December 27, 2011

Ron Paul

Ron Paul

Nelson Linder, president of the Austin NAACP, speaks favorably of Ron Paul’s campaign, especially his foreign-policy stance. Which other candidate expresses stricter antiwar sentiments than Ron Paul? The Texan congressman has consistently opposed US imperialism from the beginning of his career—there’s a book detailing these speeches. He even went where few politicians would in supporting WikiLeaks.

If he was racist, why would he continue to speak out against the outrageous number of civilian deaths resulting from these wars in the Middle East? And why is he one of the only candidates who sternly opposes the TSA’s racial profiling here at home?

Capital punishment disproportionately affects blacks. After the practice was reinstated in 1976—it had been suspended for four years due to the Furman v. Georgia ruling—University of Iowa law professor David C. Baldus published a study on the pre-suspension environment. He discovered in examining over 2,000 homicide cases in Georgia that capital punishment was more often applied to black defendants, especially when the victim was white.

The ACLU concurs. “If you’re rich, you get away with it. If you’re poor and you’re from the inner city, you’re more likely to be prosecuted and convicted,” Paul has stated. Ron Paul disagrees with capital punishment for that very reason.

The current president has extended these policies, as well as the Middle East wars, without much protest from the standard news outlets. He overrides state laws to enforce the harmful drug war. And he set a record on the border front, deporting nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year.

Nowhere on Ron Paul’s campaign website does the word “deport” exist. In fact, one of his immigration reforms includes streamlining the entry process for foreigners.

Assuming Paul gets the GOP nod, we’ll be left with a choice between the candidate who takes $500 from a racist and uses it to stop the wars or the one who takes millions from big banks and uses it to escalate them.

Obama apologists can feel free to hold up that race card when the debates get tougher, but libertarians can hold it up longer.

 

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