Rand Paul/Dennis Kucinich 2016

Suppose they had a war and Rand Paul didn’t come. It could see the day in the rising tensions in China. In reality, the Tea Party is finished, having bifurcated long ago between “Peace Gold Love”  — the unoficial slogan of iconoclastic libertarian Dad and titan of new conservative thinking, Ron Paul  — and an advanced reenactment of the Wallace/LeMay party of dangerous right-wing extremists. Son Rand, a Republican senator from Kentucky, may now be last man standing as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) moves to the middle and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) moves to extreme extensions of old, very old thinking. What now as China rises to challenge its neighbors and America?

First press accounts correctly present the situation of China challenging Japan in contrast to our other everyday wars in the Middle East,, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are wars of choice they say, with a straight face and are acceptable as “international norms.” They are cultural and political avocations, while the challenge presented by China brings us to Japan’s defense by treaty. You get the difference. In the Middle East, we don’t have to do it. We do it because we like it. In the Pacific we have to.

{mosads}And what treaty again takes us there to conflicts at the ends of the world? The Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan. Signed when? 1952. But Rand Paul was only born in 1963. And I don’t remember discussion about this around the dinner table myself, nor do I remember voting for or against it in a ballot referendum in my state, probably because it didn’t happen. And I was only 6 then, and we didn’t even have a television yet to bring the Vietnam War to our living room.

So the situation thus resembles ObamaCare and its price. We will not be paying for it. Our grandchildren will be paying for ours.

But these unborn will be the disenfranchised because there will be no money left for them and probably no country too. And to charge them generations before they are born with a duty they are required to pay in blood and to die for (by treaty) without their say presents a legitimate, moral and natural revolutionary situation. 

Ron Paul stood nearly alone in his opposition to the misconceived invasion of Iraq, advocating instead states rights, sound money policy and constitutional government. He had a few odd bedfellows; a few distinguished Democrats, some with vast military and State Department experience, railed with him. But as it turns out, some of the most sophisticated Democratic dissent from the State Department and the military back then was not on moral or common-sense grounds. It was because the war on Iraq was a war of choice brought by political forces and lobbyists, and was not in the Pentagon’s playbook. War in the Pacific was, is and long has been.

Now Rand Paul goes alone if he chooses to oppose. He might call in Dad for help. And Dennis Kucinich.