You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye

This is fun. And easy. An anonymous commenter piquefully asks:

Oh, really? Please be so kind as to go to [Rand Paul's] official campaign web site and actually quote just one of the good doctor's "worthwhile causes".

Well. Officially, Rand Paul opposes the massive transfer of wealth from private citizens to speculative corporate entitities, is a critic of the Fed and recognizes that "the Federal Reserve, an unelected group of private bankers, is printing trillions of dollars to bail out private industry, purchase government debt, and flood the market with cheap credit." He supports term limits, an admittedly minor but entirely defensible issue, if you're into the whole brevity thing. Finally:

Whether it’s passing the 315 page Patriot Act without a single member of Congress ever reading the bill, proposing a National ID Card, establishing FISA courts and utilizing warrantless searches, or betraying the medical privacy of ordinary citizens, the Federal Government has overstepped its limited powers as stipulated in the Constitution.

Rand Paul seeks to reassert the rights and privileges of the 50 states and over 300 million Americans. The Federal Government must return to its constitutionally enumerated powers and restore our inalienable rights. Rand proposes that America can successfully protect itself against potential terrorists without sacrificing civil liberties. Rand rejects the premise that the Federal Government must be given a blank check in the name of national security.

America can prosper, preserve personal liberty, and repel national security threats without intruding into the personal lives of its citizens.

So, officially, there you have it.

Now it is wholly valid to say that Paul doesn't really believe these things, or that his law-and-order, protect-the-borders schtick inherently contradicts his stance on liberty and privacy, or that his appeals to States Rights and localism are coded racism, or that his opposition to the Fed plays opportunistically on prevalent conspiracy-mongering within the so-called Tea-Party movement. You can say that his promises to fight for Constitutional governance are no more believable than Barack Obama's, although you'd have to be a fairly credulous Democratic partisan to go quite that far. The fact remains that the Democratic, "progressive" position is now that an executive-expanding, authoritarian, oligarchic militarist in the actual White House, ruling the actual American empire, is less threatening and somehow less worthy of criticism than a potential junior senator who has made some fairly thoughtless comments about race. Whatever, dears. To be fair, I think it is in fact not a bad thing that there exists so strong a social bias against racially insensitive speech that a few questionable comments elicit a furious, snarling rhetorical fussilade that, say, killing the population of a distant village or arrogating to oneself the power to murder anyone, anywhere does not . . . although obviously the very existence of such powerful social bias also suggests that federal legislation is not necessarily the only means of rectifying or addressing racial inequality. That having been said, and to reiterate once more a point that cannot be made often enough, it is not criticism of Rand Paul or the Tea Party movement to which I object, but rather the plain, blinkered belief of so many levelling the criticsm that it is a gang of disaffected and unhappy crypto-Republican political pseudo-activists who represent a greater problem, a greater evil, and a greater injustice (or potential injustice) than the operations of the bipartisan American hegemon, headed by His Jumpshot Himself.

Well, our little club is used to it. In the same way that a couple of SOI-DISANT conservative commenters enjoy reading our vociferous critique of the American empire and our qualified defenses of Iran's right to exist like any other nation as some kind of abiding approval of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and the Islamic Republic, so too are we inured to the evident liberal belief that the qualified defense of certain aspects of Rand Paul, or the Tea Partiers, or what have you, represents a secret pining for lynch mobs and segregation.

Proud We Are of All of Them

I will say this much, though. Despite what I said yesterday, I am still amazed that libertarian political types such as the Pauls père et fils do the whole possum-in-a-halogen-high-beam routine every time the subject of civil rights comes up. If you want evidence of Rand Paul's carelessness, thoughtless, and blithe disregard for racial inequality in America, it is not to be found in his mild intellectual opposition to a piece of dubiously successful, half-century-old social legislation, but rather in the fact that he appears totally unprepared to speak fluently about race in America . . . a subject that has dogged candidates of his pedigree for years. "What, oh, um, yeah. Uh, black people? You're asking me about black people, right?"

Although I do not endorse the Paul candidacy, because he is by all indications a moron, because I don't live in his state, and because I don't vote, endorse candidates (except for Candidate-for-Death, Communist Gus Hall), or care, I am nevertheless going to offer him, totes gratis, yo, this not-even-inaccurate, pat, prepackaged, even moderately eloquent reply to the Civil Rights Act questions that will invariably arise:

I believe that in the kind of civil society I hope to create, laws like the Civil Rights Act will be unnecessary, but that that society is a long way away. Long before we get there, we must address the issues of our ruinous debt, our unjust and unnecessary foreign wars, our disastrous war on drugs, and the increasing intrusion of government into every aspect of our private lives. I believe that by applying these principles, we will create a fairer, better country for all of our citizens, regardless of race, and that in such a society, we can find a way to address our fears and prejudices about each other through respect, civic dialogue, and cooperation, rather than through the force of laws and courts.

Rinse. Repeat. Sound of crickets. Katie Couric blinks. A dog howls.

On a related note, and not that we'd ever dream of trolling for nebbish good-liberal opprobrium, I just want to point out for the Avogadro's Numberth time that while progs remain desperately convinced that the greatest threat to human life on this planet is some horrific, satanic cartel of Rush Limbaugh, some Tea-Party protester with a spelling problem, and a marginal libertarian congressional candidate from an unremarkable state, it is in fact Barack Obama who is killing thousands of innocent people, presiding over the ongoing oppression of racial minorities through the drug war, transferring billions upon billions of dollars from private citizens to speculative corporate enterprises, and so on and so forth. In other words, the pricipal nexus for violence, death, destruction, and injustice is our so-called "First African-American President," the avatar of Hope and Change, the supposedly most "progressive" of candidates, who is in reality as big a death-worshipping corporate hack as anyone. Not only that, but Obama has explicitly and repeatly explained that he is not interested in proposing or supporting programs and policies specifically targeted at the advancement of black folk. And not only that, but his public pronouncements on race, especially on absentee black fathers are not only deeply conservative, but would, if uttered by, say, Rand Paul, be roundly denounced by Obama's own progressive supporters as revanchist, atavistic, and racist. Which, in fact, they are.

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.

Not in Nam, of course

I, too, was against the Vietnam war and felt that people should protest, but not dodge their draft responsibility.

-Larry Pressler

Oh, please, dear. I suppose if you "opposed" Vietnam because you had some hazy, polisci sense that it was, like, "not in America's strategic interest," or some shit, then okay, fine, protest, then suck it up and shoulder the "responsibility" of service, but if, on the other hand, you were opposed to Vietnam because you recognized that it was a crime against humanity, an epically unjust bloodletting of a scale not seen in East Asia since the Japanese in Manchuria, then you had an affirmative moral duty not to serve by any means necessary.

Now, Pressler is correct that the burden of the draft fell most heavily on the poorer members of our society. Well, military service remains an outlet for the underclasses. It is surely unfair that Dick Cheney rode it out on grad school exemptions and George Bush whooped it up in the Air National Guard and this pencildick Donk whateverheis, the ostensible inspiration for Pressler's essay, got himself a nice posting in a stateside reserve unit, while a lot of poor niggers and country hicks got themselves killed while in the service of America's Indochinese holocaust. But to proclaim that what catalyzed the decline in public ethics and the concurrent drop in the public's trust in "elites" is the result of atomized, individual dishonesty to avoid getting drafted and sent off to the abattoir rather than the immense, persistent, and universal dishonesty of the generation of elites who prosecuted the war in Vietnam on the level of strategy and policy is . . . ahem . . . bullshit. Give me a break. I mean, what's worse, a student contriving to fail an army physical, or William Fucking Westmoreland?

Twain. Thompson. Alger.

I say this kid is a classic example of American self-invention, straight outta Twain. Lulz. But seriously, I want to make a point about the deranged nature of society and the impossibility of living legally. Apparently there is a law against "pretending to hold a degree."

Emily, I have a confession to make. I really am a horse doctor.

Fuck. Stanley. Fish.

You know, Freire is a very interesting thinker and writer even though he's wrong. Most leftish thinkers are. Their admirable and often correct skepticism about and hostility toward the extant institutions of culture and society breaks apart when it becomes prescriptive. The radical critique becomes a plan for new institutions. The solution to the perpetuation of dominant culture through its institutionalized educational structures is . . . education? Wait, what? Yo, these new institutions quickly professionalize, evolve a managerial and technocratic culture that leads inevitably back to status quo liberalism. Mandatory education is by definition indoctrination, no matter how radical the political content of the curriculum.

But. Fuck. Stanley. Fish. Freire is a real thinker with real ideas, whereas Stanley Fish is a hack professor at some lazy, South-Floridian Whatsamatta U. who traffics in such congenially pre-wrought phrases as "the virus of a politicized classroom." Oh . . . well, I think of it more as a bacterium . . . um, but, uh, let's agree to disagree, k? So as not to . . . politicize the discussion. See, education, especially in the humanities and so-called social sciences, is inherently and unavoidably political. The blandest, middle-of-the-road, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand, unengaged, disinterested, milquetoast pedagogy for which Fish persistently . . . well, agitates is the wrong word . . . which he calmly suggests as some kind of alternative to whatever it is he thinks is currently going on is itself highly political, embedded with all kinds of cultural norms, economic theories, social assumptions, political and linguistic preferences, mores and ethical givens. Which is exactly the shining, neon fucking sign mounted at the center of Freire's work and shining like Vegas on a power surge. Fish's half-assed apolitical pedagogy is a deeply political proposal, a notion and practice arising directly from the political struggles of institutions of higher education in America at this very specific and particular point in time.

Watching Fish dash his skull against the edifice of a superior mind is kind of fun, like a good pile-up at the auto track, but it's also frustrating, because you can see the nice readers of the New York Times nodding along with it, comfortably ensconced in the belief that the broad, dominant, assumed, accepted culture of our times, its institutions, and its organization are apolitical, that methods of analysis and inquiry occupy a totally distinct universe from, um, "counter-hegemonic, even revolutionary, activity" . . . even though, fucking obviously, the maintenance of hegemony is not distinct from the critique of and struggle against hegemony insofar as they are all political acts.

Anyway, the solution is not the creation of counter-institutions but the eradication of education. The real radical proposition is not that there are different and better methods of teaching that will awaken the consciousness and conscience of the youth, but rather that compulsory instruction is violence and education is a violation. Put that in your pipe, Fish, you fucking hack.

Cooperation = Dissent

I am definitely not the first to note the dire, deadly irony of The West lamenting Iranian compliance with its treaty obligations and with international demands. Oh no! If they do what we keep haranguing them to do, then we won't be able to apply punitive sanctions! As if it weren't already clear enough that it isn't cooperation nor even compliance that we want. It's submission, the more abject, the better.

The Iranian stratagem came as a particularly stinging setback to the Obama administration, which lately had been buoyed by hopes that it finally was about to deliver added international economic punishment that could eventually force Iran to the bargaining table.

The Iranian, um, stratagem appears to be acceding to a major part of Amero-European demands regarding their nuclear fuel supplies. Well, whatever . . . America probably won't stop agitating for sanctions; Iran will probably refuse to follow through on the deal because they see that the world's most powerful fucking country is going to try to punish them anyway, and Christopher Hitchens can phone in another column decrying Iranian perfidy. Ever thus. Ever thus.

Test Prep

It's like, if Papa Hemmingway had skipped the literary merit and the whole ambulance-driving/war-corresponding bit, instead retiring straightaway to Sun Valley from which booze-stocked cabin he penned increasingly desperate missives to the cowards back East, that feckless establishment that refused to see Franco's Spain as an expanding empire with its eyes set on . . . its eyes set on . . . well, anyway, a self-evidently expansionist evil empire, then you would basically have a model for Hitch's increasingly preposterous career.

Iran, to reiterate for the millionth time, seems like a pretty unfortunate place to live. I am glad the fortune favored my birth with a better address. I sincerely hope that some day the Iranian people enjoy more freedom and prosperity and fairness and so forth and so on, although, as a resident of the world's preeminent blower-upper of shit, I am not about to start lobbing my outrage at the Iranian government. Washington is closer to Pittsburgh, and my arm ain't what it used to be. But Iran is plainly not an expansionist power, however nasty its secret police may be. I'm sorry, but fatuous, preening, first-world moral umbrage is really, really not a justification for war, or whatever action Hitchen's is just barely smart enough not to explicitly suggest. "Oh, I am not saying that we should intervene militarily. I'm just saying that nothing else can possibly have any effect and it would be morally impermissible to do nothing. But I am definitely not advocating for war."

Meanwhile, citing the jingoing of Iran's "semi-official press" is awfully cheap work for a guy who is writing in a subsidiary of the Goddamn Washington Post.

To Swig, to Quail

Shockingly, shockingly, I say, I agree with Ross Douthat.

Blue Chipz

Just, you know, because I feel the need periodically to point out that capitalism is entirely fictitious, totally a fraud. Just to demonstrate once more that the self-justifying principle that so-called free markets most effectively raise and allocate capital for new enterprise is fake. Not only are the values of business ventures divorced from the actual production of goods and delivery of services, they are divorced from the names and identities of the very phony companies in which they invest. Yeah, but, you know, like, whatever.