From a reader:

Jonah, On Ron Paul’s call to avoid foreign entanglments: Please stop conflating the issue of causation with the issues of guilt and culpability. Relating Al Queda’s stated reason for targeting us—our military presence in Saudi Arabia—or generally explaining that expansive intervensionism has certain consequences is NOT the same thing as justifying terrorism or blaming America. Perhaps our foreign policy is worth it. Characterizing our foreign policy as a causating factor is not necessarily a normative argument. Why shouldn’t a GOP debate be the place to make such descriptive claims? What a shame that Guilliani silenced Paul with such conclusory moralizing and crass polititicalization.

Me: Interesting email, representative of others in substance if not in syntax and spelling. The most intriguing claim might be that Giuliani tried to politicize an argument in a debate during the presidential primary. For shame! More seriously, I take the reader’s point that causation doesn’t necessarily amount to what he calls guilt and culpability. But it’s hard to see how it doesn’t in the case of Paul. His argument (and that of legions of his emailing supporters) is that the current situation is bad. We brought it on ourselves through “50 years of bad policy.” And – someone correct me if I’m being unfair — if Ron Paul had his way and we could do it all over again, we wouldn’t have those policies. “Bad policy” is a normative characterization, right? He isn’t saying “read Bin Laden” to see how that mass murderer describes our “good policies,” is he? He isn’t saying “out yourselves in their shoes” as some sort of amoral exercise, is he?

No, Paul is obviously making value judgments. Indeed, in his own libertarian way he’s probably the most judgmental guy in the race, which is one of the things that makes him appealing. It seems silly to try to defend him as being some sort of neutral and objective chronicler of events when most of his supporters see him as a more of a Jeremiah.