Truth Realm
columnist: creator

Topic: Ron Paul
An Open Letter To Joseph Farah From A Fellow Christian

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Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily has more than once published emotional arguments against Ron Paul. There are some flaws in Mr. Farah's logic.

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by creator
(Libertarian)
Thursday, December 27, 2007

♣ An Open Letter To Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily

Dear Mr. Farah,

I have long read and often admired your writing at World Net Daily. You have raised many important issues and exposed much evil to the light. For instance, I greatly appreciate your warning to homeschoolers about Mike Huckabee and the NEA, and your comments  about his record on taxation and immigration.

However, your reputation in my eyes was recently tarnished when I read this article about Dr. Ron Paul.

I note that you have for unfathomable reasons decided to add your voice to the cacophonous chorus of those who seek to diminish Ron Paul. I would have expected better from you than the misleading remarks you published on December 27th. Nevertheless, I hope to appeal to your sense of reason and fair play by paraphrasing the appeal you once made to Mike Huckabee:

I write this column today not to condemn you.
I write it to share with you a Christian brother's candid view of your logical fallacies.
I write in the hopes you may see where you have fallen short in your judgement of Ron Paul.
I write thinking there is still time for a course correction.

Your arguments are riddled with logical fallacies. You seem to have developed the "straw man fallacy" to an art that could singlehandedly fill several stables:

"He and his supporters seem to think America can, in 2008, decide we just don't want to be involved with determined foreign enemies who have sought to destroy the U.S. since it became a nation."

"Be involved?" If by involvement, you mean preemptive wars, then perhaps you're right. Americans by and large no longer want to "be involved" in killing and dying on foreign shores in undeclared wars that benefit no one but the "defense" contractors. We would far rather engage in dialog, trade, and leading by example.

"Determined foreign enemies?" Where are the armies such a phrase seeks to conjure up? I see none threatening our shores. "Islamic terrorism is a threat that must be dealt with on a case by case basis, with surgical precison, not by indiscriminant warmaking.

"He and his supporters seem to think that America itself is to blame for creating its enemies because of its own interventionist meddling."

You might want to go back to the debate interchange between Dr. Paul and Rudy Guiliani last May and see that those "thoughts" find their source in studies and testimony that say exactly that. Dr. Paul has from the beginning opposed the war in Iraq but is very much for a strong military. Won't you please go back and read your own publication? Patrick Buchanan clearly answered the objection you raise today in his editorial after the May debate.

Of the Iraq war, Dr. Paul said before it began, "It is immoral and unjust, because it has nothing to do with US security and because Iraq has not initiated aggression against us." You have in the past complimented him on this principled stance, yet you now mischaracterize his words thus:

"I will never accept that our enemies will leave us alone if we leave them alone."

Dr. Paul has never claimed that our enemies will "leave us alone." His position is that they will be less likely to hate and attack us if we stop violently intervening on their own territory. Furthermore, an authentic national security based on a strong military protection within our own borders, combined with effective foreign intelligence and swift retaliation for any overt terrorist acts, is more than adequate for our defense.

"America's No. 1 foreign enemy... Islamic radicalism... we'll all be dead wrong if we follow his prescription"

Now you are using hyperbole instead of logic, appealing to our fear. We'll all be dead? You sound like Rudy Giuliani, raising an irrational spectre of fear that is utterly unjustified by history or any reasonable analysis. As you beat the drum of terror about a foreign boogyman, you in fact energize and elevate our number one domestic enemy, fear itself. That is where the real problem lies. The kind of fear you promote is the very craven tool used to justify an appalling and unprecedented destruction of civil liberties under the Bush administration. The attack of 9-11, as despicable as it clearly was, killed far fewer Americans than die annually in traffic accidents -- yet we have not declared a "War on Traffic Fatalities," have we?

As Judge Andrew Napolitano writes in his brilliant book, A Nation of Sheep (p. xi):

[T]he Bush Administration has systematically attacked and diminished virtually every freedom and right guaranteed by the Constitution: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of association, the right to privacy, the right not to self incriminate, the right to counsel, the right to speedy trials, the right to fair trials, the right to avoid cruel and unusual punishment, even the right to be set free after acquittal! . . . . President Bush has broken laws he swore to uphold, and declined to enforce laws that he has himself signed into existence . . .

Of course, Ron Paul's American Freedom Agenda Act would reverse all of that. Your internet publication, WorldNetDaily, claims to be "A Free Press for a Free People." Why not promote and support Dr. Paul's efforts for freedom?

"if we run from this enemy now, our days as a country living in relative peace and prosperity are over."

This is another straw man. Which "enemy?" Iraq? Islamic radicalism? Islamofascism? Please be clear.

Iraq is a nation thousands of miles away. Iraq has never attacked us and has no demonstrable connection with terrorism. Dr. Paul says "We just marched in, we can just march out." - I see no "running" implied here. If you mean Islamic radicalism, that is not an "enemy" but an idea. You can't run from an idea.

As to your comment about "relative peace and prosperity," relative to what, sir? You have a strange definition of "peace" if to you peace means sending thousands of our young people to die in undeclared foreign wars. And your definition of "prosperity" must be the prosperity of Haliburton, GE, and other members of the corporatist military industrial complex, while the man in the street watches the value of a dollar plummet as more billions of dollars are printed and shipped around the world to pay for bloody foreign engagements.

"I thought there was much to like and admire about Ron Paul his outspoken support for the Constitution, the fact that he didn't get caught up in the trappings of Washington power, that he wasn't a hypocrite."

You damn him with faint praise, dismissing his clear and undeniable nobleness. It is you, sir, who are carelessly becoming the hypocrite.

"a system of plausible deniability -- hundreds of millions of dollars... Ron Paul knows his vote against his own earmarks for pork is meaningless to the actual outcome."

I will put Ron Paul's patient and persistent principled public votes in congress, year after year, up against this kind of careless nit-picking any day. While his individual vote on each and every one of those bills may have been inadequate to change the immediate outcome, the testimony of those votes is clear and a matter of history. The example of Dr. Paul's tireless stand has begun to raise an army of Americans who are ashamed of what we have let Washington become, who are inspired by Dr. Paul's persistent efforts for freedom, and who will not rest until there is a massive sea-change in "politics as usual." Mark my words, Mr. Farah, when you see the ultimate "actual outcome" you will have to eat your words.

"is he really any less guilty of picking taxpayer pockets than the rest of them?"

Ron Paul has never voted for a tax increase. Ron Paul is in no way picking taxpayer pockets. He is the only candidate who has proposed a plausible plan for actually ending, once and for all, the tyranny of the IRS and of unchecked federal spending enabled by fiat currency. You sir, are using smoke and mirrors seeking to divert attention from the phenomenal distinctives that make Ron Paul stand head and shoulders above the rest.

"Is he defending pork as a good way of bringing money back to taxpayers? Or is he condemning it as the waste we all know it to be?"

Here you are substituting one thing for another. No, sir, he is not defending pork in any way. The question at issue, which Ron Paul alone has had the courage to publicly raise, is "Whose money is it, anyway?" Does it belong to government or to the people? Money extracted at the point of a gun (yes, Mr. Farah, the IRS employs armed agents to extract money by force from the lifeblood, sweat, and tears of American taxpayers) is robbery, plain and simple, no matter how you try to dress it in the emperor's clothes. The householder has every moral right to his own money, and to defend it by whatever means may have become necessary.

"Ron Paul is just another politician using the system for his own empowerment,"

"His own empowerment?" He seeks less control, less power for the federal leviathan!

"his own ego"

"His own ego?" Close friends like Aaron Russo had to practically beg Dr. Paul to run for office.

 "and defending this abuse of the Constitution"

"Abuse of the Constitution?" How dare you, sir! Dr. Paul is virtually its only true defender!

 "with his own relativistic moral code."

"Relativistic?" I would match Ron Paul's morality against anyone. This is slander of the basest sort, and does not at all become you, Mr. Farah!

Like you once addressed Mike Huckabee hoping for a course correction, I also will hope for you to return to the advice you yourself gave candidates less than two months ago. I hope you will review your own words in that article and candidly acknowledge that, of ALL the candidates presently running for the Presidency, Dr. Ron Paul truly and authentically comes closest to actually meeting, and more accurately, exceeding every one of your wishes.

"I still had a modicum of respect for the candidate himself – until his big moment on "Meet the Press."

I might possibly recover some respect for you if you will but acknowledge the fallacies in your analysis of Dr. Paul and issue an appropriate apology. I would honor you even more greatly on the day you come to your senses and endorse Dr. Ron Paul for president.

I consider your hasty piece on Dr. Paul today as somewhat analogous to the pre-conversion expressions of another Paul, the Apostle, during the time he was breathing out threatenings and slaughter against God's people. I pray that even as Paul "saw the light" and became one of the strongest supporters of Jesus who ever lived, you also might become a staunch supporter of Dr. Ron Paul. When it comes to worthiness among presidential candidates, Ron Paul has no peer.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Dann McCreary (aka creator)
- Permission to copy with attribution granted.

Find out more about Ron Paul here.

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2007 creator, all rights reserved.
Published: Thursday, December 27, 2007
Last modified: Friday, December 28, 2007

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