The Rand Paul Trolling Campaign needs to be seen with a wink in context as self-amusement, attacking prospective 2016 GOP rivals by using attack ads keyed to online searches appropriating more eyeballs as a result. OTOH that incessant twitchy blinking needs an eye exam, something even the President of Syria can administer, as well as both men stalemating US Middle East foreign policy for the foreseeable future.
For Team Paul, this passive-aggressive trolling campaign is the equivalent of lurking in the back of the room during your opponent’s debate prep and pelting them with spitballs.
The ads have a dual purpose. First, they allow Paul to siphon off attention from whichever potential candidate is making news. Second, they allow his campaign to underscore the weaknesses of other candidates by highlighting Paul’s strengths.
With a verbal wink, Paul’s senior adviser Doug Stafford said they had chosen this method of pre-campaign campaigning “mostly because we like to amuse ourselves.”
The younger Assad has committed no atrocity on that scale. But his government has continued all along to imprison and torture political opponents, and has responded to the recent “Arab Spring’’ protests by killing hundreds. On his watch, Syrian intelligence was accused of assassinating former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, after which Assad was forced under U.S. pressure to pull Syrian troops out of Lebanon.
Why did we misread him?
It was partly wishful thinking—after all, he didn’t fight his way to the top and wasn’t groomed to be a dictator. Assad speaks fluent English and decent French, and makes a generally mild impression. His glamorous wife, Asma, was born to Syrian parents in Britain; a former investment banker, she’s been profiled in Vogue. And Assad certainly has modernized Syria, turning Damascus from a dreary socialist city into a vibrant Arab capital, with chic shops and trendy Internet cafés. During the decade of his rule, the country has privatized many sluggish state-run industries. Foreign investment has flowed in, and cell phones and satellite TV have become ubiquitous....some U.S allies “are not at all sure that Syria without Assad would be better than with him,” former U.S. Mideast negotiator Aaron David Miller wrote recently in Foreign Policy. Turkey, which shares a long border and a restive Kurdish minority with Syria, is leery of instability there. So is Israel, which got a glimpse of chaos last month when Assad allowed Palestinians in Syria to storm Israeli border defenses at the Golan Heights. The government in Jerusalem wants “to work with a devil that they know,” says Moshe Ma’oz of Hebrew University. “And this Bashar, they know him.”
When Rand Paul made allegations that we would use al Qaeda for allies in the conflict with Asssad, he completely undermined the Pro-Democracy and Christian forces in Syria. Instead, he opted to further his agenda by enhancing the image and credibility of Putin, rather than discuss how we can better form relations with ideological aligning forces. If Rand Paul truly stood for freedom, then he should want to Assad gone ASAP!
This isn’t the first time Rand Paul has shown favoritism towards the Russians either . He once blew off having a larger audience on Meet the Press to go on Russia Today. Maybe it is a case of father like father, like son? Remember when the Kremlin funded Russia Today video host, Adam Kokesh supported Ron Paul’s failed presidential campaign? Koskesh temporarily lost his job when the reports of the Kremlin aiding in the financing of a presidential campaign began to break. Why would the Russians favor Paul? Because of his foreign policy, the same policy that his son follows, which calls for bringing home everything that protects our economy and well being and hunker down like the damn North Koreans so our enemies can run over the entire Earth.