Ron Paul Versus Hillary Clinton
1 comment October 18th, 2007
Are any of the current Republican presidential candidates viable contenders with Democrat front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton? In my view, the GOP field is weak on the most vital issue, the Iraq war catastrophe-with one notable exception; Ron Paul.
Libertarian congressman Ron Paul is an official candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Though I don’t agree with many of his policy positions, he still deserves to be taken seriously and accorded respect for being the only Republican presidential contender to strongly oppose the disastrous Iraq war, initiated by the Bush and Cheney administration, and facilitated by many Congressmen and Senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Ron Paul reminds me of Lincoln Chaffee, the only Republican senator to vote against the war authorization bill that enabled Bush to launch an unprovoked attack on Iraq. In sharp contrast, unlike Ron Paul or Lincoln Chaffee, Senator Hillary Clinton did vote in support of the Iraq war. Yet, it is Hillary Clinton who is achieving the most political success in positioning herself as the candidate who will terminate the Iraq war. Why?
American politics in its distorted reality rewards the guilty and punishes the courageous. Lincoln Chaffee was voted out of office in last November’s midterm election. Ron Paul has been largely marginalized and ignored by mainstream media, with a few notable exceptions. Hillary Clinton’s Sopranos video, in the meantime, becomes topline national news on the major television networks. So let’s figure, a thoughtful debate on the Iraq war is not newsworthy, but an obsession with the Clintons playing the role of gangsters, that’s fine? I still don’t get it.
It is the nation’s loss that there is not more discussion of Ron Paul’s critique of the Iraq war. He has pointed out that the nation’s founding fathers enshrined in the constitution the requirement that only Congress had the power to wage war. In other words, politicians such as Hillary Clinton voted in favor of surrendering the most vital authority of the peoples’ representatives, the power to wage war, to the president. Given that the first Clinton administration also waged war without a congressional declaration of war, why should we feel that a second Clinton administration would act with more responsibility in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s pro-war vote? If for no other reason, American voters should pay attention to Ron Paul and his message on the war, for he is warning us that the disaster of Iraq flows from a failure by our political establishment to follow the nation’s constitution. This is a serious and thoughtful point, and for that reason is being ignored in favor of laudatory platitudes on Hillary Clinton’s theatrical review on YouTube. Just another example of why America is in trouble.
Sheldon Filger, Author
“Hillary Clinton Nude: Naked Ambition, Hillary Clinton And America’s Demise” (Available at www.hillary-clinton-nude.com and on Amazon.com)
