The immediate outcome has been less than sweeping. Paul has introduced a bill that, I guess, will be whooped through Congress and duly signed by the President forbidding him to off an American citizen on American soil without some sort of legal proceedings, except in case a terrorist attack is “imminent”—which, in ObamaSpeak, means “maybe sometime.”
In fact, the limitations on presidential offings are political rather than legal. Obama is most unlikely to cut up too rough with anyone who has relatives who speak unaccented English, though “too rough,” as Bradley Manning can tell you, is a dangerously elastic standard. And, in any event, Sen. Paul has made it clear that, overseas, he remains in the same “see no evil, speak no evil” mode as 95 percent of the Washington Establishment when it comes to bad guy elimination.*
What’s fascinating about Paul’s speech is not the substance, but rather the reaction. One has the strong sense that some Republicans are latching onto it as a way of walking the party away from the unbridled Cheneyism that has been the sum and substance of the GOP’s foreign policy “thinking” ever since 9/11. Ross Douthat “explains” that “the relative sterility of the foreign policy conversation on the right doesn’t reflect a deep conservative uniformity on national security questions; rather, it mostly reflects the fact that the potential standard-bearers for a less interventionist worldview have been relatively easy for hawks to delegitimize as cranks, Israel-haters, RINOs, etc.”
Right. All those cranks and Israel-haters, they were tiresome, weren’t they? Well, if Ross, and others, want to lie their collective asses off while silently acquiescing in the wind-down of the war in Afghanistan and maybe even in the notion that the U.S. can easily afford to spend less on defense in the coming years, I won’t complain too much.
Afterwords
Over at Antiwar.com, Kelley Vlahos reports that the Cheneyites are far from dead at this year’s CPAC convention. Paul will be speaking at CPAC today, and it will be interesting to hear what he has to say and how the CPAC crowd will respond. In a recent interview with the folks at the National Review, the senator sounded distinctly un-Cheneyesque.
Over at the American Conservative, Scott McConnell has a nice take on conservatives who aren’t falling for Rand’s non-interventionist jive.
Since I rarely have a kind word for Ross Douthat, I will compliment him for delivering a sharp slap to Paul Ryan’s budget, even though he doesn’t point out that Paulie sort of lied during the 2012 campaign when he denounced President Obama for wanting to take $700 billion out of Medicare, since now Paulie wants to do the same thing.
*Remember when it was the Soviets who liquidated people? Those were the good old days.
