In his column on Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, Ross cited a quote from the recent profile of Sen. Paul in The Weekly Standard:

Whereas Ron Paul criticizes U.S. interventionism in tropes familiar to the left — anti-imperial blowback, manipulation by neocons, moral equivalence — Rand Paul merely says America doesn’t have the money.

Ross was using this as evidence that Rand Paul “has smoothed the crankish edges off his famous father’s antiwar conservatism, reframing it in the language of constitutionalism, the national interest and the budget deficit.” Both the quote and the distinction between the two Pauls struck me as basically inaccurate. For one thing, Ron Paul’s criticism of U.S. intervention is also framed in terms of constitutionalism, national interest, and the overall fiscal burden imposed by overseas commitments. He does go beyond that to argue that intervention overseas is a cause of terrorism, which is hardly a trope familiar only to “the left.” Until the Iraq war made it so, the harmful influence of neoconservatives in shaping U.S. foreign policy was not at all familiar to “the left.” The charge of “moral equivalence” is another way of saying that Rep. Paul holds the U.S. government accountable for its actions, and he doesn’t suspend moral judgment when our government engages in illegal or outrageous behavior. This isn’t moral equivalence, but the application of moral and legal standards to the conduct of the U.S. government. The “moral equivalence” charge is one that hawks like to use to suggest that their domestic opponents believe that the U.S. is “the same” as repressive dictatorships or terrorist groups. It is a scurrilous charge, and it ought to be dismissed as such.

Dan Drezner claimed that the “real turn” in Republican views was on trade, and cited Tim Pawlenty’s lame appeal to fair trade as proof of this. The trouble is that Pawlenty was indulging in the latest bit of Republican pseudo-populism, and he has no intention of supporting anything like what trade skeptics would call “fair trade.” How do we know this? He endorsed all of the pending free trade agreements in his economic speech, including the genuinely undesirable trade agreement with South Korea. Pawlenty’s call for fair trade is a bit like his overall economic proposal: gear all of the major proposals for the benefit of corporations and wealthier individuals, and round out the speech with some sentimental appeals to his Midwestern working-class background in the hopes that most voters won’t notice that he offers to do little or nothing to serve their interests.