Rand Paul endorses Mitt Romney

[jts]

There is this big stink all over the internet. Rand Paul endorses Mitt Romney. Alex Jones is on the case. I figure April Fool's Day came at an unusual time this year.

[GALTGULCH8]

I think it became evident that not enough people got the message to assure victory. Despite the substantial turnouts all over the country where Ron Paul spoke there were not enough who understood the ideas as correct as almost all of them are.

After all Ron Paul is up against the establishment in many aspects. Even intelligent politicians such as Mitt Romney do not share his perspective on the Federal Reserve System. I doubt that many of elected politicians have ever read The Creature From Jekyll Island or Murray Rothbard's The Case Against The Fed or Ludwig von Mises' The Theory of Money and Credit. Fewer still have come across Fiat Money Inflation In France by Andrew Dickson White.

I don't remember a reference to the Federal Reserve System by Ayn Rand in her The Objectivist Newsletter although the very first issue dealt with the Antitrust Laws which I don't think I ever heard Ron Paul speak out against yet.

I was a registered Libertarian since the early Seventies and had to virtually hold my nose to change my registration to Republican in 2008 in the hope that I could help elect Ron Paul then despite Ayn Rand's admonition about "pro-life" candidates being anathema.

One must keep in mind that the Holy Roman Catholic Church fathers refused when invited to look through Galileo's telescope to see Jupiter's moons moving around it for themselves. They reportedly considered the telescope to be an instrument of the Devil.

Obama is said to be well read but I doubt that he has picked up Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson not to mention his works on the failure of Keynesian economics. Of course he may have his own agenda.

We must take heart in the knowledge that people have survived for generations in totalitarian dictatorships and through hyperinflation coupled with depression. Of course some end up in hotter water with subsequent dictatorships which we can hope to avoid.

It is not uncommon among Ron Paul supporters to imagine that without him as president we face a disaster of epic proportions in America in the coming years with massive unemployment exceeding fifty percent, civil unrest with roving bands of desperate starving people and empty super market shelves, power outages in winter, failure of civilization as we know it. At least no one can blame Ron Paul when all that does befall us no matter whether Obama is re elected or if Mitt Romney is in command.

For while that is all happening, behind the scenes, in a growing number of colleges and universities, the Youth for Liberty and the Students For Liberty and the Campaign For Liberty will be growing and planting the seeds for a renewal of... wait for it... Liberty!

Ron Paul supporters are going to have to get used to the idea that Ron Paul will not be our next president and not many of his policies, if any, will be adopted by either Obama nor Romney. No matter which one is our next president we are heading for trouble in the economy and in world affairs. For while this is going on the Islamic hordes are reproducing at over eight times the rate of any other group and you know what that means.

The question is will any of those who took the trouble to become Ron Paul delegates or Romney delegates actually go to Tampa after all? To what end?

[Mark]

... Ayn Rand's admonition about "pro-life" candidates being anathema.

She never put her position that way, having strongly supported Goldwater. See

Presidential Elections - Ayn Rand: 1932-1980

What Ayn Rand said about the prospect of Goldwater's defeat (he won the nomination but then lost the election) supports gultch8's point about propaganda:

"... if he loses ... it gives more time to the advocates of free enterprise to perfect their cause and to spread the right ideas through the country."

She wrote "it is earlier than you think." That was almost fifty years ago, half a century. It is not so early any more. Ron Paul -- who is far more consistently libertarian than Goldwater ever was -- made a strong showing in 2008 and a very much stronger one this year. Doubtless the libertarian movement will grow even stronger. The question is, can we survive to 2016?

I'm very disappointed in Randolph Paul. If you think Obama is bad, Romney is even worse. To be precise, he's about the same but because he is perceived as a conservative he will be able to do more damage.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Mark,

I am no Romney fan, but I am not as pessimistic as you.

I think Romney could be an excellent transition person to a much smaller form of government. But I say with with half a heart. In reality, it's a crap shoot.

About the only good thing in that is that the outcome is a sure thing with Obama and it's up in the air with Romney.

I believe if Rand Paul endorsed Romney, there was a price--and by that, I mean a price for Romney to pay to the libertarian vision, not a price for Rand Paul to receive personally. (Excepting an offer for VP.)

So that's a good sign.

Michael

[Mark]

Consider what baggage Romney comes with. (The following is adapted from ARI Watch.)

Romney’s advisors include: Michael Chertoff (former head of Homeland Security, and current body scanner war profiteer), Cofer Black (former director of Blackwater), Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan, Robert Joseph (responsible for the “sixteen words” in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message claiming that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger), John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Dan Senor, Eric Edelman (a top official at the Pentagon under Bush), Michael Hayden (former CIA director), Mitchell Reiss, Stephen Rademaker, Kim Holmes, Vin Weber.

And Walid Phares, former member of the of the Phalange movement in Lebanon and now at the neocons’ Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Eight of Romney advisers signed letters of the neocons’ Project for a New American Century (PNAC, founded by Kagan and Bill Kristol), urging the invasion of Iraq: one letter to President Clinton in 1998 and another to President Bush a few days after 9/11. Dobriansky, Friedberg, Cohen and Weber signed the 1997 PNAC charter. Romney’s foreign policy white paper, with the title “An American Century” and foreword by Eliot Cohen, uses the same rhetoric as PNAC.

Early in 2009 Kagan, Edelman, Senor and Bill Kristol launched Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) to succeed PNAC. FPI opposes withdrawing from Afghanistan and supports a troop increase, it advocates a permanent occupation of 20,000 troops in Iraq, promotes “regime change” in Iran, and military intervention in Syria. Three of FPI’s four board members are advisors to Romney.

Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, are good friends. See

“A Friendship Dating to 1976 Resonates in 2012”

by Michael Barbaro, The New York Times April 7, 2012.

Romney is a cipher, a Bush retread. The neocons will bend and shape him just as they did Bush.

Here is Romney speaking at The Citadel military academy in South Carolina, October 7, 2012:

“This century must be an American Century. ... God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. ... America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world, or someone else will.”

And we wouldn’t want that would we now?

[Mark]

Excellent analysis of this fiasco by Gerald Celente, whom I've always liked and here he is at his best. He starts at 6:23 minutes. Alex Jones, on this subject, starts at 3:33 minutes.

Yes, I know, Alex Jones of the obnoxiously gravelly voice, but my opinion of him went up a lot after this interview.

[jts]

I gotta sneaking suspicion, only a suspicion, I'm not stating this as a fact. My suspicion is that the Ron Paul fiasco has to do with Bilderberg. Is it mere coincidence that the fiasco happened shortly after the Bilderberg meeting? Maybe, maybe not. One of the things they were discussing at the meeting was Ron Paul. They were using cuss language about Ron Paul. They wanted Ron Paul dead. Someone said something about putting Ron Paul on a plane and then having the plane crash. Let's think about that for a bit. What would have happened if they had engineered the death of Ron Paul? Maybe that wasn't the best idea. That might make Ron Paul a martyr. And besides that, maybe people would figure it out or at least maybe there would be a conspiracy theory that would go on and on and would tend to make Bilderberg look bad. I figure, just maybe, they came up with a better idea. Something behind the scenes, that we don't know, persuaded Ron and Rand to do this fiasco. Does anyone have a better theory?

[caroljane]

Yes, anyone does.

[caroljane]

And everyone could.

[jts]

According to Adam Kokesh, Rand Paul is a statist. (video)

http://www.activistpost.com/2012/06/rand-pauls-sellout-to-mitt-romney.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

[Selene]

I gotta sneaking suspicion, only a suspicion, I'm not stating this as a fact. My suspicion is that the Ron Paul fiasco has to do with Bilderberg. Is it mere coincidence that the fiasco happened shortly after the Bilderberg meeting? Maybe, maybe not. One of the things they were discussing at the meeting was Ron Paul. They were using cuss language about Ron Paul. They wanted Ron Paul dead. Someone said something about putting Ron Paul on a plane and then having the plane crash. Let's think about that for a bit. What would have happened if they had engineered the death of Ron Paul? Maybe that wasn't the best idea. That might make Ron Paul a martyr. And besides that, maybe people would figure it out or at least maybe there would be a conspiracy theory that would go on and on and would tend to make Bilderberg look bad. I figure, just maybe, they came up with a better idea. Something behind the scenes, that we don't know, persuaded Ron and Rand to do this fiasco. Does anyone have a better theory?

Here is the classical fallacy of after this, therefore because of this...

From the Skeptics Dictionary:

post hoc fallacy

The post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event. Post hoc reasoning is the basis for many superstitions and erroneous beliefs.

Many events follow sequential patterns without being causally related. For example, you have a cold, so you drink fluids and two weeks later your cold goes away. You have a headache so you stand on your head and six hours later your headache goes away. You put acne medication on a pimple and three weeks later the pimple goes away. You perform some task exceptionally well after forgetting to bathe, so the next time you have to perform the same task you don't bathe. A solar eclipse occurs so you beat your drums to make the gods spit back the sun. The sun returns, proving to you the efficacy of your action.

You use your dowsing stick and then you find water. You imagine heads coming up on a coin toss and heads comes up. You rub your lucky charm and what you wish for comes true. You lose your lucky charm and you strike out six times. You have a "vision" that a body is going to be found near water or in a field and later a body is found near water or in a field. You have a dream that an airplane crashes and an airplane crashes the next day or crashed the night before.

However, sequences don't establish a probability of causality any more than correlations do. Coincidences happen. Occurring after an event is not sufficient to establish that the prior event caused the later one. To establish the probability of a causal connection between two events, controls must be established to rule out other factors such as chance or some unknown causal factor. Anecdotes aren't sufficient because they rely on intuition and subjective interpretation. A

controlled study is necessary to reduce the chance of error from self-deception.