{"id":132023,"date":"2012-10-26T10:00:19","date_gmt":"2012-10-26T14:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=132023"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:03:28","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:03:28","slug":"ron-paul-strange-beliefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/10\/26\/ron-paul-strange-beliefs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Peculiar Nature Of Ron Paul"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> Ron Paul’s Strange Bedfellows<\/a> by Katha Pollott in The Nation.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> What is it with progressive mancrushes on right-wing Republicans? For years, until he actually got nominated, John McCain was the recipient of lefty smooches equaled only by those bestowed upon Barack Obama before he had to start governing. You might disagree with what McCain stood for, went the argument, but he had integrity, and charisma, and some shiny mavericky positions\u2014on campaign finance reform and gun control and\u2026 well, those two anyway.<\/p>\n

Now Ron Paul is getting the love. At Truthdig, Robert Scheer calls him \u201ca profound and principled contributor to a much-needed national debate on the limits of federal power.\u201d In The Nation, John Nichols praises his \u201cpure conservatism,\u201d \u201cvalues\u201d and \u201cprinciple.\u201d Salon\u2019s Glenn Greenwald is so outraged that progressives haven\u2019t abandoned the warmongering, drone-sending, indefinite-detention-supporting Obama for Paul that he accuses them of supporting the murder of Muslim children. There\u2019s a Paul fan base in the Occupy movement and at Counterpunch, where Alexander Cockburn is a longtime admirer. Paul is a regular guest of Jon Stewart, who has yet to ask him a tough question. And yes, these are all white men; if there are leftish white women and people of color who admire Paul, they\u2019re keeping pretty quiet.<\/p>\n

Ron Paul has an advantage over most of his fellow Republicans in having an actual worldview, instead of merely a set of interests\u2014he opposes almost every power the federal government has and almost everything it does. Given Washington\u2019s enormous reach, it stands to reason that progressives would find targets to like in Paul\u2019s wholesale assault. I, too, would love to see the end of the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d and our other wars. I, too, am shocked by the curtailment of civil liberties in pursuit of the \u201cwar on terror,\u201d most recently the provision in the NDAA permitting the indefinite detention, without charge, of US citizens suspected of involvement in terrorism. But these are a handful of cherries on a blighted tree. In a Ron Paul America, there would be no environmental protection, no Social Security, no Medicaid or Medicare, no help for the poor, no public education, no civil rights laws, no anti-discrimination law, no Americans With Disabilities Act, no laws ensuring the safety of food or drugs or consumer products, no workers\u2019 rights. How far does Paul take his war against Washington? He wants to abolish the Federal Aviation Authority and its pesky air traffic controllers. He has one magic answer to every problem\u2014including how to land an airplane safely: let the market handle it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a little strange to see people who inveigh against Obama\u2019s healthcare compromises wave away, as a detail, Paul\u2019s opposition to any government involvement in healthcare. In Ron Paul\u2019s America, if you weren\u2019t prudent enough or wealthy enough to buy private insurance\u2014and the exact policy that covers what\u2019s ailing you now\u2014you find a charity or die. And if civil liberties are so important, how can Paul\u2019s progressive fans overlook his opposition to abortion and his signing of the personhood pledge, which could ban many birth control methods? Last time I checked, women were half the population (the less important half, apparently). Technically, Paul would overturn Roe and let states make their own laws regulating women\u2019s bodies, up to and including prosecuting abortion as murder. Add in his opposition to basic civil rights law\u2014he maintains his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and opposes restrictions on the \u201cfreedom\u201d of business owners to refuse service to blacks\u2014and his hostility to the federal government starts looking more and more like old-fashioned Southern-style states\u2019 rights. No wonder they love him over at Stormfront, a white-supremacist website with neo-Nazi tendencies. In a multiple-choice poll of possible effects of a Paul presidency, the most popular answer by far was \u201cPaul will implement reforms that increase liberty which will indirectly benefit White Nationalists.\u201d And let\u2019s not forget his other unsavory fan base, Christian extremists who want to execute gays, adulterers and \u201cinsubordinate children.\u201d Paul\u2019s many connections with the Reconstructionist movement, going back decades, are laid out on AlterNet by Adele Stan, who sees him as a faux libertarian whose real agenda is not individualism but to prevent the federal government from restraining the darker impulses at work at the state and local levels.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all pretty incoherent for a man often praised as principled and consistent and profound\u2014if states could turn themselves into a Christian theocracy, could they also turn themselves into socialist mini-republics? If they can ban contraception, can they also compel contraception? For people who see Paul as an antiwar candidate who will restore the Bill of Rights, it\u2019s almost bad manners to bring up his opposition to just about every piece of progressive legislation passed in the last 200 years, from the Occupational Safety and Health Act and membership in the UN to Federal Deposit Insurance and requirements that undocumented immigrants be permitted treatment in ERs. But come on! This man has been a stone reactionary his entire life. Consistent? Not to harp on abortion, but an effective ban would require a level of policing that would make the war on drugs look feeble.<\/p>\n

If Ron Paul was interested in peace, he wouldn\u2019t be a Republican\u2014that party has even more enthusiasm for the military-industrial complex than the Democrats. For decades the GOP has turned every election into a contest over who is more macho, more nationalistic, more willing to do exactly the things lefty Paul fans excoriate Obama for doing. Paul doesn\u2019t get re-elected in his Texas district because of boutique positions like thinking Osama bin Laden should have been arrested, not assassinated.<\/p>\n

Supporting Ralph Nader in 2000 was at least a vote for one\u2019s actual politics. Supporting Ron Paul is just a gesture of frivolity\u2014or despair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Ron Paul’s Strange Bedfellows by Katha Pollott in The Nation. The Text: What is it with progressive mancrushes on right-wing Republicans? For years, until he actually got nominated, John McCain was the recipient of lefty smooches equaled only by those bestowed upon Barack Obama before he had to start governing. You might disagree […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Peculiar Nature Of Ron Paul<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Many regard Paul as something of an uber-conservative sage, but just how coherent is his worldview?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/10\/26\/ron-paul-strange-beliefs\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Peculiar Nature Of Ron Paul\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Many regard Paul as something of an uber-conservative sage, but just how coherent is his 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