Dumber and Dumbest

Professional Annoying Human Person Individual Rachel Maddow is a goddamn moron, although, to be fair, Rand Paul appears to be even dumber, despite having inherited a world-view marginally closer to my own. So, she is interviewing Paul, a libertarianische type, and hauls out the ol', "What about the lunch counters! Discrimination! Business! Aahhhhhh!"

Now this is basically a huge liberal canard, as inaccurate in its way as the conservative proposition that Martin Luther King, Jr. was in favor of what they call a colorblind society because of one line from his "I Have a Dream" speech. The segregation of lunch counters and restaurants, like the segregation of buses and schools, was a matter of law, not a matter of individual businesses making individually racist decisions. Perhaps those businesses would've done it anyway; perhaps some still would given the opportunity. But the fact remains: in the Jim Crow South, state and local laws affirmatively mandated racial discrimination and segregation. Systematic discrimination was systematic, you see. It is just a terribly false, tendentious, and specious argument, this claim that absent the heavy hand of the federal government, every diner owner South of the historic Mason-Dixon line will slap up a Whites Only sign. Look, the problem faced by Blacks in the segregated South wasn't that they'd get kicked out of the segregated lunch counter. It was that they would get arrested. So, you know, let's get the matters of source and authority straight here.

Like I said, Paul le jeune seems like some kind of retarded android leftover from the back lot of some unfilmed Star Trek franchise. He manages to cough out one interesting point, which must have been accidental, because he promptly manages to forget to follow up on it. He says, Hey, we've had a lot of re-segregation. And indeed, the drug war, the American penal system, and the creation and subdivision of public school districts have proven to be the trifecta for achieving a rigid system of de facto racial segregation even in the absence of a legal Jim Crow regime . . . even in the presence of Civil Rights legislation. I said this during the Ron Paul campaign and I will say it again. A libertarian who hates Black people, thinks they are racially and genetically inferior, and would, given the opportunity, refuse to serve racial minorities at his own business could nevertheless be better for Blacks than any cruise missile liberal. Ending the drug war and closing prisons and not sending poor Black people to die in crazy foreign adventures based on hazy "humanitarian" principles is more important than paying lip service to the Civil Rights office at the DOJ. For realz.