GOP Primary

I haven't written a lot about the primaries, mainly because I just haven't had time and I have been able to vent with a co-worker (hey Chris!). But it's time I wrote something on the subject. If you've read my blog before, you probably can guess which candidate I support; Ron Paul. I don't agree with all of his policies, but he's the first major party candidate in many years who has even come close to representing my beliefs. Unfortunately, it seems that a majority of Americans don't hold similar beliefs. I could go on a rant here and get completely sidetracked, but I'm not going to. Suffice it to say that it saddens me that so many voters seem to vote the opposite of what they say they believe.

I watched the McCain-Romney, oops I mean Republican, debate on CNN last night. Apparently, they invited Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee to give McCain and Romney occasional breaks so their voices didn't get too tired. I haven't seen the total minutes each candidate got yet, but McCain and Romney had to have had at least double the time Paul and Huckabee had. When people bitched about Ron Paul not getting many questions in the early debates, the media cried that there were so many candidates on the stage, it was hard to give each one ample time. Well, now we're down to 4 and some are still getting the shaft. I'm sick of the media picking the "front runners" and shoving them down the public's throat.

Fox News showed their bias in New Hampshire when they left Ron Paul out in favor of Thompson and Ghouliani. At that time, Paul had gotten more votes than Ghouliani in Iowa and more delegates than Thompson. Fox kept repeating the "Ghouliani didn't campaign in Iowa, he's focusing on Florida." line of crap like it was the gospel truth. A little investigating shows that Rudy made 35 campaign appearances in Iowa, Ron Paul made 27. How many appearances constitute "campaigning?"

One exchange in the debate last night that I thought was great was Ron Paul's response to the question about whether he agreed w/ McCain's idea that we need to leave troops in Iraq for as long as 100 years. This was immediately following a 5 minute exchange between McCain and Romney about what Romney said about timetables. The exchange can be boiled down to
McCain: "You said blah"
Romney: "No I didn't"
McCain: "Yes you did"
Romney: "No I didn't"
Repeat for 5 minutes

Dr. Paul's response was spot on…

PAUL: I don't even think they should have gone, so keeping them for 100 years, where's the money going to come from?
(APPLAUSE)
You know, the country is in bankruptcy. And when I listen to this argument, I mean, I find it rather silly, because they're arguing technicalities of a policy they both agree with.
They agreed with going in; they agreed for staying, agreed for staying how many years? And these are technicalities. We should be debating foreign policy, whether we should have interventionism or non-interventionism, whether we should be defending this country or whether we should be the policemen of the world, whether we should be running our empire or not...
...The dollar is crashing, and you're talking about these technicalities about who said what when?
...So when I talk about these long-term stays, I think, "How many men are you willing to let die for this, for something that has nothing to do with our national security?"
There were no al Qaeda there. It had nothing do with 9/11. And there was no threat to our national security. They never committed aggression. It's unconstitutional. It's an undeclared war.
And we have these silly arguments going on about who said what when. I think it's time to debate foreign policy and why we don't follow the Constitution and only go to war with a declaration of war.
(APPLAUSE)

(I edited it down a little for brevity, you can find entire source at CNN transcript)

It was silly that these two spent so much time arguing over semantics. And the moderators just let it happen. These so called journalists are not doing their job. Out of all the candidates, Republican and Democrat, Ron Paul is the only one that I've heard that has actually said how he is going to cut spending. Several times last night McCain talked about cutting taxes, none of the "journalists" ever asked what spending he planned on cutting in order to do so. We're already running a huge deficit, we can't cut taxes and not spending.

I don't care for Huckabee, but he scored a few bonus points from me last night because he mentioned a couple of times how lopsided the questions were. But he lost those points with his comment about federalism. Maybe he just mixed up his words, but it didn't sound that way. He seems to be a little confused about Thomas Jefferson and federalism. He was responding to a question about CA having stricter environmental standards and said…

"It's the genius of our founding fathers when they had the idea of federalism. Thomas Jefferson was right, and Alexander Hamilton was wrong. That debate we thought was settled."

Yes, Thomas Jefferson was right and Hamilton was wrong, but Hamilton was the federalist not TJ. The Federalists advocated a stronger central government, the exact opposite of what Huckabee seems to be supporting.

I've been watching CNN for most of the election coverage because they seemed to be at least a little balanced. I can't stand Fox "Ghouliani Is a Frontrunner and Ron Paul Doesn't Exist" News, so I guess I'm going to have to hold my nose and give MSNBC a shot.