The United States has been ranged against the forces of Islamic reaction since there has been a United States. You can read Michael Oren's brilliant history of this centuries-old confrontation, Faith, Power, and Fantasy, or any biography of Thomas Jefferson that does not scant on his executive assembly of an American navy to force the Barbary pirates of North Africa to stop kidnapping seafaring American civilians and holding them, at ransom, in state of slavery. John Adams reports being shocked at the answer he received from the Tripoli ambassador to London when he asked him how he justified these unprovoked and criminal acts of human theft and extortion:

The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Another tolerable truth, closer to our own time: The Salafist journal to which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi contributed in his semi-literate way before becoming the main jihadist menace in Iraq was called The Impenetrable Edifice (speaking of well-built airborne castles). Its premier issue ran a lead editorial that called not for the removal of U.S. air force bases in Saudi Arabia; nor an end to the sanctions on the Saddam Hussein regime; nor Palestinian statehood; nor a Muslim-favored resolution to the conflict over Kashmir. It called for the liberation of the West from its own godless depravity. How does a so-called "protectionist" aim to protect against that, as president?

It's no surprise that Paul has touched an expose nerve of the body politic at a time when the U.S. is mired in a flagging war in Mesopotamia, and when the imminence of another terrorist attack on our own soil leaves us only surprised that one hasn't happened yet.

It's good that Paul is around, particularly as a spokesman for the antiwar right, to worry that nerve to the discomfort of his more electable competitors for high office. But let's not pretend his foreign policy rhetoric reflects anything different than his no-government ideology: faith in the impossible.