A couple of folks have asked in email if I've got anything to say about Ron Paul, who would, like, totally be Bull Connor if he hadn't already disbanded the police departments and sold the firehoses to private developers. What I have to say about Ron Paul is what Dennis Perrin says.
Dennis' most penetrating comment:
I might be mistaken, but so far as I know, Ron Paul has not left the campaign trail to oversee the killing of a black man. Liberal hero Bill Clinton did in 1992, flying back to Arkansas from New Hampshire to witness Rickey Ray Rector take the lethal needle. (Since Clinton was our first black president, did that constitute black-on-black violence?) Clinton also expanded the police and prison state, in which a large number of African-Americans are trapped, and shredded the safety net for the poor, among whom reside many African-Americans. Does this make Bill Clinton a racist? Hush yo' mouf!And let me just say this about that, folks. "A large number" is Dennis' concession to understatement, I think, because the statistics on black men in American jails are staggering, extraordinary. The incarceration of black males constitutes the most odious American pogrom since FDR (hey, wasn't he a liberal or something?) threw anyone of Japanese descent into concentration camps. In its insidiousness and invidiousness it is the equal--at least--of the Jim Crow régime, and it will have longer-lasting effects. Our penal policy in this country over the last forty years will ultimately bear out as a moral failing as great as our embrace of chattel slavery, and what are the Democrats going to do about it? Maybe we'll put 100,000 more more cops on the street.
So pat yourselves on the back for your black motherfucking candidate, Democrats. Maybe Ron Paul truly does hate niggers from the bottom of his lily-white, cracker-ass heart, but at least he'd let some of them out of fucking jail.
38 comments:
Given Ron Paul's grasp of economics, via the Austrian School (mises.org), history and the constitution, and all you and Perrin can come up with is his alleged racism and paranoia, and the drug war?
Bubba
Comment?
Fair enough, certainly, but there are people who manage to raise the issue of Paul's racism without dangling from Clinton's ballsack like remoras, ya know.
Adding for clarity: my full-on fucking lunatic wingnut brother answers valid criticisms of Republicans with the old "Oh yeah, well, a Democrat once did such and such...!" I'd expect a better response from people I assume are not insane apologist hacks.
Ron Paul, insane as he is as are all libertarians at heart, follows the logic of his beliefs. Bill Clinton triangulated between what he believes, what he thinks the lowest common denominator believes and what he thinks he can do and still be able to sleep at night. Paul's position on most things is that "It's really none of our business as the state..." Most of the incarcerated in this country are there for non-violent drug offenses or other relatively victimless crimes. Then there's three strikes and you're in...a lovely program. Smoke a crack pipe steal some baloney and go joy-ridding and you're featured on a documentary on MSNBC. Fifty years from now.
As a progressive-ish sort of guy, I'm more comfortable with what Clinton probably believes. I am not at all comfortable with what he does. And, he does a lot of stuff. Paul's approach of just doing what the government is supposed to do by the constitution as literally read reduces the damage the well-meaning but hyprocritical and the actively evil can do.
Look, put the country back on the gold standard, and there won't be any money for prisons.
Let's not forget Clinton's bullshit promise to pardon Leonard Peltier and his actual pardon of Marc Motherfucking Rich. "The Big Dog", as the more sickening pwoggies like to refer to him, is just as much a lying cocksucker as the reviled Dubya, but, ya see, he's THEIR lying cocksucker. And he speaks so well!
Whether Ron Paul said blacks have an extra bone that helps them run faster in some poopbutt newsletter in 19dickety3 or whatever is largely irrelevant. Ron Paul is not going to be President of the United States, and even if he were, he'd never get any of his stated goals accomplished. Clinton, meanwhile, is revered by the very same cunt-knuckles who are constantly shrieking about Paul's alleged racism.
Get it now, you fucks? Jesus, I swear some of you need to just be retroactively aborted.
Well, I'm with Crusader Axe's first two paragraphs, anyway.
On the other hand, what most bothers me about Paul (for, like, the third time now, and I'm as sick of hearing me say it as anyone), is his eagerness to police U.S. immigrants from terrorists countries, and for tight control of the borders. Racism in practice, if you will, even if his principals seem libertarian kosher. I don't go nearly as deeply in for the cause as some of y'all--I'm a bit progressive-ish myself (except when I'm not)--but I'd certainly call taht an alarming sort of exercise of state power.
Anonymous, I get it now! I've been enlightened. So, Bill Clinton is a fucking douchebag AND Ron Paul is a fucking douchebag. Awesome. The choir appreciates your preaching.
Clinton, meanwhile, is revered by the very same cunt-knuckles who are constantly shrieking about Paul's alleged racism.
As I said above: there are enough people throughout the "pwoggie" blogs who don't care for Clinton and still make the same point. But I'm sure you have another cute neologism like "cunt-knuckles" to use in place of an actual intelligent point. Make sure to act really, really angry when you say it, too. That's always impressive.
To be exceedingly clear for those like anon 3:15, whose parents apparently should have added some chlorine to the family gene pool: I don't even particularly care what Paul thinks. Go on and send the man your life savings for all I care. I just felt the need to call bullshit on this type of "I know you are but what am I" non-answer. Whether he is or isn't a racist has nothing to do with what someone else did.
Actually, upon further reflection, I'm gonna start applying that logic myself: whenever the boss gets on my case for fucking up, I'll just remind him that I'm nowhere near as bad as the former employee who embezzled thousands of dollars, burned the building down, and fucked his wife. That should go over well.
Ah well, eliminate the bottom 10% and you just get a new bottom 10%. Ron Paul, a fuck-up as opposed to an embezzlin', fornicatin' arsonist -- potato, potato...
You want to watch it with that "enemy of my enemy" stuff. If your enemy is the state, the state's enemies unavoidably include a huge mass of creepy people as well as righteous anarchists. Not to mention all the outsiders. al Qaeda would have liked to blow up the Capitol, that doesn't make them natural allies of the Bakunin brigade.
Um, did I have a point? Oh yeah, just because Paul is against a number of abuses of the state doesn't make him any less of a reactionary racist creep.
He's probably set back any attempt to inject libertarian values into the mainstream by a good bit.
al Qaeda would have liked to blow up the Capitol, that doesn't make them natural allies of the Bakunin brigade.
Then again ...
Guessing "what Ron Paul would do" as President is a game for fools and liars, regardless what one (perhaps accurately) thinks of Democrats.
Voting Ron Paul because one thinks he'd end "the drug war," or "the war on terror," or the occupation of Iraq is the height of self-deception.
All Presidents are bound by the rules of the Washington/corporate consensus to a greater or lesser extent, whatever they "promise." The question is not what Paul promises you but how his promises will interact with the consensus to produce real-world outcomes.
My turn to play the fool: Paul's ideology will align with and reinforce the absolute worst tendencies of the existing consensus. Regulatory oversight will decrease. "Entitlement programs" will be reduced. Jails will not shrink and neither will the military.
I think the biggest tragedy is not the number of African-Americans in jail, but the number of poor who are in jail, and the proportion of poor who are African-American.
Poor people go to jail, period, regardless of their skin color. That's its own tragedy. That our nation may skew people to being poor based on their skin tone is yet another problem that should be dealt with on its own.
"Entitlement programs" will be reduced. Jails will not shrink and neither will the military.
Putting aside whether or not, as Kanye West might say, Ron Paul hates black people, I have to take issue with what a hypothetical Paul presidency (very hypothetical) would or could do. No lawmakers, whether Republican or Democrat, are going to want to reduce entitlement programs anytime soon. I think this is evidenced by the fact that Republicans controlled all three branches of government for what, six years?, and they actually added a Medicare prescription drug program.
Furthermore, if there's one thing a president can do, it's reduce the number of people in prison. A President Paul could pardon nonviolent drug offenders unilaterally -- which he has promised to do -- and he could direct the Department of Justice to make drug crimes the lowest possible priority.
Finally, as commander-in-chief the president could order troops deployed overseas back home. And a president who refuses to continue an American imperial mission abroad is going to result in a lot less demand for cash for the military-industrial complex. Which also explains why a President Paul is nothing more than a hypothetical.
And does anyone else find it interesting that it's left to Dennis Perrin to defend Ron Paul, while the "respectable" libertarians at Reason magazine are falling over themselves to denounce Paul and remind everyone just how "cosmopolitan" they are?
Just this week I read a piece by Nick Gillespie at Reason praising the "libertarian" Congressman Jeff Flake because he dared -- dared! -- to oppose earmarks. Never mind that he voted for the war in Iraq, voted for the PATRIOT act, and voted for the Military Commissions Act (which legalized torture and granted retroactive immunity to American officials who may -- who am I kidding? -- did commit war crimes). All those faults can be overlooked in Reason's desperate attempt to gain mainstream respectability. Ignorant shit published in a few little-read newsletters 20 years ago? That's fucking beyond the pale, man.
A Ron Paul presidency could do much, by doing nothing. Dr. No will become Prez Veto.
Forcing a supermajority vote in the Senate will allow the "minority" representatives of over 100 million Americans to block a bill from becoming law. President Paul's veto power is just the leverage the minority needs.
Charlie,
If "they actually added a Medicare prescription drug program" is your attempt to summarize the new Part D benefits, we ought to note at least that this "entitlement" is different from the rest of Medicare -- it isn't paid by the government, it's paid via private insurance. One enlightened observer (yes, Krugman) called it "a huge subsidy for drug and insurance companies," "new responsibilities without new resources" and ultimately "stealth privatization."
The idea that "no lawmakers...want to reduce entitlement(s)" is laughable. Of course they want to -- the people who pay their campaign expenses want them to.
Bush spun Medicare D as a great new benefit that would help the worse off among us, when it was really something quite different. A Paul presidency would provide a different rhetorical cover for the same type of depredations, is my best guess.
Nona,
Of course the prescription drug plan was a major boon to the pharmaceutical industry and big business. I would argue that that is the purpose of our government -- to enrich corporate interests while pretending to uphold the little guy.
As for whether politicians truly want to cut entitlements -- I don't think so. It's like ancient Rome: keep the proles here at home content with their bread and gladiators to distract them from the true nastiness that is the American government's policies overseas.
And as for Paul, he has made his campaign about cutting the trillions of dollars we spend overseas so we can "spend it here at home," in part because that is the most feasible way of cutting spending -- which needs to be cut, whatever your ideological leanings. Even if you think he'd like to cut these other programs, he'd be facing a Democratic Congress that could check his government-slashing zeal.
And I'd take a small-government conservative who promises to stop killing poor people on the other side of the globe over a liberal Democrat who simply promises to run the empire more efficiently any day (I also wouldn't mind living in a Sweden-style social democracy if it meant the government stopped starting wars and tapping my phone calls).
Anon at 4:46
But I'm sure you have another cute neologism like "cunt-knuckles" to use in place of an actual intelligent point
And I'm sure you have something better than your incoherent gibberish to prove you could identify an intelligent point if it hit you smack upside the head.
It's true that not all pwoggies like Clinton and some Democrats are different. But is Ron Paul being attacked by the supporters of Gravel or Kucinich? The remaining folks in the race haven't stepped up to the plate against American hegemony or the never-ending War on Drugs at home. As for what Ron Paul would accomplish in office (though, yes, he's never going to get there) read this. Paul has a long record in the legislature so I think we have a fairly good idea of how he would behave in office, which doesn't mean perfect adherence to his principles but a damn sight better than there has ever been in D.C.
mtraven, I remember when the war was more popular all that hawks were demonizing any opponents as "idiotarians" and saying they were just like MoveOn.org or A.N.S.W.E.R. They painted people as apologists for Saddam or al Qaeda. As long as they are meekly permitted to do that kind of smearing, any end to this stuff is doomed. You need to ask what's the real immediate problem. Fringe kooks? Or the people who've been running the government and screwing everything up?
Dennis Kucinich, folks. Anti-imperialist and NOT a fucking neo-Nazi. He's got the most fundamentally decent outlook on most issues, especially the war and the PATRIOT act.
Of course, he doesn't accept all the tenets of libertarian theology, and so the Randroids won't vote for him because taxes are OMG JUST LIEK SLAVERY. (Ron Paul isn't 100% libertarian either, but his anti-libertarian aspects don't inconvenience white males, so it's all good). And of course, Kucinich doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. But neither does Paul.
It's like ancient Rome: keep the proles here at home content with their bread and gladiators to distract them from the true nastiness that is the American government's policies overseas.
If that were true, we'd have single-payer healthcare already and Katrina wouldn't have been the disaster it was.
No, Nona Nym is absolutely right.
Kucinich supports torture, so no thanks.
tggp, I explictly urged Ron Paulistas to take a look at Kucinich here (as you know, maybe others want to have a look).
If you lump MoveOn.org and A.N.S.W.E.R. together you are really confused, and I guess the hawks have done their job. The former is a very vanilla, un-radical effort at doing some Internet organizing and fundraising, with an agenda that overlaps solidly with the left side of the Democratic party. The latter is an actual radical group, with some shady and obnoxious connections, but willing and able to do the work of organizing actual protest, which is why they have achieved some prominence despite their fringe views.
The real immediate problem is surely the actions of the government, but what's to be done about it? Ron Paul flamed out because his base of support turns out to be odious. Libertarians have been useful idiots for the statist right for decades, supplying anti-government rhetoric while their compadres grow the security appartus and loot the treasury. The paleocons and paleolibs like Paul are purer but are so enmeshed in reactionary racism and nationalism that I can't believe anything good is going to come out of that swamp.
Kucinich supports torture? Say what? Evidence please. As far as I know he (and Paul, to his credit) are the most solidly anti-torture people in the presidential field.
mtraven, Kucinich, Gravel, Dodd and Richardson have already dropped out. I tried to encourage other righties to support the first two, but now I believe Gravel endorsed Kucinich and Kucinich endorsed Obama or some other donkle. I know that MoveOn.org and ANSWER are very different organizations, but I don't think opposition to war implies support for either, whereas hawks lumped people in with them (and they with each other) when they voiced opposition.
Regarding torture, I think John McCain also took a principled and unpopular stand (for his audience) against it. IOZ called Kucinich a supporter of torture since he endorses other Democrats who don't really have a problem with it. Paul, to his credit, has continually stated that he will refuse to endorse other members of his party unless they change their positions.
Kucinich has not dropped out, in fact, he is fighting right now to be included in the upcoming Democratic debate. You are probably confused because he told his followers to support Obama as a second-round choice in Iowa.
I'm not sure what your point is with this lumping/splitting stuff. Paul's problem is not that he is merely lumped with racists, it's that he let racist and other hate-based material go out under his own name for decades.
The newsletter wasn't racist. It was politically incorrect and 100% true.
HALF A BILLION KILLED.
Sorry, mtraven, you're right that I was confused about Kucinich dropping out. The IOZ post I referenced was The Dotted Line. If anyone switched their support from Paul to Kucinich, that's cool by me.
A good post on the matter is this one from Ross Douthat. A commenter there makes the same point I did about anti-war folks being lumped in with ANSWER and anti-semites. Smearers don't think it's sufficient that you state your dissagreement about Mossad causing 9/11 but that you explicitly reject the support of those who do, which doesn't really seem to make sense to me. I came across that post via David Friedman, who has a good e-mail up at Timothy Sandefur's blog (which does not allow comments).
Derbyshire has an anecdote about how Paul interacts with nutballs here that would seem to support Douthat's analysis.
Kucinich's still a Democrat, right? Then he supports torture.
Sadly, anonymous, as Ron Paul is still a Republican, your definition would also apply to Mr. Paul as well. Any politician who is still a member of the bi=partisan consensus War Party supports torture-even Mr. Paul, protestations to the contrary.
Oh yeah, they're all torture supporters, I'm just saying Kucinich is no better an option than Paul. They're all imperialist scum.
I'm saying that our RON PAUL priorities haven't been taken RON PAUL. Unless we can get RON PAUL, we're really going to RON PAUL the RON PAUL.
Oh yes...and RON PAUL.
I'm sorry, that should have been DR. RON PAUL. My apologies.
I've heard some Paulites insist that Paul is being slandered if he's not referred to as "doctor", which would make sense if people were impugning his birthin' babies expertise, but has jack-all to do with politics.
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