The Glade 4.0

The point of Congressional bills is to change something, and Ron Paul opposed two thirds of those changes. This makes him conservative by your own definition. And nice job starting an 'isolationism' tangent.

Your definition of conservatism does not seem to apply to Paul. Or the discussion. But other than that you're spot on!

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

.....yes. That was the point. I'm still not sure where you're coming from.

Yes, actually it does. Isolationism comes in degrees. It's not a matter of "you're isolationist if and only if you absolutely avoid foreign engagement of any kind or description."

Aside from the fact that the concept of "land ownership" held by the Indian tribes was of questionable similarity to what we regard as "ownership" in the first place (which I'm sure varied significantly from tribe to tribe; let's not get caught up in minutae), the fact is that a country that shares a land border with you is nearly impossible to engage in "isolationism" from; look at the impossibility of completely sealing off the MExican border, and that's with a river in the way for around half of the border and the industrial ability to create large walls and fence and deploy thousands of law enforcement agents, plus soldiers, aircraft, and if we wanted to, tanks and artillery. Therefore saying "having a body of water in the way doesn't make it different" is utterly idiotic; of course it does. That body of water is, in a large part, what makes isolationism possible at all.

Second, discussing whether the U.S. was "isolationist" means in the context of the world in general. In regard to the world in general, we were. The fact that we were bust conquering land directly adjacent to our own doesn't somehow mean that our overall policy was anything other than isolationist.

Overall, that was the general gist of our policy until it finally died from German torpedo fire. Isolationism is a matter of degrees, not a matter of "ZOMG you have to meet all this criteria to qualify!"

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."