Glenn Greenwald: Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies

Very fair point. And I'm glad to not be lumped in with the Obama defenders. But I'm also not willing to take that displeasure and throw it straight away into support for Paul.

 

You appear to be confusing cause and effect.

While I agree that the media can shape the narrative at the margins, the fact that Ron Paul's views are considered repugnant can be explained more simply in Occam's razoresque fashion by the fact that they are actually repugnant, which, in my examination, they are, and have been considered as such since the 1960's, with respect to civil rights, and the 1910's, with respect to economic policy....etc....add this in to the fact that Paulistas share an affinity for conspiracy theories and other nonsense and the portrayal you are questioning is a pretty apt description.

The problem isn't really the media portraying Paulistas as crazies - the fact that he has as many supporters as he does, given the truly ridiculous and ill-considered nature of most of his policy proposals on a pragmatic level - probably indicates to me that they're not portraying him as crazy enough, probably out of some misguided concession to "balance".

 

Yeah, because Obama's policies include such wonderful concepts as extrajudicial executions and the dissolution of habeus corpus.

 

Amusingly, vaids, Greenwald expounds on your POV in his most recent blog post.

EDIT: That was a good read - recommended.

 

So essentially what we're looking for is a Paul/Obama hybrid.

Hooray 2 party system! Nice posts gentlemen.

 

Regardless of their wonderfulness, let's just exmaine two concepts

drone strike on an armed band of militants in overseas warzone, including US citizen

vs

return to pre-Heart of Atlanta Jim-Crow era of state-sanctioned private discrimination

You find these two things to be around the same part of the "WTF?" scale? The first one, sure, you can argue "SLIPPERY SLOPE -> DEATH SQUADS -> ETC!"...then you've got a point, if that were to actually occur. The second one, there's no slippery slope, Paul just jumps right over it. Let's go back to the pre-60's legal regime.

 

Fixed that for you. Your "examination" is blatantly deceitful.

Look who's talking...

 

Kucinich's economics are not supportive of the very rich so he doesn't get the economic support Ron Paul does.

If Paul cared as much about civil liberties and a non-interventionist foreign policy as he does about the property rights of the wealthy (i.e low taxation for them and low regulation for their business interests) he would not support the GOP so loyally and would consider running as independent since Obama is less interventionist and more for civil liberties than any of the recent GOP presidential candidates.

 

Couldnt disagree more.

People frequently choose candidates on the basis of solitary positions (abortion, illegal immigration, healthcare, etc.), and there are far more frivolous reasons people choose to support candidates (religious convictions, marital status, race, gender, etc.) than what we're seeing with Paulites. Why is someone choosing to support Ron Paul solely on the basis of his foreign policy positions seen as so egregious?

Your post is an embodiment of an atitude that resonates throughout mainstream liberal/democratic discourse, in that it not only ledges against Paul and his supporters a sort of obviousness (how could anyone possibly support him? they must be a loon, drivel nonsense, espouse conspiracy theories, etc.), but whitewashes the severely problematic and repugnant facts about Obama.

Why is it so repugnant for Paul to want to remove government agencies, but wholly acceptable for Obama to perform targeted attacks that routinely result in civilian casualties, or authorize a piece of legislation as repugnant as NDAA? It's as if Paul every problem with Paul is magnified, but Obama's misgivings are portrayed as relatively minor by comparison.

 

A perfect example of why real progress is difficult to achieve. Look at how much energy that GG has to expend just to fend off misleading attacks made against him by fellow progressives. When friends like that, who needs neocons.

 

lol yeah, pretty much the same POV but he says it far more articulately than me. Been searching for the Rolling Stone interview- can you link it here? I havent been able to find it....

 

Wrong, because that's what he's after. If Paul managed to get everything he wanted, we wouldn't even be in the 1910s, we'd be back in the 1850s, back to the ridiculous idea that states should be supreme over the federal government - Paul after all, seems not to have any real problems if the individual states or businesses implement discrimination, it's only a problem if the federal government. It's clear that he's an extremist on the states rights thing which is commonly accepted by the Republican Party.

My thing with that idea is: if the states governments should really be having that much more power like Paul wants, then it would also stand to logic that the people should possess greater loyalty to their states than to the United States. That is something I will never, ever accept.

And also, so now if a US citizen joins Al Qaeda, we have to focus on capturing him alive? We've never done that with Americans who've attempted to destroy this country - from my perspective, it's not like saying that if Lincoln had the opportunity to send commandos to assassinate Lee, he would be in the wrong because according to Lincoln, Lee was still an American citizen.

If a guy wants to support Santorum just because he'll outlaw abortion, I'll call him an idiot. And if a guy wants to support Paul just because he'll legalize pot and destroy our hegemony, then I'll call him an idiot. Heck, I'll call him a bigger idiot because the loss of American influence overseas is more important than abortion.

That's been a large part of my experience with the truly fanatical Paulbots.

 

I don't really get this. Both Pauls, Ron and Rand, have explicity denounced the Civil Rights act of 1964 because it interferes with private property/etc.

There's nothing remotely deceitful about that. We had a whole thread about it.

Your argument is based on the fact that Paul is unlikely to succeed in his cockamamie scheme to hurtle is back to the Jim Crow era and thus it's ok to treat it as less repugnant, conceptually?

 

No, what's repugnant is whitewashing Obama's implemented policies by comparing them to an ideological stance given by a known absolutist. I expect this kind of repugnant position from Paul - he's famous for it. Yet, I have to listen to partisan drones act like said positions somehow indemnify Obama from criticism for real, actual policies put in place that shred the constitution and blatantly contradict his campaign stances.

I mean, your argument is based on the fact that since Paul would like to pass a cockamamie scheme to hurtle is back to the Jim Crow era, thus it's ok to treat Obama's shredding of the constitution as less repugnant, conceptually?

They're both repugnant, and neither justifies the other.

 

This topic has been discussed previously. My main problem with the assassination program is it's secrecy. It may be perfectly rational, and even legal - but the public is forced to just "trust" that it's being utilized correctly. I don't agree with that.

More to the point, exclude the assassination program and you're still left explaining the codification of indefinite detainment and loss of habeus corpus for american citizens, among other abuses.

 

What I would argue is that while Obama may have implemented various policies which you may not like ( such as taking out some people working with Al Qaeda), he's still far better than the crazy policies being proposed by Ron Paul. And I think that's what Sam is basically saying. It's a natural result of any political process.

 

No, it's based on the fact that Paul's treatment as an extremist nutjob by the media is largely justified insofar as his ideas are extreme and nutty by most objective measures.

Sure, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that when you're comparing the two - Paul's is far more worthy of scorn and outright dismissal on its own merits even in isolation, let alone the backdrop of extremism from which it comes from - rather than the Paulista grumbling of media bias.

 

How secret is it, really? Obama takes out a couple guys halfway across the world - and both the extreme right and left have been squealing like stuck pigs over it for at least half a year. If he runs around just murdering people in Nebraska over the next year, I do think people will notice.

Besides, I'm not an Obama supporter. I'm probably going to vote for Romney, but I actually don't really mind Obama all that much, and would easily support him over Ron Paul.

 

Because they are relatively minor by comparison. The authorization to perform drone strikes is a marginal muddled issue that has considerations on both sides, but ultimately a relatively narrow level of direct impact on the populace as a whole........the issue of enacting a program to take the government & economy back to the 1890's and dismantling what probably amounts to 99% of all law and regulation currently in existence is a bit broader.

 

Don't agree, but respect your opinion.