Ok...
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So, who would you like to see? The statists who will make more horrible policy just because they can get something done easily? That's not a smart way to vote.
If we're going the neighborhood route.
China and Russia really aren't our "friends" we do business, we work together on things. But we've had a few fistfights cut each other a few times.. nothing too deadly but you know they could kill us if we didn't sleep with a shotgun.
The thing is that there are reasons we have bases in Germany, Kuwait, Japan.
If there were no bases in Germany That leaves all of East Europe open, furthermore this base has air access to the middle east. This leads to Kuwait, one our bases in the middle east.. wonder why we'd need a base in one of the most hostile regions in the world?
If there was no base in Japan, there wouldn't be a South Korea. It would all be Totalitarian wasteland.
The thing is, we don't live in a neighborhood full of hermits. We live in a neighborhood with a few psychos that DO want to bash our windows in and slash our necks in our sleep.
And a few of them have tried it recently. That kind of clues me in that these bases have uses and it would be idiotic, not just unreasonable to want to shut them down. That's what I call a self-destructive foreign policy.
I think the appeal of Ron Paul is how his policies echo the frustration an anger people have with big bloated government. Yes, we need to streamline our fat ass government. But not at the expense of our security.
It's like selling your doors and locks in a neighborhood with rapists and murderers when all you needed to do is turn the heat down two degrees and stop eating out every day.
I'm ok with SOME of his domestic policies... not particularly his libertarian 'legalize everything' spiel
But I can't vote for 1/2 of a president. He needs to be good economically, foreign, and domestic and energy.
Or at least good enough in each area that one of those areas isn't setting us up for disaster.
This is a reason I certainly can't vote for Obama. His energy policy is as self-destructive to our economy as shutting our bases down abroad is. It's a feat of sheer ignorance. His domestic policy has been detrimental to the economy, and his foreign policy is fairly backwards. I know he'd sooner close our bases too if he had the chance, but luckily most of our senate have the brains to realize we do need bases.
Where I'm not 100% convinced Romney is very right-wing. I know he'll fund our military and have even a slight chance of slimming down the government unlike Obama... so where it's not a home run, it's better than what we've got.
Ron Paul's foreign policy is just too destructive to the foreign relations we've made over the past 50 years that it would set us back so irreparably I believe soundly it would result in the deaths of millions. eg. South Korea, Isreal, Japan maybe. That's assuming he got 'his way' of shutting bases down to save money.
If you want to save money. We've got 200 years worth of energy that's 5 times cheaper than natural gas. We've just stuck our whiney noses in the air and let the EPA strangle the nations energy to get it out. Cheap energy = Prosperity. Eventually the nation will need to wake up and realize we don't have enough money to subsidize wastes of time like solar, wind, and natural gas (which they try to say is cheap, but it's got nothing on coal)
You wanna save money? Cut the EPA. It's out of control and wrecking the economy.