The Ron Paul Effect

The Ron Paul Effect
Antiwar Republican makes waves – and the Establishment is in shock
by Justin Raimondo

The times, they are a changin' – and the signs are all around us. The American people are sick unto death of the Iraq war, and this growing dissatisfaction with American foreign policy spans the political spectrum: it isn't just the Left that is singing "we ain't marchin' anymore," it's moderates and even conservatives. The recantation of Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones was the harbinger of a mounting trend, and as disaster piles on fresh disaster in the killing fields of Mesopotamia, the conservative case for the war gets harder to make – and more prominent figures on the Right are dissenting from the Bush-neocon orthodoxy.

Conservative dissent on the war question has been present from the very beginning: Pat Buchanan has been a vocal critic of the War Party since Gulf War I. The American Conservative magazine, which Buchanan co-founded with Taki Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell, was launched to give voice to those on the Right who reject the neoconservative "liberationism" of the Bush administration as a "Jacobin" invention, as Claes Ryn, a prominent conservative professor, so trenchantly put it. Others have since joined Buchanan, Ryn, and the other conservatives and libertarians who were denounced as "unpatriotic" by David "Axis of Evil" Frum, the neocon enforcer of political correctness, in the pages of National Review – when he announced that he and all good little movement (neo)conservatives would henceforth "turn our backs" on those perfectly awful "unpatriotic conservatives."

Read on: http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10995