Be careful of absolute purity

Ideas and ideals are lovely.  I deeply respect principled people who have overarching values that don’t bend in every breeze.  Having said that, we live in the real world, not a fantasy land in which everything plays out as the theorists imagine it will.  The adherence to theory in the face of reality is one of the main problems with the Ivy League leftists who rule the Obama Administration.  And as Ace explains, it’s one of the big problems with Ron Paul, who has just announced that we should politely have asked Pakistan to arrest bin Laden:

Ron Paul is offered a choice here between known reality and actual facts on one hand, and his rigid, dogmatic ideology of “Letters of Marque” and “cooperation with governments” on the other. It’s an easy call for him. The ideology is so precious and lovely that it is far preferable to ugly reality and grubby facts.

His ideology is that the U.S. never needs to resort to force to accomplish its foreign policy goals. Because he knows that to be true — absolutely true, in all cases, with no exceptions — then it must also follow that wherever we have used force, there must have been alternate options.

Must be. Because, remember, it is never true that we must use force. Ergo, any use of force was a bit of cowboy imperialism. There must have been better, more peaceful options on the table.

Ron Paul draws particular venom from people like me because what he says is exactly what the leftists say. They do the same thing. The exact same thing. When there’s a controversial use of force — and the use of force is almost always controversial, as it should be — they begin the discussion from the point of view that any and all uses of American might are illegitimate, and that there are — always, no exceptions — peaceful options that could have achieved the same results.

And they cannot be backed off this assertion by argument, because it’s an irrational article of faith. You cannot reason a man out of an opinion he was never reasoned into in the first place.

That’s just a taste.  You should read Ace’s entire post.