The Last of the Texas Outsiders

Posted in H.L. News, Main Blog (All Posts) on June 5th, 2007 6:30 am by HL

Ron Paul vs. the Throng The Last of the Texas Outsiders

Counterpunch
Excerpt
Put together Murdoch’s Fox News, a mid-May debate between Republican presidential candidates and the state of South Carolina and you have a hotbed of stupidity. But to the fury of the Republican organizers there was an intrusion of rational thought, in the person of Ron Paul, a US congressman from Texas, classed as a rank outsider in the nomination race.

Texas used to send true individualists to Washington DC. One of the brightest moments of my early years, visiting the nation’s capital, was watching Rep. Wright Patman, head of the House Banking Committee, tell the red-faced chairman of the federal reserve that he deserved to be locked up in the penitentiary.

Paul is the last of the breed. As a small-government tight-money Republican this gynaecologist-obstetrician (4,000 babies claimed as a career total) regularly votes No on pork barrel projects that would put money into his own district. But as a Republican in the isolationist, libertarian tradition he also votes No, sometimes alone among the 535 members of the US congress, on war funding, on laws allowing US presidents to order arbitrary imprisonment, “coercive interrogation”, suspension of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

HL’s Take:
I’ve been hearing a lot about Ron Paul, but so far have not seen him in action. That will change as I will watch the Republican debate tonight, to see what he is all about. Apparently there is one Republican who is not looking to go on a killing spree, one with some brains to him. Full report tomorrow

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