Who Is This Ron Paul?

It seems as though every Presidential campaign has it’s wildcard candidate that stirs things up and directs the campaign season in a whole new direction. This election season is no different. In the Republican primary battle, we have many well known names and faces, but one candidate in particular has gotten very little press coverage. Texas Congressman Ron Paul has amassed more money than Senator John McCain, but polls far lower than the “top tier” candidates. His supporters are very vocal about his constitutionalist ideals, and many take offense if his name is left out of any discussion of Presidential politics.

I would like to take a closer look at the Texan OB/GYN turned congressman. Paul has a record of consistency of only voting along constitutional lines, not party lines. He has stated that if it is not in the Constitution then he will not support it. He has been a strong advocate on Pro-life issues, gun ownership rights, and fiscal responsibility. With positions like these and his apparent fund raising abilities, one would surmise that Paul would be mentioned with the likes of Giuliani, Romney, and McCain. I believe the issues that separate Dr. Paul from the rest of the Republican field are his views on how and when the military should be used.

He voted against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, which by the way certain front runners on the Democratic ticket are unable to say, and has been calling for the return of our troops. He wants the return of our troops not only from Iraq, but also from every other foreign station around the globe. He holds firm to the warning from George Washington when he left office, saying that we should not become involved in the affairs of other nations. I personally believe that the world is a much more dangerous place than the one in which Washington lived. During the colonial period, it could take months for a foreign invader to reach us. With the technological advancements of our time, a foreign government could send one agent with a nuclear device across our borders to slaughter millions of our citizens. We cannot afford to pull our troops home from around the globe. We are the lone superpower in the world and with that comes a responsibility to help protect the defenseless.

We can all argue about the merits of going to war in Iraq and whether or not there were ever weapons of mass destruction, but one simple fact remains, we are there now and we must see this to its end. The Democrats and certain Republicans, including Ron Paul, are calling for us to bring our troops home now, but the sad little secret is that even if one of them wins in November of ’08, the troops will not, let me say that again for my “intellectual” friends, will not be spirited home by the middle of February of ’09. None of these candidates will sign off on that. They all know that it will create a bloodbath of the kind that has not been seen since we pulled all of our troops out of Vietnam. Although they would like nothing more than to saddle the Bush administration with that legacy, they are still human enough to do what is necessary to prevent the needless murder of millions.

While reading about Ron Paul, I realized that I share many of his same views on a majority of his issues, but I also realized that there are certain issues that are more important. I cannot in good conscience support his candidacy based on his positions about the use of military force. He is completely correct when he says that we should never send our troops into war without a declaration of war from the Congress. Unfortunately, in our politically charged times, we do not have a Congress that is mature enough to take the responsibility of such a declaration. They would rather shirk their responsibility off to the President, so that they may feign surprise and disgust at the President’s hunger for war. We live in a very dangerous world and at times we do need to preemptively strike to preserve our freedom and the freedom of our friends around the world.