TIM RUSSERT: ... [T]his is what you have been saying on the campaign stump, "I'd like to get rid of the IRS. I want to get rid of the income tax." Abolish it.... What would happen to all those lost revenues? How would we fund our government?...Ron Paul supporters: Are you serious?
REP. PAUL: .... You need the income tax to police the world and run the welfare state. I want a constitutional-size government.... To operate our total foreign policy, when you add up everything, there's been a good study on this, it's nearly a trillion dollars a year. So I would think if you brought our troops home, you could save hundreds of billions of dollars....
MR. RUSSERT: It's 572,000. And you'd bring them all home?
REP. PAUL: As quickly as possible. We--they will not serve our interests to be overseas. They get us into trouble. And we can defend this country without troops in Germany, troops in Japan. How do they help our national defense? Doesn't make any sense to me. ...
MR. RUSSERT: Would you cut off all foreign aid to Israel?
REP. PAUL: Absolutely. But remember, the Arabs would get cut off, too, and the Arabs get three times as much aid altogether than Israel. But why, why make Israel so dependent?...
MR. RUSSERT: So under your doctrine, if we had--did not have troops in the Middle East, [al Qaeda] would leave us alone.
REP. PAUL: Not, not immediately, because they'd have to believe us....
MR. RUSSERT: Do you think there's an ideological struggle that Islamic fascists want to take over the world?
REP. PAUL: Oh, I think some, just like the West is wanting to do that all the time...
MR. RUSSERT: You would vote against the Civil Rights Act [of 1964] if, if it was today?
REP. PAUL: If it were written the same way, where the federal government's taken over property--has nothing to do with race relations....
MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."
REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist...
MR. RUSSERT: So you think we're close to fascism?
REP. PAUL: I think we're approaching it very close....
Let me read Andrew Sullivan's endorsement of Paul:
For me, it comes down to two men, Ron Paul and John McCain. That may sound strange, because in many ways they are polar opposites: the champion of the surge and the non-interventionist against the Iraq war; the occasional meddling boss of Washington and the live-and-let-live libertarian from Texas. But picking a candidate is always a mix of policy and character, of pragmatism and principle...So I guess Sullivan is serious, but he's serious at a level of abstraction that I think is really quite dangerous.
I admire McCain in so many ways. He is the adult in the field...
Let's be clear: we have lost this war....
McCain, for all his many virtues, still doesn't get this. Paul does....
The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration. Paul's federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government: these are principles that made me a conservative in the first place. ...
He's the real thing in a world of fakes and frauds....
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