Reply #63: You are confusing "principled" with "Ideologue", they are not the same at all.

[scarletwoman]

Thatcher was an ideologue, she was not "principled" in the least. Neither are most right wingers, neither was Blair.

To be principled requires some degree of personal integrity and sense of honor. Those are qualities clearly absent in ideologues, whose overriding concern is the acquisition and maintenance of the personal and political power required to force reality to bend to their wills. Their sole ethic is that the ends justify the means.

Ron Paul's ideas are definitely a mixed bag; they range from wholly rational and laudable (a non-interventionist foreign policy), to abhorrent (his statements about the Civil Rights Act). But I can see that his ideas come out of a set of internally consistent and coherent principles, and that they are NOT rooted in an egoistic quest for personal power.

sw