Ralph Nader all the way =)

Ron Paul and his CIA conspiracies reminds me of another RP, Ross Perot. He was a great independent candidate then wigged out and became a "stealth helicopters are monitoring me" conspiracy nut job.

It really is too bad. I don't know if I can hang up my Ron Paul 2008 poster this year.

Oh, well in that case...Epic. Fucking. Fail.

LOL, now that's funny

Yeah, I Epid. Fucking. Failed. by not relaying the humor well enough both times. Sorry 'bout that.

DOH! Epic. Fucking Fail. for spelling it Epid! Stoopid Draugnar! Stoopid!

I want Ron Paul in. Only one with any fiscal sense. End the Fed!

And anyone who doesn't think the CIA is deep into double-dealing is kidding themselves.

Oh, the CIA most definitely are (Iran-Contra anyone?) but spies are suppsed to be spies. And look at Herman Cain for fiscal responsibility.

Anyone who thinks the CIA has carried out a coup against the United States government is kidding themselves.

http://nation.foxnews.com/ron-paul/2010/01/21/ron-paul-cia-conduced-coup-us

Well, there are those who think Oswald and Ruby were CIA stooges in the plot to assassinate Kennedy...

Invictus, before you start debating the grown-ups, do your homework first and connect the dots, please. Thank you.

"Ron Paul and his CIA conspiracies reminds me of another RP, Ross Perot. He was a great independent candidate then wigged out and became a "stealth helicopters are monitoring me" conspiracy nut job."

What Ron Paul 'CIA Conspiracies' are you referring to?

And Perot's stated reason for dropping out was that the Bush family's dirty tricks team was going to disrupt his daughter's wedding. Do you have any proof that that wasn't the case? Such a feat would not at all be unheard of and not particularly difficult to pull off if they had the goods. Remember, this is the same team that would go on to say that McCain fathered a love child with a black prostitute, among other allegations (some true, some not).

Or do you really think a hard working, wildly successful, and extremely patriotic businessman like Ross Perot just woke up one day and said "I don't feel like running for president any more" on a whim, only to change his mind a few weeks later?

I think he's referring to the 1996 run, Tolstoy.

As for the CIA conspiracies, go to that link, for one. He's been going down the Alex Jones roads for a while now, and that saddens me. He's so right about so many things, but he's dangerously wrong and ignorant about the rest.

From your link, Invictus:

"They’re the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries." Yup. Don't know how anyone can dispute that this is happening. Remember also that a lot of the Special Forces teams who conducted the Afghan War in 2001-2002 were given their orders not by military officers but by spooks.
"They’re in businesses" - True. The CIA, like all intelligence agencies, often creates front businesses to provide cover for covert operations.
"in drug businesses" - Also true. See Gary Webb's Dark Alliance (for starters)
"they take out dictators" - Ding ding ding. See John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Operation Ajax, all those silly colored revolutions in the last ten years, etc., etc., etc.

"I think the military would laugh at the notion that they take orders from the CIA. They take orders from the President and are accountable to Congress."

There's a very good case to be made that Bush Sr. was a lifelong CIA asset (long before being appointed CIA director, a job in a field for which - officially at least - he had absolutely no experience). See Russ Baker's "Family of Secrets", among others. And it's not at all hard for the CIA to gin up a war that otherwise wouldn't happen by selectively filtering intelligence - remember that Presidents order the military around based on information he receives from sources like the CIA. See the Iraq War, for instance.

The fact that the Afghan War was and now is again a largely CIA operation does not mean that the tail is wagging the dog. It just means that the government has come to its senses and is using a more selective strategy.

The rest of your points (apart from the disgusting smear at the brave Color Revolutions against corrupt post-Soviet governments) do have some merit. However, they are nothing at all like evidence that there's been a CIA coup and these people now run our government.

It's one thing to say the CIA has done bad things in the past and is engaged in highly questionable activities now, quite another to claim they're a rouge group hijacking the totality of America policy making. This crazy thinking discredits legitimate inquest into the CIA's actions, and poisons the other positions of Ron Paul which this country desperately needs.

"Newt Gingrich. Only one with any fiscal sense. Forget the fact that he's been married 3 times, if the dude can do that and still have money in his pocket then he has to be able to fix this crap hole economy that Obama has made even worse with the stimulus package and overspending."

this

LOL, brave Color Revolutions.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3472049,00.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BHH411B.html
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f27_1220363911

Surprise, surprise. Putin33 opposes Ukrainians and Georgians standing up after stolen elections, Kyrgyz rising against a corrupt regime, Serbians kicking out the genocidal tyrant Milosevic, and Lebanese forcing the Syrian troops out.

Absolutely impossible people in those countries had legitimate concerns against the new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss governments left over from the cold War era. No, it must have been the omnipotent United States meddling.

I'm pretty sure "There’s been a coup, have you heard? It’s the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military" is a rhetorical device, in the same vein that someone might say "Corporations have taken over America" in speaking out against corporate America's influence on politics.

I find that a lot of the times I find a story that rips Ron Paul it turns out that what he said and what the writer implied are hardly ever the same thing.

---

Also, anyone who said Newt Gingrich is the only candidate with any fiscal sense needs to look around some.

Well, as a rhetorical device it certainly isn't presidential.

I know exactly what you mean because he is often misrepresented. But this is a video.

Invictus, we have people on record saying they meddled, with large amounts of money and training. Ever heard of the Albert Einstein Institute? Ever heard of Gene Sharp? They openly brag about their role in these "revolutions". But no amount of admission would ever get you to criticize the benevolence of American empire.

And anyway I was addressing the idea that these 'Color Revolutions' were somehow improvements. Evidently it doesn't phase you that the Orange Revolution was full of anti-semites, and Yushchenko was happily giving awards to fascists who implemented pogroms. It also doesn't phase you that the Orange Revolution itself engaged in voter fraud and intimidation, with ridiculous results of 90%+ voters supporting Yushchenko in western towns. Yushchenko used UNSO thugs to intimidate people into backing him.

You accept the western narrative without question. Ditto the South Ossetian war and our hero Saakashvili. We have *video evidence* of Georgians attacking South Ossetia indiscriminately prior to the Russian intervention. This didn't get reported by the western media. But you'll ignore that too.



But you'll ignore that too.

faze, not phase...ugh

It really isn't, and I'm not sure why he chose to criticize the CIA during a presidential run. It is in the same vein as a lot of other things he goes after (that is, done on a basis of principles instead of what-issues-can-I-win-elections-on), but I feel like there wasn't much need to sound off on the CIA's policies. It's not just grandstanding -- scaling back the CIA's level of interventionism is no doubt going to happen under his hypothetical presidency, because it doesn't fit in the slightest with his noninterventionist foreign policy -- but it also doesn't make much sense. Just run on the strict noninterventionist policy platform like always instead of calling attention to something that'll get you labeled a conspiracy theorist, I say.

I do maintain he's not being a conspiracy theorist here, though. Tolstoy already explained how what he actually said was indeed happening. And if you accept that the "CIA coup" was a (badly executed) rhetorical device instead of a literal conspiracy claim, I don't think what he said was really that controversial.

The misrepresentation comes not from what he actually said (see last paragraph) but from stories accompanying them that say things like this:

"I think the military would laugh at the notion that they take orders from the CIA. They take orders from the President and are accountable to Congress. We know this, because we’re rational adults and not conspiracy theorists."

Where the author takes that rhetorical device literally, labels him a conspiracy theorist, and on top of that gets things factually wrong -- for one, the Afghan War was basically run by the CIA, as Tolstoy noted already.

It doesn't help that the author is clearly and unequivocally biased. There was no attempt whatsoever to interpret what Paul was saying in anything more than the most extreme light. Unfortunately, that's a far more universal criticism of reporting today than I'd like to think.

There are three answers:

1) which possible nominee would make the best president. Huntsman is my answer, but Christie supersedes him if he decided to run.

2) which candidate would I actually *like to see* (i.e. does not have a good chance of beating Obama) - Palin in this case, since Trump and other clowns are out.

3) which candidate actually will be the GOP nominee - Mitt Romney, clearly.