Say what you like about Ron Paul, he is the only person running for president who has taken this stance (link below):
While I do not see UN membership as a particularly productive move for the Palestinian leadership, I do not believe the US should use its position in the UN Security Council to block their membership. I believe in self-determination of peoples and I recognize that peoples may wish to pursue statehood by different means. As we saw after the Cold War, numerous new states were born out of the ruins of the USSR as the various old Soviet Republics decided that smaller states were preferable to an enormous and oppressive multi-national conglomerate.
He then goes on to say, “why should we care about a tiny group of people on a tiny piece of land.”
Hardly an inspiring ethos.
I also believe in self determination for social health insurance .
In reality there is nobody for ordinary Americans in the presidential race.
And Ron Paul is so far away from party orthodoxy that he just won’t be listened to.
This covers the lunacy of the republican party stance on Israel
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ffb8fcda-e61a-11e0-960c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ZBxpAUuX
Good for Ron Paul. Compares Israeli occupation with USSR’s engulfing of small nations.
Ron’s Da Man.
Good for Ron Paul. Left-liberal types (like me) really need to learn to work with libertarians, paleoconservatives, & Ron Paul people on common goals. This is already happening to a degree, check out Scott McConnell’s encomium of CodePink in the last issue of The American Conservative. It is essential that Americans fed up with an imperial foreign policy and fed up with our senseless support for Israel learn to make not only moral, humanitarian arguments but also arguments from American self-interest. The two rhetorical lines are not contradictory, they are complementary, convergent even, and I advise my fellow left-liberal types to read Paul’s statement in full. (I don’t interpret it as callous and egocentric as Dan Crowther does; rather it’s a realistic assessment of the limits of American policy, the kind sorely lacking in our foreign policy discourse.) Let’s face it, we in the largely leftish antiwar movement have accomplished not a whole lot over the past 10 years, more proof that, like it or not (and I don’t) most Americans have no time for people who talk like Lisa Simpson. We will not get rightwing cooties if we learn a little from the Ron Paul crowd and cooperate with them where we can.
Some strategic cooperation with realists/paleocons/libertarians does not mean we lose the ability to disagree about healthcare, immigration, labor, federally enforceable LGBT rights, all areas where I’ve shed lots of sweat & tears as a bleeding-heart lawyer. But on civil liberties and foreign policy we had better work together. If not, we’re effed.