The Blog of toussaint

There was only one man on the stage at the Republican debates that i could see myself voting for and that is radical Ron Paul.  He is a true conservative who does not believe in nation building; who would not wage preemptive wars; who wants less government interference in our lives; and who would not be so hypocritical as to use nukes to stop Iran from building nukes.  i could almost vote for McCain, but the cows would come home on their own before our boys would from Iraq.  McCain did win this debate hands down, though.  He had the two moments that you will see tomorrow.  One was when he stood up to answer the woman whose brother had died in Iraq who and wanted to know when we could get out.  You could see him choke up sincerely when he thanked her for her sacrifice to this nation and in 1 minute had her convinced that we can not just up and leave.  The other moment was when he came back at Tancredo who was being his racist self talking about English as our official language.  McCain answered, Muchas gracias, and went on to put a human face on the people who were being discussed as if they were some kind of commodity.  He highlighted the service to this country of Latinos in all of this country's wars and even some fighting right now in Iraq who are not even citizens yet. 

Why is it so hard for these guys to admit that Iraq was a huge mistake?  None but Ron Paul would do so.  And Romney is either dumb or crazy:  when answering the question, had we known then what we know now about the WMDs would we still have gone in, he said that if Saddam had just let the inspectors in we would not have had to go to war.  WHAT!?  Where was he when Hans Blix was telling the world that he looked everywhere that our government  told him to look and he could not find a thing? In fact, Bush is the one who kicked out the inspectors 3 days before we went to war.  You can't just go around revising history when ever it suits you.  And Guiliani says the Democrats are in denial.

Except for Paul, on almost every issue these guys are exactly the same.  Let's go down the list and you will see what i mean. 

Iraq:  all agree to stay except Paul.

Iran: all agree that we have to stop them from getting nukes even if we have to use nukes to do it, except Paul.

Immigration:  all hate the current bill, except Paul and McCain.

Abortion: all pro-life except Guiliani, Paul is pro-life but he would leave it up to the states to decide.

Pardoning Scooter:  all would except Paul and Gilmore.

Don't ask don't tell:  all would keep it except Paul (are you noticing a trend here?).

Global warming:  all say we have to do something but they would not sat what.

Health care:  all hate "socialized" health care but agree that the system is in need of fundamental change.

All in all, a boring debate where i did not learn anything new. No one would take of the gloves.

Predictions:  if McCain keeps telling people what they don't want to hear sometimes and keeps talking straight, he will rise in the polls again and wrap this thing up by January.  If McCain doesn't get the nomination, the Republicans will lose:  all the other men on that stage have fatal flaws.  What about Fred Thompson, you ask?  Well he is just McCain minus immigration and because he has gotten in to late, all the money will have been sucked up by the time he gets serious about running.

There were two good moments in the debate.  One was hilarious: lightning was messing with the sound equipment, and when Guiliani was talking about his pro-life stand on abortion lightning crackled and McCain and Romney both stepped away as if they did not want to get struck down along with Rudy.  To give Rudy credit, he played it off pretty well by looking around just to make sure he was ok.  The other great moment happened right before that, when Wolf quoted a priest who called Rudy Pontius Pilate because of his disingenuous stance on abortion. Rudy says abortion is wrong but he won't do anything to stop it.  That hypocritical statement kind of summed up the evening.  Every time i heard Rudy speak, all i could think is that these ain't yo daddy's Republicans.