Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who opted to skip campaigning in Florida for financial reasons, said he intends to stay in the race until the national convention in August.
“I think we’ll continue,” the Texas congressman said on CNN’s “State of the Union” this morning, adding that his operation can’t compete with establishment money.
“We can’t compete with tens of millions of dollars for each individual state, and that’s what came up in Florida,” Paul said. “You need a lot of money, so it’s a money game. We’re going to stay in and see what comes of it.”
Regarding foreign policy — specifically the threat of a nuclear Iran — Paul said the United States has taken negotiating off the table in favor of aggression.
“When the Soviets had 30, 000 of these [nuclear weapons], we didn’t take talking to them off the table,” he said. “We started talking to them and started trading with them, and the results were much better. Unfortunately, they have taken something off the table, and we ought to reassess this aggressive approach to them.”
Regarding security at home, Paul denounced the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as a “bureaucratic monster.”
His criticism came because TSA agents recently prevented his son, Kentucky Sen. Ran Paul, from boarding a flight because he refused to submit to a pat-down.
“The assumption that the government has to do this is the wrong assumption,” the congressman insisted. “I voted against the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA. It’s a bureaucratic monster. It totally voids the concept of the Fourth Amendment.”
He decried the “searches and prodding and poking” that take place without permission at airports and said Americans are trapped in a system that doesn’t allow people to travel unless they agree to be subjected to such invasive practices.
“When you look at some of these pictures of . . . groin areas and breast areas and all this, and old women having to take their clothes off — if we as a people are so complacent that we can look at this and say, ‘Oh, that’s ok, they’re making us safe’ — it doesn’t make us safe,” he said.
“It undermines our liberties and there is a much better way of giving us security at the airports than accepting the bureaucrats and the politicians in Washington. That is totally unacceptable from my view point.”
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