Ted Cruz wants to be a wartime president. Ron Paul explains why that’s dangerous, unauthorized by the Constitution and immoral.
Chris Rossini:The more dead bodies that a president racks up during his tenure, the greater it tends to be in the history books. Ted Cruz who is running for President is probably aware of this and he says something along these lines. He says “our enemies are at war with us. I believe our nation needs a war time president to defend it.” Dr. Paul what is wrong with that?
Ron Paul: Dangerous. Unauthorized by the Constitution, immoral in the sense that where does he get the idea that a war time president is wonderful, especially when we generally start all the wars. Assad did not declare war against us. We said Assad had to go and we are over there messing that country up. George Bush said the same thing. He knew, it had been reported that he knew that all presidents who want to be great have to be war time presidents. So, he went up looking for war and he ended up with his war, of course in 2008 the people didn’t buy into it and they challenged him and I don’t know whether history will ever prove that George W. Bush was a great president because he was a war time president.
The big issue here is that he implies that there has to be a good war time president because we have been attacked. He would never say we shouldn’t have gone to these wars, without proper authorization, but we are the once who invaded the country and invaded Iraq, invaded Afghanistan, got into Libya, got into Ukraine and seriously involved in Syria, so now he wants a war time president, which means he was an authoritarian president. War time presidents have unusual powers, more powers, that people say we are at war, we are at war with ISIS, so we have to give up our freedoms, they have to be able to spy on us, how can we ever catch these people, how can we stop this killing, if we don’t give up some of our liberties.
War time presidents are very, very dangerous, especially when we start the wars. I think that people generally know this to be true and they come around to this feeling and belief and that is why they were so upset with the wars in 2008, but we are back now listening to the propaganda, people come and violence is on both sides and we see people coming here and killing us, like we shouldn’t expect them. They all know we have never heard of blowback, we are still looking for the motives of all these killing that is happening, but they will never look at the motive that our foreign policy has something to do with it and it has to do with blowback. Until that happens we are going to have the wars and we are going to have a lot of candidates right now competing with being the war time president.
I consider that very dangerous because they are not talking about what they ought to be talking about. It’s the foreign policy and how we could develop a society and a foreign policy and a military that wouldn’t be antagonizing people and getting us into war and allowing our presidents to go to war without even proper authority. Presidents who want to be a war time president they can go out and start a war by executive order and that is more or less what Bush has done and more or less what these wars that have continued. We don’t declare wars anymore and anybody who says, I think it is a good idea and you need a war time president, I’d be very leery and very careful and analyze that closely because that is dangerous to liberty.
Chris Rossini: Right and propaganda is strong out there,