With the new members of both the House and the Senate being sworn in today, I thought it appropriate to post a news article from Monday December 13th found in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It appears that some are finally warming up to the views of Rep. Ron Paul. Enjoy!
WASHINGTON -- As virtually all of Washington was declaring WikiLeaks' disclosures of secret diplomatic cables an act of treason, Rep. Ron Paul was applauding the organization for exposing the United States' "delusional foreign policy." For this, the conservative blog RedState dubbed him 'al-Qaeda's favorite member of Congress." It was hardly the first time that Paul had marched to his own beat. During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, he was best remembered for declaring in a debate that the 9/11 attacks were the Muslim world's response to U.S. military intervention around the globe. A fellow candidate, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York, demanded that he take back the words -- a request Paul refused. During his 20 years in Congress, Paul has staked out the lonely end of the 434-1 votes against legislation he considers unconstitutional, even on issues as ceremonial as granting Mother Teresa a Congressional Gold Medal. His colleagues have dubbed him "Dr. No," but his wife will insist that they have the spelling wrong: He is really Dr. Know. Now it appears others are beginning to credit him with some wisdom -- or at least to acknowledge his following. After years of blocking him from a leadership position, Paul's fellow Republicans have named him chairman of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which oversees the Federal Reserve as well as the valuation of the dollar. Paul has written a book called "End the Fed"; he embraces Austrian economic thought, which holds that the government has no role in regulating the economy. He wants to return to the gold standard. Many of the new Republicans in the next congress campaigned on precisely the issues Paul has been talking about for 40 years: forbidding Congress from any action not explicitly authorized in the Constitution, eliminating entire federal departments as unconstitutional and checking the power of the Fed. He has been called the "intellectual grandfather of the Tea Party," but he also is the real father of the "tea party" movement's most high-profile winner, Sen. -elect Rand Paul of Kentucky. (The two will be roommates in Ron Paul's Virginia condominium, "I told him as long as he didn't expect me to cook," the elder Paul said. "I'm not going to take care of him the way his mother did.") Republicans had blocked Paul from leading the monetary policy panel once before, and banking executives had reportedly urged them to do so again. But Republicans on Capitol Hill increasingly recognize that Paul has a following -- among his supporters from 2008 and within the Tea Party, which helped the Republicans recapture the House majority by picking up Paul's longstanding and highly vocal opposition to the federal debt. Television interviewers now use words like "vindicated" to describe him -- a term that Paul, a 75-year-old obstetrician with the manner of a country doctor, brushes off. If there is vindication, Paul says, it is for Austrian economic theory -- an anti-Keynesian model that many economists dismiss as magical thinking. [Austrian Theory] argues that markets operate properly only when they are unfettered by government regulation. It holds that the government should not have a central bank or dictate economic or monetary policy. Once the government begins any economic planning, such thinking goes, it ends up making all the economic decisions for its citizens, essentially enslaving them. [end article].
This turn around in Rep. Paul's portrayal in the media is not really surprising to me. Republicans never accept an unpopular message like entitlement slashing, or military reduction, until they have lost their seat of power. Then, when they have a common enemy to rally against, they all become liberty - minded, and anti - government, forgetting that their policies were just as conducive to the problem as those "darn liberals". With the new congress sworn in today, I would dare to dream that this time it will be different, but frankly, I'm sick of disappointment.
