Being the sanest candidate in certain areas doesn’t mean you’ll get my vote if you are insane in other areas. Obama wants to step up the drug war despite having done cocaine/drugs himself (just like Bush!, just like Clinton!) . Ron Paul wants to stop all abortion and force a bunch of unwanted babies on society. (Did you know crime dropped significantly exactly 18 years after Roe V. Wade?) Meh. I’ll vote, as I always do, but it’s doubtful it will be one of the major candidates. They’re always fucked.
And no, voting for the winner doesn’t garner you a prize, and your vote isn’t worth more if you vote for the winner. Your vote is always one vote, no matter how you vote. The people who “Waste” their votes are the ones who knowingly vote for douchebags because they think that to vote for a loser somehow costs you. It doesn’t. One vote is always one vote. The value of the number “1″ does not change based on who won.
January 11, 2008 at 3:37 PM
Yes Ron Paul doesn’t believe in abortion, but he’s already stated that its not the federal governments decision. So in effect it doesn’t matter.
January 11, 2008 at 8:07 PM
Too bad I don’t like Hillary because I would have voted to have a female president.
January 29, 2008 at 4:29 PM
As a Christian, obviously Ron Paul is PERSONALLY anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage.
However, Ron wants the Roe vs. Wade overturned because he feels it’s not the federal government’s place to force morals. He wants it overturned so that the individual states can decide (in other words, some states can decide to be pro-abortion).
He also doesn’t feel the federal government should be able to blanket the country with a same-sex marriage ban. It does not mean he personally believes in same-sex marriages, but he recognizes that such laws should be decided by individual states.
January 29, 2008 at 5:08 PM
I feel that is lip service. Anyone who wants an abortion can currently have it. And anyone who doesn’t want an abortion can currently — NOT have it.
He simply wants to make it possible for other people, under the guise of his leadership, to NOT be able to get what they want.
Spin it as “states rights”, but I just find it to be bullshit doublespeak avoiding the issue. There’s enough idiots in this country without encouraging more unwanted babies. Especially when that is now considered an established “Constitutional” right. I’m not buying his excuse.
It would be like if he wanted the states to be able to decide whether they had free speech or not — because he doesn’t think it’s the government’s business to dictate what you can say. Some big-L libertarians would undoubtedly swoon at the idea of the government not being involved, but what that would really do would be to make it possible for states to take away free speech, which to me would not be good in any way. (And no, I don’t think hate speech should be banned, and this is one of the problems with free speech in Canada.)
The difference? People can much more universally agree that taking away free speech is probably a bad thing, so it’s not exactly a big campaign issue in the election.
But nobody who is actually pro choice would ever spin the issue this way. Nobody who wants to have an abortion would ever spin the issue that way. Nobody is going to convince me, and any other one who is truly pro-choice, that taking away “free (as in speech) abortions” is a good thing for ANYBODY who wants to have one. It’s not giving a new right to anybody, unless you count “The right to take away other people’s established rights” as a right.
(Besides, aren’t we the country who forces others to be free whether they want to or not? I guess that’s good enough for Iraq, but not Alabama.)
Making it possible to erode a right and allowing it to happen on your watch is the same thing as doing it yourself. Leadership makes you responsible for everyone undernearth you. If Ron Paul left it up to the states, and the states stopped abortion — he would ultimately be the single individual responsible even if he looked the other direction and whistled while twiddling his thumbs and pretending it was states’ rights.
He’d be the politician equivalent of a nation that passively supports terrorism by allowing soldiers to train in his soil and ignoring their activity. That is — Afghanistan didn’t decide to attack us. They just let its local “states” (for these purposes, i’ll call the Taliban a state, though faction would be a better word) decide whether they want to attack us or not. The Afghanistan government didn’t take away anybody’s rights; they simply let some of their state/factions take away peoples’ rights (i.e. the rights of New Yorker’s to survive on 9/11/2001). The Afghanistani president could claim it was the local factions/states, and nothing to do with his government.
But you know — we bombed them anyway, because they let it happen. And if Ron Paul let it happen, he would deserve to bomb in his own way (the polls).
(P.S. Yes, I know the hijackers were Saudi Arabian citizens, but to harp on that fact would be to miss my point. Afghanistan let it happen just like Ron Paul would let something I don’t support happen. Attempts to dress it up under a libertarian guise do not pass any muster with me whatsoever! If it stinks, it’s still shit, no matter who created the odor.)