Ron Paul is a Baby Elephant
From a recent Salon article:
He told me that to understand Paul, I had to think of the American people as a baby elephant, chained to a tree. "It realizes that it can only walk 5 feet in each direction. It realizes that it is a slave. When it grows old enough, it is strong enough to break away from the tree. But it doesn't know." He pauses, to let this sink in -- the American people are a captive animal unaware of its own power to claim liberty. "When was the last time you tried it?" he asks me of breaking free. "Maybe you are strong enough."
And so for thousands of his supporters, Paul has begun to symbolize freedom itself. He is the baby elephant who broke his chains, the Guy Fawkes for a new millennium. And with his candidacy, his supporters believe he shows a way out of the morass in Iraq, a way away from the burden of taxation and the fear of economic insecurity, a way to strike back against the creeping power of the federal government and the free-spending culture of Washington. He is a political savior for people who feel trapped by two political parties that have failed to solve the nation's problems, by a political dialogue that often skirts the real issues, and by a federal government that expands its power by marketing fear. Ron Paul, they hope, is the way out. "It's like do or die," says Linda Hannan, a 35-year-old paralegal from Staten Island, N.Y., as the Murphy's celebrations continue. "Liberty and freedom are our future."
I thought the illustration apt. Anyhow, the rest of the article was okay. The things I dislike about so many articles reporting on Ron Paul is how they gloss over some very important planks to his campaign platform without explaining what they mean or his reasoning behind them. For example, reporters are quick to say he'd "eliminate the Department of Education." As an audience-questioner at Paul's Google interview showed, most people think that means he wants to eliminate public education! That's just ridiculous, and it's sad that most people are so ignorant about how our government operates. The federal Department of Education is a new thing, invented in 1979, and we had public education in this country for a long, long time before we ever turned control of it over to the federal government. Paul's plan will basically eliminate a completely useless government bureaucracy that inefficiently gobbles up and wastes money. Control of education would be entirely returned to the States so that local governments (which are smaller and more efficient than the federal government) can appropriate funds towards education and impliment educational reform and policies as they see fit. The federal DoE has succeeded in driving up the costs of higher education and public school education and simultaneously ruining the American educational system by dumbing down our curriculum to such a degree that what used to be the highest-rated educational system in the world is now one of the lowest among first world countries! Anyhow, there are other parts of his platform that are just as well-reasoned and intentioned (like returning to the gold standard), yet none of these articles explores them. They just toss them out without explanation, scaring off a lot of people who would otherwise have paid attention.
Some folks on YouTube are starting to put together issue by issue videos on each of Paul's talking points so that the intrepid investigator into presidential candidates can see just how he comes by his positions and realize they aren't quite as radical as the sound-bite driven media would have us presume. This is one such video on Paul's economic and monetary policy:
He told me that to understand Paul, I had to think of the American people as a baby elephant, chained to a tree. "It realizes that it can only walk 5 feet in each direction. It realizes that it is a slave. When it grows old enough, it is strong enough to break away from the tree. But it doesn't know." He pauses, to let this sink in -- the American people are a captive animal unaware of its own power to claim liberty. "When was the last time you tried it?" he asks me of breaking free. "Maybe you are strong enough."
And so for thousands of his supporters, Paul has begun to symbolize freedom itself. He is the baby elephant who broke his chains, the Guy Fawkes for a new millennium. And with his candidacy, his supporters believe he shows a way out of the morass in Iraq, a way away from the burden of taxation and the fear of economic insecurity, a way to strike back against the creeping power of the federal government and the free-spending culture of Washington. He is a political savior for people who feel trapped by two political parties that have failed to solve the nation's problems, by a political dialogue that often skirts the real issues, and by a federal government that expands its power by marketing fear. Ron Paul, they hope, is the way out. "It's like do or die," says Linda Hannan, a 35-year-old paralegal from Staten Island, N.Y., as the Murphy's celebrations continue. "Liberty and freedom are our future."
I thought the illustration apt. Anyhow, the rest of the article was okay. The things I dislike about so many articles reporting on Ron Paul is how they gloss over some very important planks to his campaign platform without explaining what they mean or his reasoning behind them. For example, reporters are quick to say he'd "eliminate the Department of Education." As an audience-questioner at Paul's Google interview showed, most people think that means he wants to eliminate public education! That's just ridiculous, and it's sad that most people are so ignorant about how our government operates. The federal Department of Education is a new thing, invented in 1979, and we had public education in this country for a long, long time before we ever turned control of it over to the federal government. Paul's plan will basically eliminate a completely useless government bureaucracy that inefficiently gobbles up and wastes money. Control of education would be entirely returned to the States so that local governments (which are smaller and more efficient than the federal government) can appropriate funds towards education and impliment educational reform and policies as they see fit. The federal DoE has succeeded in driving up the costs of higher education and public school education and simultaneously ruining the American educational system by dumbing down our curriculum to such a degree that what used to be the highest-rated educational system in the world is now one of the lowest among first world countries! Anyhow, there are other parts of his platform that are just as well-reasoned and intentioned (like returning to the gold standard), yet none of these articles explores them. They just toss them out without explanation, scaring off a lot of people who would otherwise have paid attention.
Some folks on YouTube are starting to put together issue by issue videos on each of Paul's talking points so that the intrepid investigator into presidential candidates can see just how he comes by his positions and realize they aren't quite as radical as the sound-bite driven media would have us presume. This is one such video on Paul's economic and monetary policy:
Click to view