Sen. Rand Paul is running for the Republican nomination for President, but sounds to me more like Bernie Sanders or Jesse Jackson. Whenever he speaks about crime and punishment, he seems to view the criminal as the victim and the law as the oppressor. He would eliminate all federal mandatory minimum sentencing -- sponsoring a bill so radically pro-criminal that its co-sponsor, then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy, refused to bring it up in his own Committee. Apparently, even liberal Democrats wouldn't touch it.
If Sen. Paul supports the death penalty, I've been unable to find out about it. His position seems to be that juries are insufficiently trustworthy, a stance virtually always associated with abolitionism. His views on what needs to be done to combat terrorism are also out of the mainstream. He wants to block, not merely the Patriot Act's provision for bulk data collection, but the entire Act.
Not for nothing does the Real Clear Politics poll average have him running in single digits, behind Bush, Walker, Rubio, Huckabee and Carson.
Is it fair and sensible, Bill, for me to river Sen Paul's struggles within his party as proof that the GOP is not really a hospitable place for real libertarians?
As you know, I think of myself politically as a libertarian and I am a fan of Sen Paul's efforts to grow this part of the GOP tent. But if you and others within the GOP establishment are apparently so eager to reject his messages and efforts, then I suppose I and other libertarian leaning folks ought to look elsewhere for political energy.
The GOP is not a hospitable place for those who view victimizers as victims, make excuses for traffickers, think the cops are the main problem, want to let judges run loose again (just like they did in the Sixties and Seventies, and with the same results), oppose the only punishment that fits the crime for some murders, and think we can wish Jihad away without doing some hard things to combat it, both with our military and intelligence services.
Guilty as charged on all that.
The GOP is a quite hospitable place -- vastly more hospitable than the Democrats -- for those who believe in growth through personal responsibility, take indebtedness seriously, would at least half-way like to curb our rush into national bankruptcy, want to treat people based on their behavior rather than their identity, think you should mostly keep what you honestly earn, think classroom "trigger warnings" are a bad (and dangerous) joke, want drug use suppressed, view family life as a good thing rather than a Puritan menace, and think America is a great country whose interests are to be defended and advanced without relent or apology.
If you are in the latter group, welcome aboard!
You snuck in want "drug use suppressed" without an account for who will be doing the suppressing. Is it right that you, Bill, think government has a fundamental role in preventing individuals from using certain substances and using whatever means necessary to prevent functioning free markets and free people from decided how to they want to treat themselves?
Which party is going to be more willing to allow adults to live their lives as they wish to without government interference? That is what I want to know and who will get my vote.
If the question is who gets your vote, there is not much difference between the parties on drugs. Both would keep drugs illegal, except for pot, which the Dems mostly favor legalizing and the Reps mostly don't. Even that is an overstated difference, however, because, as I've said a zillion times, there is next to no enforcement of simple possession laws anyway.
Both parties will maintain the present prohibition against all other drugs, consistent with overwhelming public opinion.
What struck me most about your answer was that it focused on but a single part of my response, which has many parts.
You might be a one-issue voter; I don't know. I'm not. Crime, drugs, sentencing and the death penalty are important to me, you bet. But other things are as or more important: The direction of the culture (responsibility or whining?); reducing our massive debt; rebuilding stern standards in education and cutting out this "self-esteem" BS; the rule of law and indiscipline in judging; and restoring respect for the Constitution.
But none of those is the most important. The most critical issue is restoring a strong and self-confident United States in foreign relations and, for the immediate moment, ensuring by any means necessary that Iran -- a brutal, backward, malign, Seventh Century, terror-spreading regime -- does not get The Big One. I cannot think of a quicker route to a cataclysmic world war than a nuclear-armed Iran.
Of course, the cultural context undergirding all these issues is the same: A strong and morally confident America at home is far more likely to be a strong and morally confident America abroad.
So are you backing Lindsay Graham?