The establishment’s war against Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has been evident since the Texas congressman began surging in the polls, but the previously privy attack on the candidate was made public to millions Wednesday night.
During a live interview Wednesday night from an Iowa caucus location, CNN briefly spoke to an US military veteran and adamant supporter of Rep. Ron Paul until the soldier began praising Paul for the non-interventionist ideals that separate the congressman from the mainstream candidates endorsed by the establishment. Just when Corporal Jesse Thorsen began to get heated, CNN dropped the feed.Commentator Wolf Blitzer dismissed the issue as a technical error, but others have quickly speculated that Wednesday night’s mysterious malfunction was less of a problem with camera feeds and more of an issue with what Cpl. Thorsen had to say — a message made loud and clear by Ron Paul but missed by the mainstream media outlets that continue to attack the candidate.“I’m really excited about a lot of his ideas,” Cpl. Thorsen told CNN pundit Dana Bash from Paul headquarters in Ankeny, Iowa Wednesday night. “Especially when it comes to bringing the soldiers home,” added Thorsen. “I’ve been serving for ten years now and all ten of those have been during wartime. I’d like to see a little peacetime army and I think he has the right idea.”Almost immediately, CNN’s Bash began berating the veteran and questioning him over his support for a candidate that would want to largely discontinue America’s foreign military presence. Bash pointed the camera towards a large tattoo on the solder’s neck that recognizes the September 11 terrorist attack and asks Thorsen how he could consider a candidate like Paul while other Republicans write him off as a security threat. “Some Republicans out there have been saying that Ron Paul would be very dangerous for this country because he wants to bring troops like you back from your post from all over the world,” said Bash.“I think it would be even more dangerous to start nitpicking wars with more countries,” responded the vet. At that point, CNN’s broadcast became scrambled, but Thorsen managed to begin, “Someone like Iran.” The soldier managed to squeeze off the word “Israel” before the broadcast ceased and the network returned to Blitzer live from in-studio. Later in the evening, Paul welcomed Cpl. Thorsen onto the stage with him so he could finish speaking as the results of the Iowa caucus came in. “If there's any man out there who's had a vision for this country it is definitely him,” finished the soldier. “His foreign policy is by far hands down better than any candidates out there . . . We don't need to be picking fights overseas.”CNN’s latest attempt at censoring Rep. Ron Paul’s message from the masses comes days after the network broadcast an edited interview of the candidate in which he is portrayed as agitated and irritated by a CNN host grilling him over controversial newsletters penned under the congressman’s name from the 1990s. After the broadcast, an unedited version of the interview circulated to the Web and showed that the station had largely doctored the original piece.Despite the continuing smear, Paul still managed a top-tier victor on Wednesday night, earning 21.4 percent of the vote in Iowa behind Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.