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I loooove this little clip.

To paraphrase Ron Paul’s response, “Are you an idiot? Why are you asking a presidential candidate such a fucking moronic question. Sounds like a better question for your PR team. Who the fuck cares?” Course Ron Paul’s answer was much better than mine.

And I love his response to the question about taking the white supremacist’s money. “Yes, I took his money and did something better with it than he ever would have. If he gives me more money I’ll take that too and do even more good stuff with it. Why would I give the money back to him so he can use it for bad purposes? He gave me money because he believes in my issues, not his.” Yea! Thank god someone has said that now. I hope all the candidates start parroting that response so we can we move on from stupid media bait.

Imagine seeing a news anchor grilling a Hillary or Barack about why they gave money back to a white-supremacist instead of using it to do something good. Demonstrates the power our media has over us.

And I LOVE at the end how the slime-ball FOX news anchor tries to get him to stop talking with a bunch of dismissive “All right”’s at the end. Doh! He’s onto you bitch. “He’s making us look like fools. Get him off the air, quick! He’s not playing any of our games and he didn’t fall for any of our bait.” And Ron Paul gets the last word in too. You go, Ron.

I would absolutely love to see Ron Paul and Barack Obama be our two candidates. How surreal. The press would have no idea how to get them to fight each other. Neither candidate would be accepting money from special interest. There’d be a whole line of lobbyists with millions of dollars and no one to give it to and a press that has to deal with none of the candidates they told us to pick. And I think Ron and Barack would push each other in good directions.

It gets me thinking about a Barack/Paul ticket. I think it’s not even possible with our two-party system, but it wouldn’t surprise me too much to see Barack being the first to pick someone from the opposing party to be his vice-president. Right now I’d have a harder time seeing Ron Paul do the same.

What I get to be the main point of Ron Paul’s campaign reminds me of Regan though. “We can solve all of our problems by just getting the government out of it.” Capitalize on mis-trust of government. I don’t agree with him on that. I think it’s just as mis-guided to inherently mis-trust the government as it is to inherently trust it. I don’t think people become any more or less evil because they take a government job. Government is people, us. Some try to spread fear that this isn’t the case. To me this is just more of the same fear-based politics. There seems to be an equal amount of fucked-up-ness in the government as anything else, of good and evil, fear and hope; so to me that indicates that it’s probably fairly representative of the population, as it must be if we hope to get anywhere.

Ron Paul’s answer to everything seems to be to leave it up to the states to decide. Hmm, so if Alabama wants to decide that black people and white people can’t marry each other, then we should just let them? Everyone in Alabama that doesn’t agree should just move to another state? I disagree. There are some things federal government, yes the “Government” or the infamous and eternally evil “They” who is responsible for everything bad that happens, should impose on states whether they like it or not, in my view. In some ways Ron Paul’s position is self-conflicting. By “get the government out of it”, he actually means get the federal government out of it. The state government can still fuck with your life as much as they want. For instance, he somewhat round-about-ly came out in support of gay marriage, but what he actually is suggesting, leaving it to the states, would result in discrimination in most of the country. He thinks the states should not be involved in the issue because it’s a religious issue, and I agree, but he proposes leaving it to each state to decide if gays deserve equality, which would basically mean they’d wouldn’t get equality in the majority of the country.

I prefer Barack’s message. It’s more about coming together and figuring out what we can all agree on. Ignoring people who disagree with you is not the way to find a solution everyone can live with. Leaving everything up to the states, while it has some advantages, does not make the issues go away.

If Abraham Lincoln had taken Ron Paul’s stance we might still have black slaves working on plantations in the south, perhaps in our India-Pakistan style mortal-enemy/neighbor, the Confederate States of America. The world would be a very different place. While I hear what Ron Paul is saying, the devil is in the details and I think I lean towards Abe Lincoln’s position on the issue of state’s rights.

For me it all comes back to education. If we want our government to be less fucked up, then we need to make ourselves less fucked up. And we do that by educating ourselves. Stupid people make stupid choices. Let’s make less stupid people.

And Ron Paul’s stand on education seems to be the same as everything else, leave it up to the states to fend for themselves. And if parents wants to teach their kids that the Giant Spaghetti Monster poofed us all into existence with some magical spell and the laws of physic are just made-up nonsense and science is just a big conspiracy of one-world-government Nazi-alien-lizard-people, we should just let them. And give them a tax credit. Ah, here we go with the perennial republican carrot, a tax credit. Mmmmm, sounds tasty doesn’t it? You like money don’t you? Dude, a tax credit is not going to fix this problem. It is not going to miraculously return our education system into the envy of the world. Neither is leaving it up to the states or “removing the federal subsidies that inflate costs“? So wait, he’s saying we’ll get a better education system by just paying less? Amazing. Yea, it’s all those damn teachers demanding such outrageous salaries and overpriced textbooks full of “Government” propaganda and unproven theories. We should leave it up to each city to decide so that the quality of your education is tied to the quality of the neighborhood your parents can afford to buy a house in. We should focus on saving our factory jobs where these stupid people can work and dream about their tax credit.