Tag Archives: Rand Paul

The Foreign Policy of the GOP, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on August 12, 2015 | 1 comment

From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.org:

They’ve learned nothing because they remember nothing

If the “first tier” Republican presidential debate revealed anything, it is the huge empty space that is at the heart of the conservative mind, circa 2015. No wonder a vacuous nonentity like Donald Trump is leading in all the polls: his gargantuan ego has invaded that vast emptiness and expanded like a giant hot air balloon. As to how soon that gaseous zeppelin will pop – well, it’s anybody’s guess. All we know is that if and when it does another big nothing will take its place.

Speaking of a big nothing, the performance of Sen. Rand Paul, once the great hope of anti-interventionists and libertarians, was even worse than this writer expected. The first mention of foreign policy was the following question posed by Fox News anchor Brett Baier to the junior Senator from Kentucky:

“BAIER: Senator Paul, you recently blamed the rise of ISIS on Republican hawks. You later said that that statement, you could have said it better. But, the statement went on, and you said, quote, ‘Everything they’ve talked about in foreign policy, they’ve been wrong for the last 20 years.’

“Why are you so quick to blame your own party?

“PAUL: First of all, only ISIS is responsible for the terrorism. Only ISIS is responsible for the depravity. But, we do have to examine, how are we going to defeat ISIS?

“I’ve got a proposal. I’m the leading voice in America for not arming the allies of ISIS. I’ve been fighting amidst a lot of opposition from both Hillary Clinton, as well as some Republicans who wanted to send arms to the allies of ISIS. ISIS rides around in a billion dollars worth of U.S. Humvees. It’s a disgrace. We’ve got to stop – we shouldn’t fund our enemies, for goodness sakes. So, we didn’t create ISIS – ISIS created themselves, but we will stop them, and one of the ways we stop them is by not funding them, and not arming them.”

Pauls’s answer was not merely inadequate, and shot through with an undertone of abject cowardice – it was confusing as well. To begin with, as Baier phrased his question, Paul’s original critique was directed at “Republican hawks,” i.e. the neoconservatives, a group of Republican ideologues the Senator used to criticize quite freely and regularly. Yet Paul let Baier get away with equating this group with every single Republican on earth: instead of challenging the premise of the question, Paul did what he’s been doing for months now, at great cost to his campaign – he backtracked.

Missing a great opportunity to point out that the neocons – his enemies – have indeed been spectacularly wrong about everything for the last 20 years, Paul instead went into a vague peroration about how we’re supposedly sending arms to allies of ISIS without specifying who those allies are. Are they the Turks? The Saudis? The Qataris? All three of these countries have been implicated in funding or otherwise assisting Syria’s jihadis, including ISIS. What I presume Paul meant is that the United States has been funding the Syrian rebels, who have gone over to ISIS and Al Qaeda in large numbers. Yet he didn’t deign to say that – which left millions of television viewers scratching their heads in puzzlement.

To continue reading: The Foreign Policy of the GOP

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Rand Paul: Fraud, Failure, Liar, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on July 31, 2015 | 1 comment

Justin Raimondo at antiwar.org gives an appropriate farewell to Rand Paul:

As the smoke wafted up into the already smoggy Los Angeles air, a group of young libertarians watched as Jayel Aheram burned his “Stand With Rand” t-shirts. He had two of them, a token of his former esteem for the “libertarian-ish” presidential candidate and Senator from Kentucky, whose father had inspired young Jayel to identify as a libertarian and become active in the movement. A former Marine and Iraq war veteran, the now 31-year-old Aheram had phone-banked for Rand, and enthusiastically retweeted the Senator’s pronouncements on Twitter. He had even forked out $35 for those T-shirts – and now they were going up in flames as he and a group of young libertarians sat on the roof of Jayel’s Los Angeles apartment, drinking beer and glumly contemplating what had brought them – all former supporters of Rand Paul’s presidential campaign – to this point. As Charles Davis writes over at MondoWeiss:

“So what prompted such a fiery stunt on a Saturday night? Simple: The son of Ron opposes the deal with Iran over its nuclear program, faulting the agreement for lifting sanctions on the Islamic Republic before ‘evidence of compliance.’ Paul still insists he prefers peace to war – who doesn’t? – and that he favors a negotiated settlement to the West’s standoff with the Islamic Republic, he just doesn’t support the only one that will ever happen, functionally making him pro-war. Worst of all: He’s lying to do it.”

Aheram and his friends had stood by the Kentucky Senator for many months, even as Rand occasionally waffled and made some statements that didn’t sit well with them by any means: the military budget proposal that actually called for an increase in what is laughingly referred to as “defense” spending, and his signing of an “open letter” to the Iranian government authored by neoconservative warmonger Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Strauss), who made no bones about his determination to scotch the looming deal with Iran. These things had disturbed them, but not enough to extinguish all hope that Sen. Paul – who had, after all, been brought up by a father whose dedication to liberty and peace is unquestioned – could and would serve as an admirable spokesman for their cause.

But it was the lie that vanquished that hope.

In questioning Secretary of State John Kerry at a hearing on the Iran deal before the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Sen. Paul cited what he said were the Ayatollah Khamenei’s words:

“The Americans say they stopped Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. They know it’s not true.”

Claiming that this contradicts the administration’s contention that the deal “would prevent [the Iranians] from getting a nuclear weapon,” Paul averred that “the Ayatollah is saying the opposite.”

But what did Khamenei really say? Here’s the entire quote:

“The Americans say they stopped Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. They know it’s not true. We had a fatwa, declaring nuclear weapons to be religiously forbidden. It had nothing to do with the nuclear talks.”

This was no mistake on Rand Paul’s part. It was a lie, and he repeated the lie to Fox News in an interview with Lou Dobbs:

“I made a point that the ayatollah is now saying that the deal does not prevent them from having a nuclear weapon and I thought that’s precisely what the deal is supposed to do, so I don’t know how we can have an agreement that President Obama says means one thing, John Kerry says means one thing, but the ayatollah says doesn’t mean that at all.”

So Rand Paul is now repeating AIPAC’s dishonest talking points. This is reminiscent of the same sort of propaganda that led the US to invade Iraq: “factoids” ripped out of context and promulgated by the Bush administration and its pet neoconservative pundits to create an entirely false picture of an Iraq that was seeking nuclear weapons.

In short, the Rand Paul that we were all hoping for – someone who would stand up to the War Party and refute their propaganda – is no more, if he ever existed in the first place. Instead of refuting the lies he’s joining in the telling of them – and in doing so, he’s crossed the Rubicon as far as libertarians and all those who oppose war with Iran are concerned.

To continue reading: Rand Paul: Fraud, Failure, Liar

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Opposition To Spy State, First Step To ‘Least Popular’ in Washington, by John V. Walsh

Posted on June 22, 2015 | Leave a comment

Once in a great while a politician does or says something right. In contemporary politics, that someone is usually Rand or Ron Paul. John V. Walsh, from antiwar.com, with three things Rand Paul has done right:

“I am the least popular guy in Washington.” Thus spoke Rand Paul at a stopover rally in Massachusetts on his way to New Hampshire on June 7. Who can doubt that claim after the events of the last few weeks.

When you have Barack Obama, John McCain, Harry Reid, Lindsay Graham all arrayed against you, you are bound to get the award for least popular guy in Empire’s capital city. An accolade of this magnitude also means that you must be doing something right. And that something right was Paul’s filibuster against the PATRIOT Act in the Senate in defiance of his own Party, an act that killed the PATRIOT Act dead.

Now here is the strange thing about Senator Paul’s acts of courage and defiance. Those who wish to see respect for privacy and the Bill of Rights withhold their praise from Paul! Is that not strange on the face of it? It is great to have sympathizers who are also critical when the occasion demands it – and Paul has these in abundance. But when a political figure like Rand Paul does something right, he also deserves praise. To withhold such praise will in the end weaken an ally and perhaps lead to his political demise.

So let’s get to the overdue praise right now. One loud full-throated cheer for Rand Paul – for his courageous stance that killed the PATRIOT Act and also for opposing Obama’s fake reform USA Freedom Act which has replaced it.

(If you have any doubts that the USA Freedom Act is a sham reform, the PATRIOT Act in disguise, here is what the ACLU’s director Jameel Jaffer had to say about the “USA Freedom Act”:

“This bill would make only incremental improvements, and at least one provision – the material-support provision – would represent a significant step backwards. The disclosures of the last two years make clear that we need wholesale reform.”

For more detail and a hint of how bad the USA Freedom Act really is, read what Jaffer said to Glenn Greenwald here.

If that does not convince you, think about this. Obama has been making love to the PATRIOT Act since he has been in office, advocating and winning its extension in 2011. But after Snowden’s revelations burst on the scene in 2013, the widespread anger made it impossible for PATRIOT to survive. So Obama offered a “reform.” It would have been very surprising, given Obama’s record, if that reform were anything other than a fig leaf. (And so it has turned out, and a pathetic fig leaf it is, incapable of providing adequate cover for our clothes-less spying Emperor.)

To continue reading: First Step To ‘Least Popular’ in Washington

http://original.antiwar.com/john-v-walsh/2015/06/21/opposition-to-spy-state-first-step-to-least-popular-in-washington/

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Blow Up the Tax Code and Start Over, by Rand Paul

Posted on June 18, 2015 | Leave a comment

A flat tax is not a new idea and the US economy and its debt situation would undoubtedly be in a lot better shape if it had been enacted back in 1996 when Steve Forbes made it a plank in his unsuccessful presidential campaign. The idea of progressivity—the more you earn the more of each marginal dollar the government gets to steal—on the grounds that higher earners should bear more of the cost of government, is specious. Under a flat tax, government would continue to steal, and higher earners would pay more tax and thus bear more of the cost of government. From Senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul, via a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

Some of my fellow Republican candidates for the presidency have proposed plans to fix the tax system. These proposals are a step in the right direction, but the tax code has grown so corrupt, complicated, intrusive and antigrowth that I’ve concluded the system isn’t fixable.

So on Thursday I am announcing an over $2 trillion tax cut that would repeal the entire IRS tax code—more than 70,000 pages—and replace it with a low, broad-based tax of 14.5% on individuals and businesses. I would eliminate nearly every special-interest loophole. The plan also eliminates the payroll tax on workers and several federal taxes outright, including gift and estate taxes, telephone taxes, and all duties and tariffs. I call this “The Fair and Flat Tax.”

President Obama talks about “middle-class economics,” but his redistribution policies have led to rising income inequality and negative income gains for families. Here’s what I propose for the middle class: The Fair and Flat Tax eliminates payroll taxes, which are seized by the IRS from a worker’s paychecks before a family ever sees the money. This will boost the incentive for employers to hire more workers, and raise after-tax income by at least 15% over 10 years.

Here’s why we have to start over with the tax code. From 2001 until 2010, there were at least 4,430 changes to tax laws—an average of one “fix” a day—always promising more fairness, more simplicity or more growth stimulants. And every year the Internal Revenue Code grows absurdly more incomprehensible, as if it were designed as a jobs program for accountants, IRS agents and tax attorneys.
Polls show that “fairness” is a top goal for Americans in our tax system. I envision a traditionally All-American solution: Everyone plays by the same rules. This means no one of privilege, wealth or with an arsenal of lobbyists can game the system to pay a lower rate than working Americans.

Most important, a smart tax system must turbocharge the economy and pull America out of the slow-growth rut of the past decade. We are already at least $2 trillion behind where we should be with a normal recovery; the growth gap widens every month. Even Mr. Obama’s economic advisers tell him that the U.S. corporate tax code, which has the highest rates in the world (35%), is an economic drag. When an iconic American company like Burger King wants to renounce its citizenship for Canada because that country’s tax rates are so much lower, there’s a fundamental problem.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/06/18/blow-up-the-tax-code-and-start-over/

To continue reading: Blow Up the Tax Code and Start Over

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Rand Paul’s New Crusade: The Secret 9/11 Docs, by Eleanor Clift

Posted on June 4, 2015 | Leave a comment

There are 28 pages of a 2002 Senate inquiry into the causes of 9/11 that have been kept from the public. There have been tantalizing hints of what is in those 28 pages, which may implicate either prominent Saudi Arabians, the government of that nation, or both in aiding the 9/11 perpetrators. With Rand Paul signing up, there may be enough political momentum for the public release of those pages. (Obama has promised twice to release them, but what’s an Obama promise worth?) From Eleanor Clift at thedailybeast.com:

Coming off the Patriot Act fight, the presidential hopeful is sponsoring a bill to declassify 28 pages of a 9/11 report that may blame Saudi Arabia.

Senator Rand Paul, the man of the hour when it comes to pushing back against government secrecy, is throwing his weight behind a fresh push to declassify 28 pages from a 2002 Senate inquiry into the causes of 9/11.

The Kentucky Republican is sponsoring legislation called the “Transparency for the Families of 9/11 Act,” which would force the release of the disputed pages. With his support, an important issue that has languished far too long may be finally gaining traction.

Paul is a big catch for the 28 pages movement, as advocates describe their effort. Former Florida senator Bob Graham, who has been banging the drum on the classified pages for years, will appear alongside Paul at a press conference at the Capitol on Tuesday morning to lend his gravitas to the occasion.

Graham led the Senate inquiry and drafted the pages that have been kept under wraps. Without violating his oath of secrecy about specifics, the Democrat has been quite outspoken, saying the redacted pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier” of the 9/11 attacks. He has also said the U.S. government’s protective stance toward the Saudis allows them to continue spreading the extreme Wahhabi version of Islam that has led to the rise of ISIS.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has long been on record supporting the disclosure, and he is co-sponsoring the legislation. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is described as “definitely interested,” and as the 9/11 family members continue to press for answers, they hope the moment is coming when this long-festering report will see the light of day, either by legislative action or by President Obama deciding enough is enough.

North Carolina Representative Walter Jones, an anti-war Republican who has worked tirelessly on behalf of the 9/11 families, said he started reaching out to members of the Senate after a House resolution he sponsored in two successive Congresses failed to gain enough momentum. Bringing Paul aboard at this time, when the nation is focused on issues of government overreach and secrecy, could generate the momentum that until now eluded him.

“This has never been about me, this is about the pain of the families,” Jones told The Daily Beast. He said he had been in contact with several senators, all Democrats, and their staffs. Then he noted, “Rand Paul is my choice for president, so I reached out to his daddy, who had me on his show to talk about it.”

Ron Paul has a radio show where he promotes his libertarian views, and father and son agree that you can always look for excuses not to release something, but absent clear harm to national security, government is not supposed to keep things secret because they’re embarrassing.

“I don’t know if it might be embarrassing to the Bush administration, how close they were to the Saudi family,” Jones said. “I just don’t know. I can’t put my fingers on it.”

Jones and Massachusetts Democratic Representative Stephen Lynch wrote a letter to Obama almost a year ago reminding him that on two separate occasions he told family members that he would declassify the pages. “And he hasn’t kept his word,” Jones said, despite numerous conversations he and Lynch have had in the interim with administration officials.

The introduction that precedes the redacted pages says that in the course of the Senate committee’s inquiry, it found pretty significant leads about the possible sources of support for the 9/11 attackers. But unable to reach firm conclusions within the time frame of the report, and with the resources at hand, the committee passed the information to the FBI. Whether the FBI followed up with sufficient zeal is left to the imagination, and listening to Senator Graham, the answer seems to be no.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/02/rand-paul-s-new-crusade-the-secret-9-11-docs.html

To continue reading: Rand Paul’s New Crusade: the Secret 9/11 Docs

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The Redemption of Rand Paul, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on June 1, 2015 | 1 comment

Has Rand Paul rediscovered his inner Libertarian? He tried to play footsie with the Republican party’s interventionists, moving their direction, but there are so many true blue interventionists in the party that Paul was never going to get their money or their votes. The flip side of foreign intervention, the external growth of the state, is domestic repression, the internal growth of the state. Paul made a lonely stand against renewal of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which supposedly authorizes the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records (except the 2nd US Circuit Court of appeals said that it doesn’t). Time ran out on Section 215, although civil liberties’ advocates shouldn’t get too overjoyed, because it looks like the misnamed USA Freedom Act may become law. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.org:

If one of the very worst provisions of the Patriot Act – which the government has erroneously and illegally interpreted to gather the phone records of each and every American – expires, we’ll have Senator Rand Paul to thank.

And the truth is, we can’t thank him enough.

Yes, I’ve been critical of the Senator in this space and elsewhere, and yet with this brave stance – and up against a veritable storm of disdain and contempt from the Washington cognoscenti – he has in large part redeemed himself.

With everyone from the President to John McCain and Lindsey Graham attacking Sen. Paul for supposedly “endangering” the national security, the Senator has not only stood his ground but he’s also articulated the libertarian position on the utter impermissibility of what our government is doing and its dire implications for the future of our republic:

“Forcing us to choose between our rights and our safety is a false choice and we are better than that as a nation and as a people,” Paul tweeted. “It’s why I have been seeking for months to have a full, open and honest debate on this issue – a debate that never came.

“Let me be clear: I acknowledge the need for a robust intelligence agency and for a vigilant national security. I believe we must fight terrorism, and I believe we must stand strong against our enemies. But we do not need to give up who we are to defeat them. In fact, we must not. There has to be another way. We must find it together. So tomorrow, I will force the expiration of the NSA illegal spy program.”

There is, of course, “another way,” as pointed out here. The government and its law enforcement agencies have plenty of legal alternatives to scooping up our communications indiscriminately, en masse: they’ll just have to put their lawyers on overtime and start obeying the law. This is the real essence of the fight Sen. Paul is making on our behalf: he’s fighting – almost alone – against the utter lawlessness of our rulers, who believe they can do anything to anyone and get away with it.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/05/31/the-redemption-of-rand-paul/

To continue reading: The Redemption of Rand Paul

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Rand Paul’s Munich, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on March 11, 2015 | 1 comment

From Justin Raimondo, at antiwar.com:

Rand Paul’s Munich

In signing the Cotton letter he’s become the Neville Chamberlain of the liberty movement

If you read the letter circulated by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), and signed by forty-seven GOP Senators, addressed to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” what’s striking is its condescending tone:

“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system….”

Sounding like Miss Manners instructing a boorish host on the proper placement of table napkins, Cotton goes on to make a series of highly debatable assertions about the how the US Constitution regulates the making of international agreements and the role of Congress in the process. He reminds the Iranians that all treaties must be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, while neglecting to say how the as-yet-to-be-reached agreement with Iran qualifies as a treaty – say, in the same sense that the establishment of NATO did. This a technical legal point that is nevertheless significant: treaties have no time limit, but a principal objection to the pending agreement with Iran made by its opponents is that it is limited in duration to, at most, ten to fifteen years.

A “so-called congressional-executive agreement,” Sen. Cotton avers, also requires congressional approval: that President Obama will doubtless bypass Congress in this matter, however, is left unmentioned. Also ignored is the fact that the members of that august body will have no recourse but to sit there and take it. Many of the measures designed to isolate Iran can be lifted by executive order. Eventually, however, the President will have to come to Congress to lift the worst of the sanctions permanently, but by that time, as Dan Drezner points out in the Washington Post, the political and diplomatic consequences of reneging on the agreement are likely to deter Congress and whoever sits in the Oval Office from backtracking.

The letter, in short, is without any real substance: as Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif noted, it betrays a lack of understanding of international law, not to mention the recent history of US executive agreements with other nations – the overwhelming majority of which have never been subject to congressional approval. Zarif went on to point out that “the world is not the United States,” a geographical reality neocons like Sen. Cotton have trouble acknowledging. “If the current negotiation with P5+1 results in a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” Zarif observed, “it will not be a bilateral agreement between Iran and the US, but rather one that will be concluded with the participation of five other countries, including all permanent members of the Security Council, and will also be endorsed by a Security Council resolution.”

Will the United States risk alienating its allies and defying the Security Council in order to appease Benjamin Netanyahu? Sen. Cotton certainly hopes so, but the chances of this happening are close to nil.

The Cotton letter, said Zarif, is a “propaganda ploy,” but on whose behalf? Clearly it is a follow-up to Netanyahu’s speech before Congress and is designed to torpedo the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran. A shorter version might have read simply: “Are you sure you want to sign an agreement with these guys – when it will probably be rendered inoperative once we Republicans take the White House?”

Given that, the fact that among the signers were three prospective GOP presidential hopefuls – Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul – underscores the propagandistic nature of this ploy. That Rubio and Cruz signed on is hardly surprising: they have been among the most bombastic of the Republican field when it comes to foreign policy, never deviating from the Fox News-neocon party line. The real stunner was the conquest of the sometime anti-interventionist junior Senator from Kentucky.

I say “conquest” because, although he voted for sanctioning Iran in 2012, Sen. Paul has recently been a vocal opponent of imposing new sanctions, and has broken with his Republican colleagues on the whole question of how to deal with Tehran, averring that we must give diplomacy a chance. Less than two months ago, speaking at a forum for GOP presidential aspirants, he directly confronted Rubio and Cruz:

“Are you ready to send ground troops into Iran? Are you ready to bomb them? Are you ready to send in 100,000 troops?I’m a big fan of trying to exert and trying the diplomatic option as long as we can. If it fails, I will vote to resume sanctions and I would vote to have new sanctions. But if you do it in the middle of negotiations, you’re ruining it.”

If Sen. Paul is against “ruining it,” why did he sign a letter that seeks to do exactly that? Is he now ready to send ground troops into Iran? Is he ready to bomb them?

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/03/10/rand-pauls-munich/

To continue reading: Rand Paul’s Munich

See also: Rand Paul: Iran Letter Was Meant to Strengthen President’s Hand

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Rand Paul: Iran Letter Was Meant to Strengthen President’s Hand, by Ed Krayewski

Posted on March 11, 2015 | 2 comments

Rand Paul defends his signing of the letter that 46 Republican senators cosigned and sent to Iran. From Ed Krayewski, at reason.com:

In an interview with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on the Today show this morning, Matt Lauer skipped over the motivation for Senate Republicans’ open letter to Iran and asked Paul instead whether if he were president he would want a group of senators “undermining” his delicate negotiations.

Paul rejected the premise, claiming he signed the letter because he wanted to “strengthen the president’s hand” by reminding Iran of the U.S.’s own hardliners. Paul also reiterated that sanctions on Iran would have to be lifted by Congress. Watch this portion of the interview below:

Paul was working on a more “moderate” sanctions bill with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), but nothing in the multilateral Iran negotiations has yet required any change to sanctions legislation. If a deal is agreed to, Congress will have to lift much of the U.S. sanctions by repealing the associated laws. Congress could decide not to do so but that decision wouldn’t stop other countries parties to the deal, France, the U.K, Germany, Russia, and China from lifting their own sanctions, without which the American sanctions are far weaker.

The letter from Senate Republicans to Iran treads no new ground—in that way it was similar to Netanyahu’s address to Congress earlier this month, targeted more toward appealing to the domestic hardline audience than actually influencing negotiations. As with the Netanyahu address, the Iran letter also had some Obama supporters screaming “treason.” Those sensibilities, naturally, were absent when Democrats tried to “undermine” (woefully inadequately) President Bush’s foreign policy. Joe Biden thought the letter was beneath the Senate’s dignity but when he was in the Senate he didn’t shy away from calling out the foreign policies of multiple presidents.

On Twitter Glenn Greenwald pointed to a Teddy Roosevelt quote popular in that era, that a president “should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct,” and that anything less than being at liberty to speak out about his actions was “base and servile.” Negotiations with Iran could yet prove to be a success—especially if they result in no new responsibilities for the U.S. to monitor or subsidize Iran’s nuclear program, and no obligation for the U.S. to attack on the whim of other countries’ decision-makers.

Rand Paul is not his father, but neither does he appear to be thirsty for a war with Iran, an idea with surprising staying power on the national political scene. It’s no Munich moment for Paul, who still seems like he’d be a more authentically anti-war (or pro–less war) candidate than any serious contender this century, the present occupant of the White House included. But even if negotiations are a positive step, speaking out against them is certainly not “treason,” not even for elected officials.

http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/11/rand-paul-iran-letter-was-meant-to-stren

See also, “Rand Paul’s Munich“

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