ABC News reports:
During the convention of the Republican Liberty Caucus on Friday, a college student asked Paul whether he would pardon Snowden if elected president. The ballroom in Nashua, New Hampshire, quickly fell silent as Paul joked, "There's always got to be an easy question."
Not surprisingly, Rand danced around the question, but finally came down on the side of the Empire and said that he would want Snowden to do "some" prison time:
“I know most people would want me to say yes [to pardoning Snowden] and part of me says yes and part of me says we cannot have no rules,” Paul said. "We do have secrets -- maybe too many -- but we do have secrets that need to be protected. We have operatives who try to risk our lives to defend our country and he [Snowden] didn’t reveal that, but you don’t want people to reveal things like that.”
Paul said Snowden did something that some see value in: revealing a surveillance program that may have gone hidden were it not for the leak.Here's a new question to ask Rand:
"He revealed a program that we probably would’ve never known about had not he revealed it because the government was lying to us," he said. "So in many ways, you could call him a whistle-blower.”
Paul said Snowden deserves some sort of punishment, but not a severe penalty like some of his fellow Republicans have called for.
"I think the best compromise on it is that there would be some penalty but that people who are going nuts -- which includes half the people in our party, wanting to execute him, shoot him, chop his head off, all this crazy stuff -- they’re completely wrong," he said. "I think there could be some accommodation. I think he would actually serve some sentence if it were reasonable and were negotiated."
If your niece's husband, Jesse Benton, is convicted of lying to the government and is serving time during a Rand Paul Administration would you pardon him?
Here are other questions I have suggested. And another here.
-RW
In other words, if this is really his real position and it's not a cover, then he's not one of us. Murray Rothbard would ask, "Do you hate the state?" to determine if you are a lover of liberty or just a statist technocrat. Rand certainly doesn't seem to hate the state at all. Anyone who hates the state and wants to reduce it's violence, whether an anarcho-capitalist, minarchist, classical liberal, or a conservative, would be outraged at Snowden's treatment.
ReplyDeleteHow can it be a crime to expose illegal government activity?
ReplyDeleteIt's sad how law has become a tool without principle by those that are "enforcing" it against our will, is it not?
DeleteMy brother in law stopped practicing law a few years out of law school because he couldn't stand it, he undertook an honorable profession...he now owns/runs an ice cream shop.
It would have been nice if he had actually given some sort of reason as to why he should server prison time. He's trying to appease somebody.
ReplyDeleteIn truth, it was an easy question!
ReplyDeleteI’m officially renouncing the NAP. That’s it. I’m through. It’s all over. People ask me what It would take for me to renounce the NAP. Rand Paul has convinced me. When Rand Paul says he wants to put Edward Snowden in prison, I feel that Rand Paul needs to be slapped.
ReplyDeleteOn a similar note, when I hear these war-vangelicals announce their allegiance to Bibi, I start thinking that the entire Republican base should be declared enemy combatants who should either be deported immediately to Israel (by air-drop) or put on a tether so they can’t leave their front porch.
I was thinking that not only did Keynesianism and socialism fail in the past decades, but the spokespeople for both pretty much admitted they had failed. Now suddenly, after the biggest failure in the history of the Keynesians, they are back acting like it wasn’t their fault and that they saved the day. I’m not sure what should be done with them yet. Obviously, you could just refuse to sell them food, water or shelter and you wouldn’t violate the NAP at all.
There. No more silly dreamy idealism. Just hard-headed practical action.