Only 17% want to withdraw from Afganistan? Is that true?
If so, very discouraging

Yes, the real distinction and opposition is between those who work under the Leninist Bolshevik principle of "Who does what to whom" and the vast majority of more humble folk who see the Golden Rule as a good deal. The former crave power and deride the concepts of justice and truth; the latter are content to live and let live and to attempt to do unto others as they would have others do unto them.
In A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding, Ellis Sandoz defines the basis of natural law as the Golden Rule. And this explains why legal positivism flourishes today.
Rachel Maddow's devastating analysis of Obama's "rule of law" speech was great fun but failed to note that his concept of law is positivist rather than constitutional. I think he was just saying that the Govt has to adopt "a new regime of law" that will provide a legal basis for Philip K. Dick's Minority Report and preventive detention

The Inquisition switcheeroo goes back to the 30s when the Select Committee on Un-American Activities, aka the Dies Committee which investigated fascist activities was co-founded by Congressman Samuel Dickstein who was also on the Soviet NKVD payroll. The Dies Committee later became the House Un-American Activities Committee which has become notorious in media fostered legend. Seems it's all right until it's you.

Perhaps there is less to this debate than meets the eye. That the torture issue is framed in terms of pragmatic strategy rather than the rule of law already marks a consensus and a moral failure.. The obscene theatricality of the torture issue seems designed for two purposes: to inflame opposition and keep the job going in terms of military expenditure and the proliferation of contingencies that require mass murder and to foster a new ethos of sadistic brutality on the domestic front.
I was impressed by a Pew poll that showed evangelical Christian and white Catholics support for torture while nonbelievers were opposed. Along with torture, these massacres, which cannot be called "war" much less just war, have served to corrupt morality as Christians flock to Cheney's "dark side." For the less enthused Obama's janus face is just as effective as the whole issue plays and spins on policy rather than morality and law.

Wow! "Centrism" Glenn Greenwald, hardly an extreme leftist, remarks on the absurdity of this term for policies that not only sanction and endorse the lawlessness of the Cheney Shogunate, but will establish "a new regime of law" to give preventive detention, the denial of due process and habeas corpus, torture, thought crime, the status of law. This vast expansion of policy at the expense of the Constitution and the rule of law is called "centrism." Wow!
Raimondo is right of course: the left is completely illiberal, mired in its sanctimonious cultural political wars for abortion, gay marriage, and equality. As he has often averred, there is one party: the War and Money Party and the rest is sports politics.
"Obama-Cheney 2012"!

Even if all or some of the assertions above were true, Antiwar would still be worthy of support: it is the only game in town.
The economic setup Mr. Grady describes is not libertarian nor even capitalist. Privately owned monopolies administered by government policy (as opposed to the rule of law) are corporatist, i.e., fascist in the strict economic sense although we now endure much of the theatrical grandguignol characteristics of fascism as well.
Lobbyists never visit Ron Paul.
The Ron Paul campaign and the continuing Campaign for Liberty have included lots of lefties. These folks were not attracted with venom but with the milk of human kindness and perhaps also a strong cup of intellectual coffee. And both Denis Kucinich and Ralph Nader were grateful for Ron Paul's support and eventually have come to realize that the Federal Reserve has been the major player in all the wars and economic calamities.

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin wouldn't agree with your premise that Plato's philosopher king is an authoritarian expert. That is the reading of Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies (the bible of Soros' neo-liberalism)
On the contrary, Plato holds that reality and rationality are apprehended through introspection rather than empirical data, techniques, hype, spin, pragmatism and power, all the phantasmagoria of the cave. You do seem to buy into the cave a bit as Rick's asserts, I guess there is an admission ticket to the general discussion but I think Ron Paul is right to look within past the phantasmagoria into our own part in the "conflict."