Libertarian Insight from Early in the Campaign

I find it both interesting and ironic that it took a staunch and consistently loyal conservative such as Rand Paul to identify the similar foreign policy positions of Hillary Clinton and other Republican candidates, most notably Jeb Bush. He is to be commended for suggesting the unbroken line of thought from the Neo-cons of the Bush/Chaney Administration, the continuation and expansion of many of these policies through the Obama years, and the prospect of more of the same with a looming Clinton regime. It is also somewhat ironic that the intersection between true and traditional conservative thought as represented by Paul and the foreign policy analysis of the Democratic Socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders, continues to expand. Of course, there exists a massive gap in terms of their respective domestic policy positions...most notably regarding the current  and future status of Social Security and Medicare.
I also appreciated Paul's observations regarding the imprudence of certain military options to the crisis in Syria being considered by some of the other Republican participants ...first in reaction to Christy's willingness to shoot down Russian planes in the event of establishing a no-fly zone and then, by inference, to the suggestion by both Trump and Cruz that carpet bombing Syria was a viable option in combating ISIS in particular and radical Islamic terrorism in general. May I suggest that such a course of action is not only in direct violation of international law and is universally considered to be a war crime (the very nature of a carpet bomb is to inflict random destruction and loss of life) but it most certainly will result in the massive recruitment of vengeance-seeking individuals for future terrorist attacks. As Donald Rumsfield once mused over our actions in Iraq, 'with each terrorist we kill, we create two more in their wake'.
Last night was appallingly clarifying in terms of how our would-be leaders consider the future and we can thank the likes of Rand Paul for bringing his colleagues' views into a disturbing focus.