How is he wrong? Obama has done a lot of those things that piss me off, Paul has opposed them, and I still think that Obama is a far better choice than Paul. Why is that so hard to understand?
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.
Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.
They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.
Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.
Everything is totally normal and fine!!!
It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.
They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.
Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?
This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.
Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.
When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.
And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.
Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.
The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.
Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll
Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.
Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.
They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.
Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.
They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.
Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.
“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber
Baud
Please warn before linking to GG.
I only skimmed it but he’s wrong in categorizing an imperfect good (Obama and the Dems) as a lesser evil.
Taking him at his word that he is not endorsing any candidate (Fox News doesn’t either, IIRC), he is exercising a luxury that most working people in this country don’t have — the ability to sit on the sidelines and wait for something good to happen.
Mudge
It’s what Paul believes in that matters. He’d aggressively ruin the country. Any man that believes someone lacking health insurance should just be allowed to die can never be allowed near power.
JPL
Paul is an isolationist in all cases and that appeals to some. Of course he is against gay rights, civil rights, rights for females and thinks it’s okay for monopolies to kill small businesses and start ups so I guess he’s against free enterprise and capitalism. Paul would believe in Sharia law if it were named something else..let’s name it libertarianism. If he knocked on my door, I wouldn’t let him in.
Mark S.
Oh lordy, there’s gonna be a shitstorm.
I’ll let Edroso state my main objection:
Anya
John, it’s too early in the new year to troll for a flame war. Also, what Baud said.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I’m still working through the article, but I’ll state this: Would Glenn want to live in the America Ron Paul would actually create? That last thing I want is an actual libertarian society: I don’t own enough guns. And the moment Paul wants to give the government the ability to enforce contracts, we’re not haggling over whether government has any power or not, just how much. (We’re just deciding the price.)
I do like some of the goals Paul is proposing. His path for getting there is not the way to do it. Oh, and he’s a Republican.
amk
Apples and oranges, John, apples and oranges.
geegee is yet another hack pundtwit and he is not even from msm. So stop giving him the attention he so craves but doesn’t deserve even an iota of it.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
It isn’t like Paul offers a libertarian society, though. He offers a society in which there’s a weak federal government that can’t overrule the trampling by the states on civil rights and liberties.
Origuy
Charles at LGF front-paged Paul’s belief that AIDS patients shouldn’t burden others by getting insurance payments. And that sexual harassment victims should just quit and find another job.
Mark S.
An honest line of reasoning for a Paul supporter would go as follows:
Without my adopting it, that is at least an honest, candid, and rational way to defend one’s choice. It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest.
rikyrah
I am Black.
Ron Paul thinks nothing of the second-class citizenship that was codified into the LAWS OF THIS COUNTRY up until 1964.
He has said – REPEATEDLY – that he would have NEVER voted to codify INTO THE LAWS OF THIS LAND – on paper – first-class citizenship for my ancestors and me.
erego, he is disqualified, in my eyes, to be President of this country.
period.
I don’t have to go further than this.
I don’t even have to get into his misogyny when it comes to my body and my womb.
The anti-Black stuff is where I can begin and end with Ron Paul.
Libby
Love Glenn. Appreciate all he’s done in the past. But this “agree with me that Obama is horrible or you’re just as evil” schtick is off the rails. Nobody disagrees that some of this stuff is horrible, but more horrible than it was under Bush? Sorry I don’t think so. It’s the more principled than thou narrative that’s getting to me.
I mean, bitching on the internet about stuff that already happened is going to change everything. Oh wait. No it won’t.
I don’t even mind the bitching if he and the other Obama bashers would offer some practical solutions too. I mean, allowing GOPers to take charge of the gov’t is going to change everything? Make it better? Not seeing it.
Like I said to emptywheel yesterday. I don’t want to fight. We disagree on stuff. It happens. We shouldn’t let it divide us or the bad guys win.
Lolis
Those newsletters and history of nutty conspiracy theories are too bad to give Ron Paul even the slighest consideration for anything. We should have zero tolerance for bigots with a tenuous grasp of reality.
Redshift
Remember how part of the problem with the supposedly widespread progressive “disappointment” with Obama was that a lot of people had projected onto him the things they believed, rather than the things he said he believed?
Well, that’s nothing compared with the ability of the Paul-curious to assume that the appalling things he believes in would never happen because of widespread opposition by other political forces, but you should support him because of the supposedly positive things he believes in, despite the fact that they would be even less likely to actually happen.
I mean, seriously, does anyone thing legalizing drugs is more likely to get through Congress than restricting abortion or gay rights?
WereBear (itouch)
I believe in civil rights, universal health care, and staying out of wars. Vote for meeeeee!
I see Greenwald as one of those folks whose ranting worked wonderfully when he objected to the egregious abuses perpetrated by Bush; it was horrible. But his protests ring hollow when we have a President who did stopped torture; and GG just pivots to a new complaint.
Roger Moore
Greenwald’s analysis ignores the most salient point: you’re not voting just for the candidate, you’re also voting for a party. Because the government isn’t just the President, a vote for any Republican, even one who’s as far off the Republican reservation as Paul, is a vote in favor of the evil policies the Republicans endorse. It doesn’t matter that Paul opposes them himself. Just look at how much good it’s done Obama to oppose the continued operation of Guantanamo in the face of concerted Congressional opposition.
Do you really think that Ron Paul, by himself, will be able to end the drug war or American foreign policy adventurism? Absolutely not. The issues Greenwald cares the most about, the ones where Paul is most at odds with his party, are the ones where Paul is least likely to have a policy effect. It’s nice that Paul is bringing those issues up, but it would be even better if the person raising them weren’t so evil on so many other issues that nobody can take him seriously.
jazzgurl
The attraction to Ron Paul is the fact that he proposes some things that the more liberal white folks/and at the other end of the spectrum the more extremists in society can agree with, and won’t get a look-in with Obama.
But, being fooled by ‘this old man, he played one, he played two, he is playing knock knack on your brain’ etc. is to allow yourself to get sucked into his obvious distortions and divisiveness,via racism, extreme policies which unfortunately don’t work well with the average man.
CT Voter
I thought he was inadvertently amusing. Starting off with a lament about how election years debase political discussion, so that it’s nothing more than an “Us VS Them” mentality, and then proceeds to adopt the exact same mentality later in the post. If you support Obama, then you must be comfortable with the murder of women and children.
If that’s not an “Us vs Them” mentality, I don’t know what is.
Redshift
@Lolis: Not just a history of nutty conspiracy theories — two days ago he was telling Iowa voters that some people want to have the UN “controlling our lands” and that there will be violence in the streets if we don’t stop “losing our liberties.”
Redshift
@amk: Ah, yes, because if bloggers ignore pundits, they all just disappear.
Donna
What kills me is that the analysis of any Republican candidate, including Paul, ignores the fact that if a Republican wins the presidency, a Republican Senate and House is virtually guaranteed. And so a Republican president, in that scenario, is going to be governed by the Congress, and not vice versa. So no matter how great Paul seems now to Glenn and other disgruntled “liberals,” the make-up of Congress following a Republican presidential win is of much more consequence than the “principles” of the Republican president.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Mark S.:
Yet with regards to GG’s position on the invasion of Iraq in the run-up and early days was this:
[ETA: the link here http://www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/index.cfm?fuseaction=printable&book_number=1812 ]
As someone who didn’t support that invasion at all, I’m just a bit more than miffed at Greenwald on this. He’s like a kid who makes a big fucking mess then bitches about the measures taken to clean that mess up. He might consider SingTFU about the brown people and cluster bombs.
Martin
Well, in my first read, he’s wrong because he says that candidate Paul opposes things that President Obama supports. That’s bullshit false equivalency. Fuck, man, candidate Obama also opposes things that President Obama supports.
Seriously, people with jobs and kids and other responsibilities should understand well enough that hypothetically I’d never lay off one of my best staff, nor would I hypothetically ever give the doctor the okay to cut off one of my kids limbs, but those are things that as non-hypothetical people in those roles that you sometimes have to do because the alternatives are worse or because there are elements out of your control.
That’s great that Paul is opposed to preemptive war – so is Obama. What the fuck does that have to do with the actual war that is actually happening that neither one of them created but they have to deal with head-on? One of my biggest gripes with Greenwald is that he doesn’t recognize the disparity of choices that we are granted. We all get choices in life that are free, and are reversible. Can’t choose between fish and chicken at the restaurant? That’s okay, if you get it wrong, you can still order the other one, or just wait until tomorrow to have the thing you want.
But other choices aren’t like that – particularly Presidential choices. You’re told that there is actionable intelligence that OBL is in a house in Pakistan and may be protected by the Pakistanis. Do you tell them that you’re going in? Do you go in without telling them? Do you do nothing? Do you call in a drone strike instead? They all carry negative consequences. None have 100% positive outcomes. They all have the potential to backfire on you, and every single one of them is irreversible in the consequences they create. If you do nothing and OBL was there, and organizes another attack, you fucked up. If you tell Pakistan and they slip him out before you get there, or worse, they tip off that you’ve helicopters coming in, you have another Operation Eagle Claw. Presidents face countless decisions where the best outcome they can expect really is to do less damage than the other outcomes. Shit, no other US presidents killed more innocent civilians than FDR and Truman. Were they wrong? Yeah, probably with some of those decisions, but not collectively. There simply wasn’t any clear way to get it more right than they did. That’s life as President, and it was true for George Bush as well.
Paul doesn’t have those liberties, nor did candidate Obama, and comparing the positions of someone like Paul who is free of the burden of these decisions to someone who has the full burden placed upon them is bullshit without noting that distinction – or at least noting the relative position that candidate Obama took when he too was unburdened with that responsibility. And anyone who thinks that the Paul positions are in any way credible or realistic of what will actually happen in office are fucking delusional. Credit to candidate Obama for not ignoring the realities of office as Paul does. When he was candidate he said what he would do if the OBL decision came up, and he was pilloried from both sides for that position, and fuck if that isn’t exactly the scenario that came up and if that isn’t exactly what he did.
I think one of the biggest problems the GOP has is that they refuse to deal with the world as it exists and keep trying to fold and spindle it into the world they want, and then take positions as if that’s the reality. This shit is messy. Nobody wants it to be messy, but that’s what it is, and you have to deal with that. Paul can’t handle the messiness and waves it away, and Greenwald follows him down that path. Yeah, it’d be great if Yaweh would just get his ass down here and sort out all of the constitutional and extra-legal problems involved with persons who exist outside of nation states, but he won’t, so we get this terrible mishmash of laws that just don’t fit into a structure that was never designed to handle these problems. But the solution is to pretend there are no problems? That’s lunacy to expect of our leaders. Great lesson for your kids, though. And let’s not pretend that the situation has ever been any better than it is now – it’s always been fucked and it’s always been solved with this shitty patchwork of solutions. The only difference was that in the past it was out of view, so nobody had to be troubled with it, whereas now we all get to see it if we choose. That doesn’t mean we’re any worse at dealing with it, though.
amk
@Redshift: who gives a shite whether they disappear or not ? let them yell from the bleachers.
Fed Up In Brooklyn
Hey John, a bit of a strawman. If that was the actual argument, there wouldn’t be a big problem. If you want to claim Obama has many flaws but is still better than Paul, I don’t know many who wouldn’t respect that reasoning. They wouldn’t necessarily agree with it, but they could respect it. The criticisms occur when someone completely ignores Obama’s flaws, while at the same time ONLY focus on Paul’s flaws. If you think Obama is better than Paul, after comparing all of their positives and negatives, that’s fine. Just apply equal standards of criticism to both candidates.
Spiffy McBang
Greenwald:
He then goes on to list all the things Obama’s done that fly in the face of classic liberalism.
So… wouldn’t that make President Obama the mirror? The fact that our best choice as a candidate is a person who has supported all these things a “good liberal” wants to avoid like the plague? What the hell is he talking about, that Ron Paul reflects Democrats and progressives in any way whatsoever?
wrb
@Martin:
this
thread can end
Jim
1. Greenwald’s whole schtick these days is arguing with 12 Democrats on Twitter who defend Obama no matter what and then writing a blog post about “cultists” and “Obama loyalists” as if they’re a representative sample of anything.
2. Greenwald and certain others keep circle-jerk-linking to one another with the idea that progressives are terrified of Ron Paul because he holds up a mirror to themselves or something and they thus desperately want to ruin Ron Paul for what he stands for. Heh. Electorally, no sane person thinks Ron Paul ever has a chance at becoming president, so I’m not sure who the hell is scared of Ron Paul. But I think policy-wise it’s a straightforward equation for most. You can talk about drones and wars and habeas corpus all day, but Ron Paul’s America is a much worse country for almost everyone than Barack Obama’s America. It’s really quite simple. And yeah, yeah, “tell that to Muslim children” — we’ve heard it all before.
3. The idea that Greenwald can say that anyone who supports Obama “thinks that dead Muslim children is an acceptable outcome if we can preserve current Social Security outlays” while simultaneously saying “hey, I’m not saying I support Ron Paul — I’m just throwing it out there” is hilarious. OK well then name a candidate you support so I can peg you with responsibility for his most vile proposals.
This idea that Ron Paul presents a unique challenge to progressives is insanity. I don’t know why Ron Paul gets treated like Jesus for opposing drones. I oppose drones — where’s my gold medal? I’m against the Drug War. Where’s my campaign website? People oppose Ron Paul because he’s a fucking nutcase and because he would overall make the country a worse place to live.
Martin
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
There is no path to those goals, short of genocide. John seems to have this goal of a blog with troll-free comments, that will spontaneously happen without moderator (government) intervention if only 100% of the people that come here follow some set of arbitrary and unspoken behaviors. If the goal is dependent on rational self-actors in blog comments, then you’re living in fucking Narnia, and the only way that the goal will ever be achieved is to systematically hunt down and kill every single internet troll, leaving only those people that instinctively know and follow the behaviors. Barring that, someone needs to step in and establish and enforce the behaviors.
Paul (and Greenwald), like so many economists, refuse to accept that people are flawed, every single one of them. They insist that we’ll get perfect outcomes out of imperfect people for free, just because. We all agree on the goal. Goals are cheap, though.
ShadeTail
The linked article is a load of pretentious, holier-than-thou, and ironically black-and-white moralizing bullshit. He sets up and knocks down a massive strawman about what the politicians and political parties believe, all the while affecting an air of “I know better than you do” self-absorption. The views of both Obama and Paul are *not* as stark and simple as he claimed they are, and he “defended” many of his claims with nothing but variations of the blithe statement that “you can’t deny it”, even though they could very rationally be denied.
His statement that you can think politicians have good points without supporting them is certainly true. But he buried that under an avalanche of false whining about how rare the attitude is, and how horrid it is that so few people agree with him about it. It came across as such a martyr complex that one might think he was literally nailing himself to a cross.
EDIT: Wow, that was a Glen Greenwald article. I didn’t pay attention to the byline when I read it. Well, then. I don’t have a strong opinion about the guy, apparently unlike most people here, but this article certainly is a shoddy piece of work.
Rathskeller
@Martin: mega dittos. thank you so much for posting this. it’s a complex, messy world. the simple-minded don’t want to accept that, the paranoid and the delusional don’t want to accept, and unbearably prolix Glenn Greenwald will not accept anything except the hyperfine curving path winding through correctness that only he can see and describe. He’s a smart man with unlimited energy and almost zero compassion. I think if I were trapped in an elevator with him, the only choices would be to knock him or me unconscious so I wouldn’t have to hear him prate on.
eemom
ugh. ok, if this is how we are going to spend the ENTIRE new year’s day, I’ll just reiterate what I said yesterday and sincerely believe:
I invite a response from anyone who does, in fact, continue to support GG.
And don’t forget the Guardian article — which, for all the multiple times I’ve linked to it, has been greeted with unvarying **crickets** from the Glenbots.
And before you regurgitate his ass-covering bullshit about “not supporting” Paul, take heed of this from FlipYrWig:
Have at it, Glenbots who purport to believe in equality and choice — not to mention honesty. We’re waiting.
Spiffy McBang
Also:
If Greenwald was sticking to the point you’re making, John, and that he claims to be making up front- that Paul brings important topics to the fore, with a view no other major candidates hold or appear to hold- that would be fine. But he’s playing it like Democrats who hate Paul do so because they don’t like the fact the “other guy” is the one supporting some of the ideas they believe in. That’s crap. Most of us think he’s shit for all the reasons already mentioned, and probably think it’s a shame those kind of anti-war views are wrapped up in the brain of such a shit-eating nutjob.
amk
A better conversation starter
Fund Raising/Sep 2007/Sep 2009
Obama/80.3 M/99.6 M
willard/62.8 M/32.6 M
obama raises about 20% more while mittens loses about 50%.
BruceFromOhio
@rikyrah: I am white. And what you said holds for anyone, anywhere.
Ron Paul is not fit for leadership. End of story.
Roger Moore
@Spiffy McBang:
I think the idea is that Paul is proposing many of the things that liberals are supposed to like (e.g. end to foreign wars, end to the war on drugs, support for civil liberties, etc.) but from an extreme right wing/libertarian position rather than from a traditional left liberal one. In that respect, he’s holding up an ugly mirror to the liberals in that he’s showing that an extreme conservative can be truer to the principles they’re supposed to hold dear than they are.
Of course that ignores the real problem with what Paul is proposing: he only cares about Federal interference in those matters. He doesn’t seem to care about State governments violating people’s rights, even though they’re the ones who do it more on a day-in, day-out basis. And he certainly doesn’t think you deserve any protection from big business or bigoted neighbors. As far as he’s concerned, those people are free to do whatever they want to you. That seems like such a narrow view of liberty it’s hard to get behind.
Lynn Sutherland
Greenwald states clearly (and then says he knows it will be distorted–and his position is being distorted here) that he is not supporting Paul for President but is grateful that he is running because it means certain subjects (never-ending war, Federal financing of never-ending war, the drug war, uncontrolled spying on US citizens, the law being used to destroy equality and protect the powerful, no meaningful bank regulation) are being discussed that wouldn’t be discussed if Paul were not running. Obama is doing horrible things and they must be acknowledged or they can’t be stopped. They must be talked about, he must be called on it. Because Obama is doing it doesn’t make it less horrible. Yes, Greenwald is angry, but shouldn’t he be? Shouldn’t we all be?
wrb
@amk:
unfortunately, the amount of Willard funding that is now going through super pacs must be added to that recent figure.
sb
I’m sorry but if GG ever said to my face that my support for Obama means I accept dead Muslim children, I’d consider slapping him. In the face. Hard.
But then I’d lower myself to being almost as big an asshole as he is so never mind.
eemom
@eemom:
How about you, John Cole? The post is a bit cryptic. Are you still a defender of your buddy Glenn?
Martin
@amk: Careful about those numbers. Mitt has millions tied up in his super pac, and he doesn’t need to disclose that amount for at least a month. Not to mention that the guy can write a personal check and close that gap.
Fed Up In Brooklyn
Someday there will once again be a GOP POTUS and it will be a hoot watching all the current GG bashers suddenly agreeing with him again, like they did back in the George W. era.
carpeduum
Here we go. Cole letting his core idiocy bubble to the surface. He was dumb enough to be brainwashed into voting for Bush twice. He is dumb enough to be brainwashed by Greenwald who he seems to hold in high regard for some bizarre reason.
Copy past from thepeoplesview.net to correct Greenwalds Bullshit…read and learn Cole you fucking clown.
“This is the bill Ron Paul introduced in Congress in 2001.
The President of the United States is authorized to place a money bounty, drawn in his discretion from the $40,000,000,000 appropriated on September 14, 2001, in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Re- covery from and Response to Terrorists Attacks on the United States or from private sources, for the capture, alive or dead, of Osama bin Laden or any other al Qaeda conspirator responsible for the act of air piracy upon the United States on September 11, 2001, under the authority of any letter of marque or reprisal issued under this Act.
So Greenwald thinks that private pirates licensed to kill roaming the world is morally pure, but the US government taking violent action against an armed enemy is evil. The moral bankruptcy of Libertarianism has never been more starkly on display. Paul reintroduced that bill in 2007. By the way, the only US Congressional Representative to vote against the Afghan war was Barbara Lee. Paul voted for it.”
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2011/12/ron-pauls-princples-and-glenn.html
Conversation starter…….BHAHAHAHAHAhahaha you fucking clown.
wrb
@sb:
Greenwald’s support for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan shows clearly that he has quite a taste for dead Muslim children.
How Obama’s winding down of those conflicts- conflicts that resulted from the efforts of Glenn and others- demonstrates such a taste is less clear.
FlipYrWhig
Both Greenwald and Paul are libertarians, just of slightly different favors. Parsing the reasons why Greenwald wants to talk about Paul gets less interesting by the moment. And, you know, if Michele Bachmann had some issue stand that I liked, so I spoke ad nauseam about the glories of Michele Bachmann while carefully bracketing all the crazy stuff, you’d start to think that I was either a concern troll, a tool, or a dickwipe. Greenwald is there.
amk
@wrb: @Martin: True dat. But all that superpac money will be spent on ads, whose effect on the electoral outcome is iffy, at the best. While the ‘official’ money, which is an indicator voter enthusiasm, goes towards GOTV.
Martin
@amk: I thought the GOP had a national network of no-cost
pastorsactivists to ensure that voters get to the polls?amk
@Fed Up In Brooklyn: oh, don’t worry. geegee has shot his whole load during dubya regime.
And for all that poutrage show, he didn’t have much to show for it, did he now ? I mean dubya got elected twice.
Rathskeller
@eemom: thanks for posting that link (again). in fact, I had never seen it. Once again, it shows that Glenn is the master of tendentious argumentation, going from one paper-chain link to another one, then hop, concluding that Obama ought to be brought up at the fucking Hague and shot for his war crimes. He’s basically a higher-functioning Lyndon Larouche, who’s just really good at hyperlinking.
Tlazolteotl
Glenn Greenwald sure has a thing for telling progressives what they think.
He doesn’t speak for me.
Redshift
@Fed Up In Brooklyn: Yes, because a writer must be completely right or completely wrong, no matter what the circumstances, so the idea that people could agree with him when he’s right and disagree when he’s wrong (and mock him when he’s ludicrously wrong) is just hilarious! Hah, hah, hah!
Buttered Toast
I did not find Greenwald’s column unreasonable; at bottom, it seems he is arguing in favor of a more honest discourse, and against dogmatic attachment to one or another candidate.
That said, I found his balance sheet of pro-Paul/anti-Paul stances to lack one important issue; RP believes that, contra virtually every scientist in the world, as well as the current president and the democratic party, concern over climate change is “a hoax”. If one is concerned about this country’s role in bringing harm to black and brown people around the world, I think it worth considering Paul’s views in this regard as much as his views on US imperialism.
amk
@Martin: He didn’t have it (“activists”) then and he sure doesn’t have it now. The fucker never even crossed that proverbial 27% wingnut base.
FlipYrWhig
@Fed Up In Brooklyn: Greenwald has a good point that abuses of executive power should be called out both when Republicans do them and when Democrats do. Fine. But why this particular category of analysis needs to be so prominent is something that needs to be hashed out. It’s like determining why abortion is so much more important to political Catholics than poverty or social justice. What Greenwald’s crusade does for me is confirm that, as a liberal myself, I’m really a lot less concerned with executive power than he thinks I should be, and I would submit that it’s because Greenwald misunderstands many things about what makes liberals tick in his rush to make “civil liberties” central — probably because those were the issues crucial to his own political evolution, giving him the zeal of the late convert.
Rathskeller
@amk: excellent points. still, I wonder if superpac has a measurable follow-on effect with smaller donors and other signs of grass-level commitment. on the other hand, you can blanket the airwaves with ads for Green Lantern or Happy Feet 2, but that doesn’t mean people actually go to see them.
Fed Up In Brooklyn
@Redshift:
Yeah, it’s funny how he’s right when holding the GOP to a high critical standard, yet wrong when he does the same to Democrats. Weird….
Persia
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Well, in both places Greenwald is ignoring the real brown people in case of weird fetishistic versions of them, I guess.
MacKenna
So Paul’s a non-interventionist. Great. Let’s all vote for the guy who would
-end laws against discrimination
-kill work safety laws
-kill the EPA
-kill public education
-kill the minimum wage
-allow restaurants to refuse service to minorities (heh, let’s bring back separate drinking fountains)
-end women’s rights
-end medicare
-end social security
-end worker’s rights
indeed, for Paul Freedom is just another word for FUCK WORKERS OVER.
Mark S.
@rikyrah:
Greenwald doesn’t give a shit about those laws, either. That’s why he writes 10,000 word essays fellating Ron Paul.
I’m just using Greenwald logic. That’s how us lovers of dead Muslim children roll.
carpeduum
Last I heard nobody reads Salon anymore anyways so WGAF what that douchebag says.
Fed Up In Brooklyn
@FlipYrWhig: Except his main gripe has been based on liberals screaming from the rafters about those same abuses when Bush was in charge. In other words, those abuses ARE important to many liberals, but only when it’s the other guy doing it.
barath
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Wow… It’s very telling to me that a guy who supported the Iraq war is the go-to guy for puritanical self-proclaimed progressives. That somehow being wrong doesn’t matter as long as you’re loud and purist about it when you change your mind. Whereas Obama was loud and clear in his opposition to the Iraq war, and had good reasons for his opposition.
I’m reminded of something DougJ or mistermix said a year or two ago—that the most broken thing about public life these days is that people can never be discredited. No matter what stupid things they say or do or support, they can always be a trusted authority again.
carpeduum
@MacKenna: Don’t forget that he also wants to end child labour laws. Which doesn’t seem like such a big deal I guess considering all the other things he wants to end.
I hear kids are great workers for coal mines. Underground you won’t notice day or night anyways so those 12hour days won’t be so bad. Won’t have to make the tunnels so high. And with nobody around to enforce safety standards it will be glorous days for the coal industry.
Chyron HR
Or in Greenwaldian terms, you “mindlessly worship dear leader”.
But of course good ol’ Glenn isn’t talking about you when he says that stuff. He must mean those other Obama supporters.
FlipYrWhig
@Rathskeller: His views on the perils of accepting an intrusive, militarized state would be right at home in the John Birch Society or in the militia movement of the 1990s. There’s a long pedigree for them… _on the right_. IMHO he’s offering a right-wing critique of Obama, and he’s shopping it as “left” because he’s a latecomer to politics who doesn’t know the history of what he’s arguing.
amk
@Fed Up In Brooklyn: shorter you – geegee is pissed off that fewer and fewer give a shite about what he has got to say.
Martin
@amk: If he’s the nom, they’ll line up out of fear of rampant ass-fucking in the pews, and a UN mandate that they perform abortions on the altar during Sunday services.
Fed Up In Brooklyn
@amk: Or, he’s merely pointing out the hypocrisy of those who find certain abuses extremely important when committed by the other guy, but when their own guy does the same thing… not so much.
Hal
So the only reason these issues are in the public conscience is because of Ron Paul? No one else has ever talked consistently about these issues but Paul?
I’m so fucking sick of intelligent people saying “yeah, the racism, homophobia, and isolationism” is scary, but hey! Did you hear what he had to say about warrant less wire tapping?
Also, is it really impossible to say all of this in shorter posts? Jesus, the youtube videos, the breaks in paragraphs, the constant updates…
amk
@Martin: LOL. Even he is the nom, mittens will need his own tundra twit for that mindless mob to come out and vote for him.
carpeduum
@Chyron HR: That statement alone is laughable. It still means Cole is on the wrong side of demented to even think it’s a horse race.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@wrb: Pretty much says it all. Thanks to both you and Martin.
ruemara
@amk: It could even be that once a democrat got into office, we started to be more skeptical of what he had to say, since we needed to actually have a source more thorough than “GG says it is thus, ergo it must be thus”. Glennbot out!
ShadeTail
@Fed Up In Brooklyn:
…And, at least in this article, in order to gripe about that, Mr. Greenwald has made analysis of political positions that is so simple-minded, it makes one wonder whether he was able to keep a straight face while he wrote. If he is so concerned about civil liberties, then looking to Ron Paul for an example is absurd. Any self-respecting civil libertarian would be horrified after looking at what Ron Paul actually says on the subject. And Mr. Greenwald’s misrepresentations of both Obama’s positions and the positions of his supporters gives him no credibility to criticize them, either.
amk
@Fed Up In Brooklyn: Or he is a clueless moron who is comparing apples and oranges and hence is turning off the whatever little ‘base’ he had, thus falling off the cliff.
I am done ‘discussing’ this idjit.
carpeduum
@Hal: I hear Brazil is very nice this time of year. He must be a busy guy coming in from the beach for his updates.
FlipYrWhig
@Fed Up In Brooklyn: Like I said, that’s Greenwald’s most valid point. But I think he misunderstands how important those kinds of critiques are towards positioning on the left-right spectrum. Yes, Greenwald has the virtue of being consistent. He also has the unlovely habit of thinking that consistency and liberalism are the same thing. I don’t see the appeal in being dogmatic when the dogma is nothing special in the first place. Greenwald offers a consistent libertarian critique that applies to both Bush and Obama. Great! So, why should we particularly care any more about his libertarian critique than someone else’s vegan critique?
MikeBoyScout
GG is wrong in holding Ron Paul up as a viable spokesperson for the views GG supports.
Ron Paul absolutely does not force truths about the Democratic Party to be confronted. Ron Paul does nothing with the Democratic Party mostly because he is a Republican, not a Democrat. And Ron Paul also does nothing within the Republican party, where he’s been a backbencher his entire congressional career.
What GG believes in and reports needs to be discussed.
Ron Paul is not, has never been and never will be the vehicle for this discussion.
If one must latch on to a personality to have a discussion about the improper use of power, the “left” has had one for years; Noam Chomsky. And Chomsky doesn’t come with all of Paul’s baggage.
gbear
@FlipYrWhig:
A few days ago, Little Green Footballs posted an official 1998 John Birch Society video with on-camera narrative provided by Paul.
Martin
My problem with Greenwald is pretty basic – I have a rule in the office “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” Any idiot can identify problems, but solving them is often fucking hard work. Paul does nothing more than point to the problems that we all already know. He brings no solutions though, other than pie-in-the-sky bullshit.
Greenwald falls into this trap too often. Yeah, indefinite detention is a serious problem, but if you have someone that isn’t wanted back by their home country, and nobody else will take them, whats the alternative? Stick them on an ice floe, brush off you hands, and declare success? Make them a US citizen? What?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@barath:
Oh, I dunno…I think that the left did a “good” job discrediting Hitchens on all but his atheistic writing, painting him as a neo-con when he’d been consistently anti-despot for, like, ever.
carpeduum
@Redshift: It’s all about mouse clicks and Cole is the one that put that link up. Things that make me go hmmmmmm.
Keith G
Let’s pretend a different universe:
It is late 2007 and I magically know all the Obama policy decisions that GG highlighted in his post. I most certainly would have to give my support for Obama a very rigorous second thought. Our country in changing in some very indecent ways and Obama has at times been in collusion.
But this is not a different universe. Obama all too often acts like a corporatist, security stater, centrist Democrat. I am tired that my tax dollars are murdering non-combatants in other lands that are not even combat zones and maintaining jails where humans will be held without due process. I dread that secret governmental actions may be expanding and not contracting. I am told that I need to trust Obama to make these things better when the time is right. This is not the country I grew up in.
I generally like Obama and will vote for him, but as things stand now I guess I feel that I am stuck with him.
I will try to do better in 2016.
wasabi gasp
Ron Paul won’t kill you, but he will watch you die.
carpeduum
@FlipYrWhig: There is NOTHING consistent about his views. Give me a break.
He opposes war but has no problem with the Bill Ron Paul introduced (twice) to set aside 40billion for private mercenaries to hunt down and kill terrorists. How exactly is that consistent in an intellectually honest way.
junker359
What irritates me the most about the “Dead Muslim children” line is that it’s a clear attempt to short circuit debate about the costs and benefits of military action by inciting passions. “You support Obama, therefore you support killing children,” is easier to say and harder to defend against than a real debate about war.
All military leaders, ever, have been responsible for the killing of innocents through warfare. The real debate is about whether or not the goals achieved through armed conflict are worth the costs involved. The “You support someone who kills children” line is an attempt to avoid that debate by painting Obama as someone who cackles with glee over the idea that he can order the military to kill children.
Danny
@Keith G:
For example, whom?
FlipYrWhig
@Martin: And for that matter a lot of the concern over “executive power” has merit as a structural matter — but if Congress wants to do stupid shit, is it really more principled or more liberal to allow them to do it rather than to invoke executive prerogatives to check it? Like, to give an absurd case, if Congress decided to declare war on Tuvalu, should the president have to follow that? If you take a dim view of executive power, wouldn’t your answer have to be yes? Is it really more true to being “liberal” to give that answer?
Anya
@Martin:
More like, President Obama is forced to approve or work with things that Obama opposes. I think if President Obama had a magic wand, he would have done away with many things, spacially the drug war. Does anyone believe that President Obama, actually supports the cluster fuck that’s the drug war? I think he would have done away with it, if he had a choice. We forget that President Obama went into office dealing with two wars, a collapsing economy and a congress full of nuts. Imagine if he added to his other major priorities the drug war? What would have the Republicans done with that?
I fucking hate to argue with people like GG. He does not care who’s in power, as long as he’s typing from his purity palace, he can continue to opine about how both sides are the same, and only his fantasy candidate can get us to a civil libertarian’s nirvana.
dmbeaster
GG is a zealous advocate and loves hyperbole – hence an all-or-nothing point of view. Those faults did not matter much when the Bush administration was his target since it rarely presented a situation when you had to balance pros and cons in assessing its policies. With Obama, that failing is brought into stark relief.
But I never imagined he would be so deluded as to see Paul as someone allegedly more committed to issues that concern progressives. Had I known of his support for the Iraq war (which I read for the first time in this thread thanks to Temporarily Max McGee at @22), then that delusion would not have been so surprising.
Keith G
@eemom:
Support him, for what? Is he running for office?
Mark S.
Greenwald is Jonah Goldberg with fewer book sales.
Oh, wait, that’s unfair. Goldberg was at least horrified by Paul’s newsletters. I don’t buy Greenwald’s faux concern about them.
FlipYrWhig
@Keith G: Do you think that Clinton, Edwards et al wouldn’t have ended up doing similar things? Let alone McCain or Romney, who wanted more wars (like in Georgia)? If anything I think what Greenwald’s particular set of issues reveals is that Democrats and Republicans have converged on similar views — which may be lamentable in an absolute way, but not really stoppable anytime soon. Democrats used to stand for gun control. Democrats used to stand for strong environmental protection. Now, not so much. It’s certainly fair to find that a dispiriting development. But they don’t seem like smart ways to determine who should win your support or your vote. YMMV.
LT
A conversation starter. You fucker. It’s like an ant farm for you, isn’t it?
On New Years Day even. You bastard!
Kola Noscopy
The Glennzilla rules.
And it is so.
Spaghetti Lee
@FlipYrWhig:
Uh, no, but if that was presented to the President in the form of a bill, he can veto it, right? The problem is that the Executive branch can do a lot of shit without consulting with congress. The solution is not to give congress the power to do stupid shit behind the president’s back, but to at least make sure the two of them have to get the other’s approval. Stupid shit will still happen, but a properly functioning check and balance system would be at least one more roadblock.
FlipYrWhig
@Anya: And, in a bit of a conundrum, the only way for an uncompromising libertarian president to make uncompromising libertarian things come to pass would be to avail himself of … Executive powers that trumped the legislative branch.
Keith G
@Danny: Since appearently your googlez are broken, here
That’s just a sample.
wrb
@Anya:
Exactly. In his litany of charges against Obama, Greenwald flat-out, flagrantly lies, again and again, by describing Obama as the cause of things Obama has has to accept.
It isn’t an ambiguous issue. Greenwald in this one post has demonstrated that he is someone who repeatedly and shamefully lies in public.
Nellcote
A new low in trolling your own blog. Fuckit, I hope the Steelers trade for Tebow.
Mark S.
@LT:
But sometimes the ants fight back!
Hey Cole, is it fun cheering for a rapist QB? Just a conversation starter!
eemom
@Keith G:
Support him as being something other than a sneering, lying, opportunistic hypocrite.
Support him as having any genuine concern for his fellow human beings as opposed to having fastened onto a convenient cause celebre to perpetuate his own fame and fortune.
And don’t forget the Guardian article.
Nellcote
GiGi is neither a liberal not a progressive. Why should I care about his rants? His non-endorsement is the same as David Duke’s and Stormfront’s.
brantl
The policies aren’t bipartisan, he’s full of shit; how many sentences in was that?
eemom
@Kola Noscopy:
Did you have a nice New Year’s?
Anya
@FlipYrWhig: When you’re working with a hypothetical candidate you don’t need logic.
@wrb: I can take his holier than thou attitude and nastiness, but his flagrant dishonesty and hyperbole annoy me the most.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig:
Hence I said ‘rethink’ and not ‘change’. Politicians are not gods and not saviors. They are (usually) complex individuals who are a mix of good and less than good attributes.
I know Obama gets a lot of things right and I look forward to seeing his batting average getting better. Years will have to pass before we see the full development and impact of many of these contentious decisions. I hope for the best.
Citizen_X
See, that’s pure chickenshit on Greenwald’s part. There is no “none of the above” option in American elections. Obama or Generic Republican (or maybe Romney) is going to be elected in November. American citizens can only affect the result by voting for one or the other. But that means dealing with all that messy baggage that real candidates bring. We don’t get to choose Greenwald’s perfect Platonic Ron Paul.
It’s push come to shove, Glen. Pick a side.
Keith G
@eemom: Okay. I was just wondering since initially you were a bit vague.
Svensker
@Lynn Sutherland:
Yes. What you and John said.
John, why you trolling your own blog?
Chris
@Roger Moore:
Agree.
As far as the libertarian view of liberty goes, I posted this in a discussion on libertarianism months ago and it was well received, so I’ll repost it here, seems relevant:
Liberals are pro-individual rights, libertarians are anti-government.
A few hundred years ago when “government” mean “centralized authoritarian European-style monarchy,” that was the same thing. As liberal experiments like the U.S, grew, it eventually dawned on liberals that guaranteeing the individual his freedom from government meant nothing if you were just going to let someone else step in and take over the oppressing. Those liberals who didn’t make that leap of understanding are now called libertarians.
Citizen_X
@LT: Comment of the thread.
John does have a funny way of spelling T-R-O-L-L-I-N-G, doesn’t he?
FlipYrWhig
@Spaghetti Lee: He could veto it, and Congress could override it. Then what? My point is that concern for overweening executive power and concern for liberal, civil libertarian, or anti war outcomes will fairly often be at cross purposes. And deciding that the core issue is hemming in executive power is an idiosyncratic choice that bespeaks Greenwald as something like a “process libertarian,” if that label makes any sense, rather than any kind of liberal. I’d rather have liberal outcomes by any means necessary, including a president availing himself of executive prerogatives, than spending a lot of time worrying about process. Greenwald is much more concerned about process. Like I said, that’s fine for him to do, but it has nothing to do with who is more liberal.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Citizen_X:
From the same Greenwald piece I linked @22:
He’s a lifelong kibitzer, a Monday morning quarterback. It only hurts him when he actually commits to someone who proves less perfect than himself.
LT
The noose-shaped trajectory of history: Enslave them for centuries; after they’ve won their freedom, use the fact that they were enslaved against them.
Observer
GG’s post is just a fancy way of saying “the left is full of shit”. Takes 1,000 words or so but that’s what it boils down to.
He’s calling you folks out.
Any politician of any belief can join the Democratic party and as so long as they claim a D behind their name, very rarely will anybody *with power* do anything about it *and* even more rarely there will be any uprising amongst the rank and file in the party and vote them out.
That’s just what you folks are, the mirror isn’t a place for you to be.
You can pretend it’s only GG who notices but you should know that’s lots of others do too. There’s a reason why Dems lost the 2010 midterms. And there’s a reason about half as many people self-identify themselves as liberals as they do conservative. And there’s a reason it’s been that way for at least 20 years.
And it’s not because America just started reading an online magazine called Salon and suddenly found Glenn Greenwald’s work.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: Yes, that’s very helpful, and it jibes neatly with the classic political meaning of “republican.” See for instance Philip Pettit. What Greenwald has discovered is that he and Paul are both small-r republicans on the subject of the federal government, the presidency, and its powers. Obama isn’t. Where Greenwald and Greenwald fans are goofing up is by thinking small-r republicanism is a very important credential for a self-avowed liberal to have. It isn’t. They’re unrelated except coincidentally.
Mark S.
@Citizen_X:
He won’t. He’ll vote third party and continue his pox on both houses schtick.
Unless of course Ron Paul wins the nomination. Then he’ll go all in for the Paul/Rockwell ticket, and then spend the next four years bemoaning that America missed its last best chance to elect some real progressives.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
They also seem to have a hankering to be the one to whom the forlock is tugged.
amk
@Observer:
Way to contradict yourself in the same post.
Mark S.
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Oh, then he probably won’t vote at all. I stand by my prediction that he’ll spend the next four years bitching.
Danny
@Keith G:
Would you mind terribly elaborating on why you feel that the words “murder” and “non-combatants” apply?
eemom
Don’t y’all see what Cole has done here? Laid out some flagrant flame-war-bait to keep the rest of us busy while he watches his beloved Steelers.
Probly he’s gleefully texting GG at this VERY MOMENT.
And every one of us fell for it.
A sad bunch, we are. : (
Alison
(Hm…am I in moderation? Did I use a bad word?)
Mnemosyne
@Mark S.:
I thought this was even more to the point from Edroso and says better than I can why I don’t trust Greenwald when he tries to claim that he’s not a Paul supporter:
It’s kind of amazing to me how Greenwald is able to look at the wars and civil liberties legislation that Obama inherited and declare Obama solely responsible for all of them, but then looks at Paul’s odious right-wing isolationist, anti-civil-rights views that Paul has stated and defended over and over again and declare they don’t matter because Paul wouldn’t be able to implement them even if he was elected president. WTF kind of specious logic is that?
Actually, given what Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again) linked to, it’s pretty obvious why GG feels the way he does. He sounds like a cuckolded husband who treats every new woman he dates like she’s automatically cheating on him.
Snayke
I wish GG would shut the fuck up. Nobody thinks it’s OK what the administration has done, but this “let’s teach Democrats a lesson” bullshit is what leads to Ralph Nader and George Bush.
This isn’t an argument for electing just any Democrat or whitewashing their actions, either.
Kathy in St. Louis
So, you are not a Paul supporter because…everything you don’t agree with wasn’t caused by some conspiracy? Every action that government takes is not a mistake? You don’t just oppose things because you oppose them and for no other sane reason? I get it.
Snayke
@Kathy in St. Louis:
Can anyone decipher this comment?
Villago Delenda Est
@Snayke:
It’s also way too highly reminiscent of the “Nach Hitler, Uns” philosophy of the German Communists.
Fuck that. Yeah, they got to rule a ruined third of what was left of Germany after WWII at the pleasure of their Soviet masters.
Mnemosyne
@Lynn Sutherland:
You realize that Ron Paul is in favor of those two positions, right? He thinks the Civil Rights Act should be repealed and that the federal government has no place regulating businesses. I’m not sure how you got the impression that Paul is in favor of equality and bank regulation when he’s repeatedly said and done things to demonstrate the opposite.
Keith G
@Danny: From the cited source:
Now, it seems that most drones hit the target and I bet that most targeted hits cause little collateral damage. But little ain’t zero and dead is dead.
Kathy in St. Louis
@Martin: Some really samrt answers here, but I have to say, you said it best. Very well reasoned.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Mark S.:
I predict that he’ll never stop bitching. Ever.
He’s a theoretician- and purely so- as opposed to an activist: Were he ever to actually endorse someone (or run for office himself) who was to prove a failure, he’d lose a fuck-ton of his credibility as a pundit. He guards himself from criticism with all of the tricks that worked so well as a litigator- weasel words, midirection, omission- but where he can excuse himself as a lawyer with a short declaration of ideological neutrality like, ‘Matthew Hale, like everyone else, deserves a defense,’ he can’t do so when he’s spinning a political candidate.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
I think it says everything that Greenwald wants to hold a neo-Confederate Bircher up as a mirror to Democrats and progressives.
Keith G
@eemom: Awww. not really.
I am getting laundry done while doing a little post holiday kitchen clean up as I sample a gift single malt and occasionally type.
It’s all good, Ma’am.
Kathy in St. Louis
@Snayke: Hey, snayke, and I’m sure you’ve earned that nomenclature, decipher this.
Keith G
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-: What does it say?
dmbeaster
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Holy Crap Max, another killer quote from GG that defines his madness. Not bothering to vote because he doesn’t think it matters? That sort of defines the problem progressives had in 2010 – asswipes like GG who don’t think voting matters (or who only vote if the candidate is sufficiently pure and perfect).
No one can be a credible pundit concerning politics, and at the same time hold the belief that voting does not really matter. Maybe the quote just represents a now out-of-date GG, but somehow I doubt it. He still exhibits all of the characteristics of someone with this belief.
Dr Paul
The only real issue I could find with the article is that GG starts with the premise that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with election outcomes and then proceeds to contrast the Democratic candidate with his selected Republican candidate as if they are the only candidates available- likely election outcomes trumping all else. We don’t actually have to vote for Obama or Paul (or whoever beats out Paul on the R side.) There’ll be plenty of general election candidates for President, any number of whom could closely represent the values we might personally hold dear. In short, there’s no reason to tie oneself in knots over LesserEvilism or NABAism. It’s a forced construct; vote for the candidate that best represents your views from the wide variety of candidates that will be available in the general election. Yes, perhaps the “worst” major party candidate will win but that’s the only way the other major party will recalibrate. For the things that really matter, the two major parties are in virtual lockstep, and completely wrong about.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Mnemosyne:
Whenever GG has come up lately, I’ve been thinking of this exchange from The Wild One:
nancydarling
@Snayke: That’s what I was thinking. What does it mean? Is it code for something?
Villago Delenda Est
The only political candidate who will agree with me on every single issue is…
me.
So, I have to compromise a bit. Now, my local congresscritter is a very strong opponent of most gun control legislation. That goes with having a district that has a strong rural base. He also tends to side a bit too much with the timber industry in a district that has a very strong timber extraction component to its economy. That also goes with the territory.
But overall, I’m pretty happy with him. He fights for veterans and seniors, he doesn’t care much for the asswipes of Wall Street, and he’s a tireless advocate of investing in infrastructure, particularly transportation infrastructure, that spurs further economic development.
When the two viable alternatives in the Presidential race are Barack Obama and John McCain, for example, in 2008, there’s no question which one is better in my view, even if Obama is a bit to corporate friendly for my tastes. He’s still going to outperform McCain, even with his flaws. You can’t expect perfection. You can still tell him that you disagree with him and hope he’ll come around to your way of thinking, but don’t count on it. An imporatant consideration, I might add, is that if Obama falls down a flight of stairs, you get Joe Bidon, not Mooselini.
It’s not very likely that Biden pushed him down the stairs. Unlike Mooselini.
Danny
@Keith G:
If that was what you were referring to, then I feel that “murder” was probably a pretty inappropriate word to use… Unless you meant to label every soldier that caused the death of a civilian a murderer.
eemom
@dmbeaster:
my disgust runneth over.
WaterGirl
@MacKenna: Somebody needs to take the word FREEDOM and make it an acronym for each of 7 things Ron Paul would take away if elected.
jaywillie
This is the same Glenn Greenwald who said back in the first term of Bush that voting wasn’t all that important, and wrote in the introduction of his first book:
So, when all of these extraordinary security measures were being voted on and enacted, Glenn was all like, “Meh…I trust Bush. Big deal. Voting isn’t important anyway.” Plus he was all like, “Hoo-ray…let’s invade Iraq!” The same Glenn Greenwald who engaged in illegal recording of conversations to defend a neo-Nazi in court. The same Glenn who compared a pro-Obama blogger to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films.
This sums up Glenn:
.
Nellcote
@Keith G:
Go back to 2007 and look at the other candidates available. Which one would have had outcomes more to your liking now that you know what they would have been up against?
SIA
@BruceFromOhio:
@rikyrah:
Agreed. End of story.
ChrisNYC
Slightly OT
From the NYT story about the Iowa ground game.
“At [Paul’s] campaign rallies, supporters and staff members, who once complained about being ignored by the news media, now declare that they are prohibited from talking to the press, muttering about “operationally sensitive” campaign work. “I can’t talk to you,” one of them said over his shoulder, after a group of Paul volunteers scattered at the sight of a journalist the other night.”
Hilarious.
Chris
@carpeduum:
Not much different from mainstream conservatism or just mainstream U.S. policy in which military services keep getting privatized, outsourced or contracted out.
I mean, we put a price on Osama’s head that resulted in several bounty hunters going after him… and we’ve been giving more and more military work to private mercs and apparently plan to keep on going in that respect, so really, we’re basically doing exactly what Ron Paul wants. Only difference being that he wants to do it with a “letter of marque and reprisal” because that’s how people did it in the 1700s. Pretty much encapsulates Ron Paul and his supporters’ ideology right there…
Keith G
@Danny: I would not blame a soldier who miss fires,in the heat of combat. That is not what is happening here. This is a new category of human endeavor. This is the killing of people who our government believes to be bad folk (and I will stipulate that most of them are). It seems that battlefield soldiers are seldom involved. But even if they were, sometimes governments issue immoral orders.
Emma
@Fed Up In Brooklyn: Could you spell out Paul’s pros versus his cons? Because from where I’m standing, I don’t see any.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Nellcote:
Of the viable candidates- Obama, Clinton and Edwards (yeah, I’m one of the many who supported him early, my bad)- I truly think that Obama, with the wide coattails he provided, was the best we could get. The big problem that any of them would have faced was the ConservaDems/BlueDog faction in the Senate- which would have been a larger percentage of a smaller Democratic caucus in the Upper Chamber if not for the Obama coattails.
Chuck Butcher
If the realities of the US do not make you want to tear your hair out, I’m not too sure how one managed to become such a self-satisfied asshole and bother with this site as anything other than as a troll for the GOPers. Now just to be clear, IMNSHO Ron Paul sucks rancid donkey dicks and the rest of the GOPers are the same with slightly different spices.
Fairly simply, given what it would take in policies to make a noticeable effect even what is even quietly suggested by the not-GOP crazy party makes this an exercise in choosing from the least bad alternative. I have no idea what an unshackled Obama would go for… and it doesn’t matter because he is not unshackled and won’t be so. It doesn’t matter that a sizable portion of the Democratic legislators are well left of current policies because they will not be loosed on the nation.
The failures are what they are, and they are not separable from the characters acting. President Obama signs what he signs and takes the executive actions he takes. Congress passes what it passes. We live in the outcome.
To behave as though any actor is above or outside of criticism because of other actors is just plain stupid, as is the tendency to assign blame to any one while ignoring the context they operate in. That context, finally, is the electorate.
Despite the howling that will ensue, this next election will simply be about which Party is the least bad for the nation and that is, once again, a sad occurrence that looks like the foreseeable future for many cycles.
The GGs are like the canary in a coal mine – they let you know that you are being slowly poisoned as the least bad drifts farther and farther into bad. I’m no fan of Greenwald, but I’m less of a fan of obeisance in the name of “well because”.
Danny
@Keith G:
I’m confused. Just one minute ago you were talking about an incident where missiles missed their target and hit innocent bystanders. Now you’re suddenly talking about our government killing people they believe to be “bad folk” in cold blood.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Chuck Butcher:
Thank you for that. I’m glad to see I’m not the only person who finds “IMHO” a bit more than disingenuous.
Keith G
@Nellcote: In the quote you highlighted, I said that I “would have to give my support for Obama a very rigorous second thought.” I was not positing that there were any better choices. Then again, I have been surprised by some of Obama’s choices. Maybe another would have surprised me in a different direction.
What this has taught me is that the Democratic Party has to be more persistent and demanding of its candidates in 2015/2016 than it was in 2007/2008.
That said, I am not an all or nothing guy. Obama has done a lot of good and he has really let me down at other times. I do feel that some of the bigger disappointments were not necessary.
boss bitch
@Fed Up In Brooklyn:
Sorry love, I will never trust Greenwald. Ever.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
There’s a reason why Letters of Marque were pretty much banned by all the major powers in the 19th century. Privateers were only a hair’s breadth away from being outright pirates, and the economic advantage of having private warships going after your enemy’s shipping on the high seas dried up. Not to mention the complications involved.
Of course, I wouldn’t expect Ron Paul to realize any of this…like a lot of libertarian types, he doesn’t seem to comprehend that many of his “solutions” were obsoleted many decades earlier after it was discovered that overall they did not work.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Chuck Butcher:
Shit, didn’t mean to submit that last one right away….
Yeah, but most of us already know all about the gas leak, but we aren’t pretending that the guy who’s been appointed to fix it is the guy who caused it…And it’s worse because, by his own admission, GG’s on the crew that tapped into the pocket of gas by being fucking lazy, anyway.
nancydarling
@Chuck Butcher: Chuck, many of us don’t think we are voting for the “less bad” when we support President Obama. We are supporting what someone in another thread called an “imperfect good”.
Emma
@LT: I think so too!
gwangung
@Chuck Butcher:
I think what’s relevant to me is what comes after the criticism. If it’s “We need to do better” or some concrete plan of action, all well and good. That’s substantive and that’s constructive.
If it ends with “Well, a pox on both houses” or “They’re all the same”, I find that less useful.
gnomedad
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I’ve always seen that phrase as ironic. “IMO” suffices to acknowledge that you are not stating established fact.
Mnemosyne
Is it just me, or is it a little strange that the same people who accuse Obama supporters of being mindless cultists that won’t look at his entire record are the same ones who get pissed off if we point out that they’re cherrypicking the things they like from Ron Paul’s record?
Jim
@Mnemosyne:
This is a good point (realize it isn’t yours) and it gives up the game that either Greenwald either knows he is going for intentionally cheap hyperbole regarding Obama or else he doesn’t actually believe Paul would be better on these issues. You can’t say “Obama’s killing Muslim children in droves” and that Paul is the one true gentleman willing to stand up for freedom and then get all wishy-washy when it comes to the actual candidate you support. This isn’t a local election about potholes — if you paint someone without nuance as a mass murderer of children and then go “well, each candidate has flaws,” it makes it seem like you’re lying in one regard or another.
Keith G
@Danny: Dude, let me type slower. I am sorry for the confusion.
Our gov is trying to use what was unconventional warfare methods to kill what it thinks to be bad people. Given the fact that we are using some third party intel, I do wonder if some of those missiles are just settling old scores of the guys who feed us the intel – but that is another thread.
As drones go about killing what we are told are the bad guys, they do on occasion miss, as was the case cited. This was not a misfire in the heat of combat. This was a glitch in the scope of a CIA sniper rifle (if you will). The difference was a single bullet did not ricochet off a rock, an errant missile blew up a building that was not the target. The 38 people killed were not the target. They were husbands, fathers and brothers who as far as I know were doing good and did not deserve to be blown apart at all and especially not with my complicity.
That is just one instance.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’ve heard some people compare terrorists today with pirates two hundred years ago. In that model, whoever’s it was, privateers would simply be state-sponsored terrorists. The more things change…
Agree.
I think people here who labeled him a paleoconservative and lumped him with Pat Buchanan had him pegged. He’s basically a conservative who’s just a little more behind than the main group.
Nellcote
I agree with Smartypants
Chuck Butcher
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I don’t think that is quite true and I’m less confident that most recognize the extent to which the leak is not being addressed or being worsened.
I’ll give this example, people keep acting as thought the sole function of Federal taxes is to fund the govt or give somebody a break from funding the govt. Our tax policies not only state that it is OK to suck every last cent out of the economy, they encourage it. Very high progressive tax rates on incomes of 500K, 1M, 50M, 100M and no differentiation between high level cap gains and straight income means that money leaves the economy and resides in the catagory of paper pushing money generating money rather than output. Cigarette taxes are what they are, not to fund programs, but to make smoking ludicrously expensive and unattractive. Compared to the dollars taken in the programs are immaterial – it isn’t about that.
It won’t happen for a variety of reasons including who we elect as President as well as Legislators. Something like the Stock Market has an important role in the funding of large scale business policies, its current role is as momentary profit taking rather than funding and accrued value. People themselves participate in the fiction that the Market as is does something for the economy other than concentrate wealth. If I buy GM stock because I think GM can build better and more competitive products with my investment you have one result, if I buy GM because it is depressed today and tomorrow it will gain a few cents so I can sell at a profit you have another outcome. Short of re-engineering humans there is exactly one way to change that outlook which is to make it less attractive financially.
How many buyers for that outlook do you think are participating right now? The same could be said of Civil Liberties, ad nauseum.
Emma
@Chuck Butcher: You had me until you said “obeisance.” See, we (and I feel fairly safe to speak on behalf of Balloon Juicers who support Obama) do not pay him obeisance. We take him because he’s the best of what’s available. Some of us have screamed at him about things we thing he’s doing wrong. Our esteemed host takes him to task on a regular basis. BUT, again, he’s the best of what we can get at the moment.
When people sneer that we are paying obeisance to Obama because we disagree with them, they are discounting the fact that we have thought about it hard and have made a decision to support him for good and valid reasons, even if you disagree with them. It makes me immediately discount your opinion because, what the hell, you discounted mine. And the merry-go-round goes on.
OzoneR
Because it doesn’t make Paul a fucking hero of human rights because he opposed them. He didn’t oppose them because he cares about people’s civil rights, he opposed them because he has an irrational hatred of government.
He takes the right side for the wrong fucking reasons. That’s why it so hard to understand and that’s why Glenn Greenwald is wrong.
nancydarling
@Emma: This!
piratedan
Glenn Greenwald? never heard of him.
Kola Noscopy
@eemom:
Did you have a nice New Year’s?
I did, my dear. And thank you for asking.
The BF, a friend of ours, the pups, and I stayed in, watched a movie, enjoyed a fire in the fireplace, noshed on great food, and had a wonderful, quiet New year’s. God knows back in the day I got in more than my share of head splitting New Year’s Eve drunks. Apparently I’m at a stage of life where laying low feels like luxury. :D
And you?
Chuck Butcher
@Emma:
Nice try. I used the word as it is intended to be used and you broadened it to mean exactly what it does not mean to take a swipe at me. If you felt included, I’m curious why you did.
Did you find something in those sentences that included “don’t vote for Obama?” I didn’t put it in there, you did. The fact that I’m horrified by the GOPers doesn’t mean I’m satisfied with the President or Legislators and I don’t see why I should be or be quiet about it.
Brazilian Rascal
Speaking as a socialist foreigner with tons of friends in the US (and a former fiancee), Obama has been a colossal letdown for me and mine. As journalist focused on covering the economy, his financial industry appointments were a kick in the gut, and the usual excuse of “He needs insiders to fix this mess!” was transparent bull from day one.
But I dared hope that while failing to address the big issues, Obama would at least be good on several other fronts. He is not without accomplishments. The qyestion is, do those accomplishments matter in the larger picture? If the titanic is chugging toward the iceberg, you don’t need a captain who’s working on redoing the upholstery on 3rd class of wiping out the rats in steerage; you need someone who’ll turn the ship around posthaste. Can anyone say, with a straight face, that Obama is that person?
I’m quite sure Paul isn’t, mind you. But I agree with Glenn that he does show how confirmist and warped the Democratic establishment has become. Many of my political-minded friends here are quite sure he’s the usual foreigner-bombing, Kyoto-sinking, dictator-coddling US president we so love to stereotype. Less glaring than Bush, yes, but only just.
El Tiburon
@eemom:
It is bewildering how very stupid so many of you can be. Have you read the article in question? I mean, did you actually read it?
Let me help you out with a Shorter Greenwald:
Anyway, that’s how I see it.
Also, the Guardian article was spot on. Please tell me where you quibble.
OzoneR
Can we all just accept that Glenn Greenwald is in no ways a progressive
He’s a libertarian, the end.
This unholy alliance between progressives and libertarians needs to end yesterday
Danny
@Keith G:
You said your tax dollars were being used to “murder” people – people who were “non-combatants”. Who were those non-combatants you were talking about, and when were your tax dollars used to “murder” them?
I think you should be able to back that up or else maybe think twice about the words you use. Call me crazy.
OzoneR
You know a progressive is delusional when they think Ron Paul is going to fight Wall Street.
El Tiburon
The above comment from me was supposed to be blockquoted up to the paragraph: Anyway that’s how I see it.
Tried to edit but couldn’t so fuck it.
OzoneR
@Keith G:
Yes, it is, since 1776.
El Tiburon
@OzoneR:
Oh fucking bullshit. This meme is so worn out.
First, who cares the reason? Tell me: why does Obama want to continue the drone attacks? Or the War on Drugs? Let me help you: you can’t because you don’t know. None of us really know why any of this dipshits do anything. Did you listen to the video clip in the Greenwald article and Paul’s stance on the War on Drugs? Without assigning motives, do you disagree with it?
Can’t any of you people agree with Paul’s stance on some of these issues without it meaning you want to be his boyfriend?
Roger Moore
@Chris:
I’m not even sure if it’s that. The absolute monarchs were less absolute than their press made them out to be; they always depended on intermediate levels of authority to carry out a lot of the day-to-day stuff like arresting criminals and collecting taxes. Plenty of their citizens saw the far off king as protection against the depredations of the lower-level governments, not necessarily because the kings were actually any better but because they were removed by one or two steps from oppression as the little people felt it.
The libertarian position is like pretending that all governments are absolute monarchies and ignoring all the other stuff that falls between the top level and where all the people are. It only makes sense if you’re a total ivory tower theoretician or if you see yourself as one of those intermediate level authorities who sees the central government primarily as a threat to your ability to do whatever you want. It’s interesting to look at real world libertarians to try to figure out which category they fit in.
Keith G
@Danny: I laid out the info on that one case. I understand that you disagree with the record. That’s cool in America. For now.
Kidding
Chuck Butcher
@Emma:
Of the people in 07 and 08 on the tickets, I agree. This time he is what we’ve got versus the clown parade. Are there better people out there that aren’t running? There may well be, as in most offices.
You seem to be asking me to excuse that what we’ve got is what we’ve got in offices and I say bullshit. That is more a commentary on the electorate than it is on the politicians but the poliitcal machinery is also very unforgiving of new and different.
El Tiburon
@OzoneR:
No. You are wrong. This isn’t really about Ron Paul doing anything except bringing these issues to the forefront so that WE THE PEOPLE can demand our politicians do something.
I don’t think anyone, especially Glenn Greenwald, expects Ron Paul to really do anything. But other than Ron Paul, who is talking about these issues? Why can’t any of you understand this?
barath
@El Tiburon:
Here’s a more basic question: if Paul is against the use of executive power, against federal action in general, and against funding federal agencies, but okay with basically whatever states want to do, then how is he going to end the drug war? By executive fiat? Is he going to go through congress? How many votes would that get in the senate? Maybe 15 or 20. And what would he do if a majority of states immediately enacted even more crazy laws to compensate, as I’m sure his home state would do?
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
And yet when we look at the many areas where Ron Paul’s preferred policy sucks — his isolationist foreign policy, his pro-forced-birth policies, his desire to remove all regulation from corporations, his plan to remove all authority from the federal government and return everything to the states — we’re told that it’s somehow unfair to point those things out. If we need to look at Obama’s entire record and not only concentrate on the positive things, why are we supposed to ignore Paul’s entire record and only concentrate on the areas where there is superficial agreement?
Ron Paul’s dislike of the Iraq War goes hand in glove with his view that sending money to Africa to fight AIDS is “worthless.” You can’t separate the two, because they stem from the same isolationist foreign policy.
El Tiburon
@Danny:
You are crazy. Your tax dollars fund the drone program which has murdered hundreds if not thousands of people. Your tax dollars fund the War Machine which has murdered hundreds of thousands of people just in the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can call it whatever you want, but there is no doubt that these innocent people were killed for no fucking reason. And if you try and dispute it, you really are beyond redemption.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
And do you really think WE THE PEOPLE are going to demand we follow Ron Paul’s lead on issues of national security? Barack Obama will beat Paul like a drum while proudly talking about how he’s send drones into Afghanistan, killed American-born terrorists and kept marijuana out of the hands of your children.
I don’t know what’s dumber, the fact that you think Ron Paul’s opposition to wars and indefinite detention is winning argument in a national election, or that you think THOSE are the reasons he has a following in the GOP and not because he wants to ax government agencies like the EPA an Dept. of Education.
Keith G
@OzoneR: Truly. And it still is not morally correct even after all these years. Funny that.
gwangung
Why can’t you listen to the people who are explaining EXACTLY WHY they’re dismissing Paul and his policy stances?
OzoneR
@barath:
He’s not. He’s just fine with states warring on drugs. That’s what makes his follows so fucking stupid
Danny
@Keith G:
You have utterly failed to show how any “non-combatants” have been “murdered” with your tax dollars.
El Tiburon
@Mnemosyne:
You most absolutely can because we are not talking about supporting Ron Paul and getting him elected. Ron Paul is simply the avatar as the ONLY politician on the stage espousing on these topics.
So, we really do have to throw the baby out with the bath water? We have to pretend like Ron Paul doesn’t exist?
If a doctor found the cure for cancer (but oh by the way he molested a thousand kids) do we not take his cure for cancer? Yes, I know, a stupid analogy, but isn’t this the gist of what is going on here?
Yes, I think Ron Paul would be horrible as President and I would fight to defeat him. But I sure do like many of his positions as compared to Obama’s, regardless of how he gets there.
Lynn Sutherland
I like Mr. Butcher’s word “obeisance.” It fits the situation perfectly. I do not support Ron Paul because of his racism, his position on women’s rights and his extreme position on state’s rights. I do not support Obama because of his attacks on civil rights, privacy rights, his rampant increases in executive power, his killing of an American citizen and his demand for the law to make it his right to do so and his policy of endless war. (As an aside, I also don’t trust him to protect the middle class or social security or medicare.) But we must talk about these things–we must acknowledge that all of this is happening. We cannot excuse what Obama is doing, we cannot defend him and I, for one, think that one thing I can do is not vote for him.
Danny
@El Tiburon:
You are a pacificist then, and the kind who asserts that anyone who’s not a pacifist is a supporter of “murder”?
Emma
@Chuck Butcher: No, I’m not asking you excuse anything. I’m asking you for a viable option. I’ve done the same thing to others and I’ve gotten back a resounding silence. I am not interested in pie in the sky, because I’m not interested in wasting my vote. Which one of the current crop of Democrats can mount a creditable primary from the left?
(edit) Sorry, I missed your early comment. Obeisance, used in a democracy, or a republic, or whatever you want to call it, implies subservience. It is a derogatory statement when taken in context of your comment, and it is directly aimed at Obama supporters.
OzoneR
@Keith G:
No one said human beings were moral characters. Paul’s opposition to this stuff is not based on moral correctness. If anything, it’s the opposition. THAT is the problem.
This Paul obsession shows progressives are so desperate to get a foothold on unwinnable arguments that’s they’re willing to outsource them to characters who have no soul.
Which leads me to believe progressives themselves aren’t as morally sound as they think they are.
You can’t win on “let’s treat everyone good” arguments, and/or you’re afraid of being called lily-livered, so you’re ok with bringing forth your arguments on the anti-progressive, anti-social democratic “big bad federal government” bullshit. It’s pathetic really.
El Tiburon
@gwangung:
I am. But it makes no sense. I don’t care if Ron Paul secretly hates black people and wants the states to enact tougher drug laws that will lock up more blacks.
I care that he wants to repeal this horrible War on Drugs that is causing so much damage, especially to minorities. Fact is Ron Paul wants to end the War on Drugs. Obama does not. Does this mean I now Support Ron Paul? NO.
Morzer
It’s possible to argue that Obama has been imperfect in a good number of areas, without regarding Ron Paul as anything other than profoundly dangerous and dishonest. I happen to think that any president burdened with the present sorry crew of Democrats/Blue Dogs would have trouble being liberal, and that Greenwald makes his essay depend too heavily on the assumption that Obama is a fully independent agent who can do whatever he wishes and should be held accountable for all the woes of the world. It seems exceedingly perverse to me to consider Obama on civil liberties worse than Ron Paul – Ron Paul who apparently thinks that white people should derive full liberties and inviolable property rights from the same libertarian vision of society and law that somehow denies those same liberties and rights to black people. Ron Paul can deny until he’s blue in the face that he is a racist. If denying people liberties and rights solely on the basis of skin color is not racism, then the term has no meaning.
Chuck Butcher
@Lynn Sutherland:
I prefer to hit myself on the finger with a hammer than my head. That won’t keep me from swearing about it because I’d damn well prefer an intact finger.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@El Tiburon:
And, sadly, had people like Greenwald not just sat back and allowed Bush to invade Iraq, and, instead, forced him to concentrate on the mandate he was given to take care of OBL rather than divert resources to the invasion of Iraq, the whole fucking thing might have been over long before the 2008 elections.
So what did Obama get in 2009 instead? A religious based civil war in Iraq that the US prompted due to the inaction of Greenwald and company, and a Pashtun nationalist movement on either side of the AfPak border.
Now you, the Pony Purist, and I, the Obot, might have been in agreement over whether or not to invade Iraq in ’03, and I’ll agree to disagree with you on the terms of the Pottery Barn Rule- you probably think it was Bush’s war, but I see it as America’s war, and Bush was just the agent designated by the majority to buy it- but I’l be damned if I won’t object to Greenwald being allowed into the conversation after he rolled over for Bush and let the whole thing start anyway.
Allan
@El Tiburon:
That’s interesting, because the basis of all Glenn’s writing is that Glenn knows what’s in the hearts and minds of the people he’s critiquing. He doesn’t simply disagree with their positions on an issue; he judges what he believes lies within their soul, determines to his own satisfaction that it’s pure unadulterated evil, or moral cowardice, or some defect of personality, then insists that it is so, and if you disagree, you are equally sick, diseased, damaged and repellent.
Lynn Sutherland
Oh, yes, El Tiburon–what you said.
El Tiburon
@Danny:
No, Danny, I am not a pacifist. But I believe with every ounce in my body that what we did in Iraq was murder on a massive scale. And what we are doing with our drones is murder.
While I came to not necessarily agree with our invasion of Afghanistan, I do believe we had to take action against Al Queda and attack and kill some of them. I also believe we should attempt to capture these people instead of indiscriminate bombing and killing. It’s not only the righ thing to do, but we continue to create more terrorists with every Freedom bomb.
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
But he’s espousing them from a platform that’s completely inimical to everything I believe as a liberal. I can’t support Paul’s stance on drug laws because he’s not actually against drug laws per se — he’s against federal drug laws. If Texas wanted to implement the death penalty for pot smokers, Paul would be on board with that because he thinks states should decide everything for themselves without interference from the federal government.
There is a host of valid medical research that was done on prisoners in concentration camps by the Nazis. So your view is that using that research is perfectly fine and there are no ethical questions to be asked about how it was obtained?
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@El Tiburon:
Because he doesn’t want to wind up like Jimmy Carter or Poppy Bush? There are 160 million people out there who vote, and so far they haven’t clamoring for more legalization or closing Gitmo.
I disagree with it because Ron Paul doesn’t fucking care about the War on Drugs on the state level. Hell, he probably thinks the whole thing will be over with the moment the uppity negroes are returned to the back of the bus.
Emma
@El Tiburon: ARRRRGH. How can I ignored (1)the newsletters; (2)the recent conspiracy theories that make him sound like a paranoid off his meds; (3)the stated belief in dismantling the federal government protections for the individual against the vagaries of the state governments? HOW?
Keith G
@OzoneR: Ironically, even though this is partially a “Paul” thread. None of my comments were based on Paul’s ideas. My bad
I have just been responding to various comments here in the abstract. I care not one wit about my neighboring Congressperson. In fact, I am quite weary of his prattling and more than weary of his core followers.
El Tiburon
@Allan:
Funny. I read Greenwald everyday. And what he does is take what people SAY and WRITE and DO. He meticulously documents the writings and interviews of these people. He then draws conclusions based on the writings and interviews with these people to draw conclusions.
So as an example, Greenwald has meticulously documented Obama’s continued attack on civil liberties and has come to the conclusion (as have many other progressive pundits) that Obama is worse than Bush on many issues. Greenwald can then conclude (rightly or wrongly) that Obama is not really a progressive or a liberal. But no, Allan, you are wrong on what Greenwald does. Perhaps you should read him. And when reading him, drop the anger and hatred I THINK you have for him.
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
So you’re okay with state authorities continuing their War on Drugs as long as the feds end theirs? You don’t care how many black men in Texas end up getting life sentences for having an ounce of pot as long as California has different laws?
Again, if Ron Paul wants state authorities to keep locking up pot users, he’s not calling for an end to the War on Drugs. He’s calling for an end to federal authority over the War on Drugs. Not the same thing.
slag
Here’s where I think Greenwald goes off the rails:
He seems to be completely unable/unwilling to personalize Social Security, Medicare, environmental protections, and civil rights for women and minorities in the way that he personalizes drone attacks and civil liberties issues. This is a typical use of asymmetrical rhetoric. We have children being “slaughtered” verses “stronger enforcement of civil rights”. That’s an unfair fight. And, quite frankly, one would think that Greenwald–as a lawyer–should recognize that fact. Personally, I think he’s being very manipulative–to the point of intellectual dishonesty–in this passage. He should be ashamed of himself.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
Then what the hell ARE we talking about?
Glenn Greenwald wants Ron Paul to debate Barack Obama on these issues. Fine, but do you people really think Obama would trot out there all loud and proud about his drones and drug wars? I mean, really?!?!
And then what are you going to do?
WaterGirl
@Morzer:
Ding. Ding. Ding. We have a winner!
Chuck Butcher
@El Tiburon:
Once you decide the war game is on, “innocent” people are going to get it in the neck. That is exactly how it goes and will go. You want it neat and clean when its most basic good definition is controlled chaos.
What happens is a measure is taken of what is acceptable in collateral damage. That measure has varied radically over the centuries. What was commonplace by the US in WWII would now be considered atrocities but zero ain’t happening.
El Tiburon
@Emma:
Because no one is asking you to support Ron Paul. You are only being challenged to listen to a few of his ideas on Very Important Issues.
Are you not capable of doing this? You really can’t say something like this: “Gee, I find Ron Paul a repulsive human being, but man he really has something to say on the War on Drugs, drone attacks and our disastrous wars. I sure wish our Democratic leaders would talk the same way, but they don’t, and that’s a shame because we really are doing a lot of damage in the world.”
You really can’t have that internal dialogue?
OzoneR
@slag:
He’s a libertarian, he doesn’t really care about social services and civil rights and he’s just made that explicitly clear.
Roger Moore
@El Tiburon:
No, but we have to discuss the Ron Paul who actually exists, not the theoretical construct people like Glenn Greenwald would like to talk about. This isn’t an abstract policy debate where we can invite Paul in when his views are interesting and dismiss him where they’re ridiculous. It’s a presidential primary campaign where we’re trying to decide who will run for one of the two major parties. That means we need to discuss candidates full credentials, pointing out both their strengths and weaknesses, not just their policy prescriptions but also their practical ability to carry them out. In the case of Ron Paul, his negatives are so bad that he deserves to be dismissed almost immediately, especially because his few interesting ideas have negligible chance of being put into effect.
Benjamin Franklin
I keep hearing that he couldn’t veto the NDAA because it included Military spendiing.
Wasn’t that the crux of the payroll tax? Didn’t he isolate the Republicans and make them back down?
He could’ve done the same with NDAA. Make it their problem.
Stop lecturing on the need to choose ‘paper’ over ‘plastic’. I’m tired of making false choices.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
He doesn’t have something to say about the war on drugs, drone attacks and disastrous wars.
Perhaps Russ Feingold does, but Ron Paul does not and I do not want my Democratic leaders taking Ron Paul’s views on those issues. I want them to take Russ Feingold’s views on those issues.
El Tiburon
@Chuck Butcher:
Are you listening? Do you consider Iraq getting your “war game on?” Are you comparing our invasion of Iraq (tell me again what they did?) to the US entering WWII? Because if you are, then I think you need to comment over at Free Repbulic.
And please defend the drone attacks in Pakistan that are not even officially happening.
OzoneR
@Benjamin Franklin:
He couldn’t veto NDAA because it would have been overridden.
Svensker
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
You’re blaming Greenwald for the Iraq War? That’s kind of a stretch, isn’t it?
barath
@slag:
Not just in that paragraph: that’s his style. It’s why I only read him for a few months a few years ago and stopped after that. When I read his text, I’m reminded of activist anarchists (who in many instances make common cause with libertarians; and here I mean political anarchists, not the colloquial meaning of the term). It’s something about the language that they uses that really turns me off. It’s almost a mirror image of neo-cons. Everything was a vague scary threat supported by vague but threatening sounding pseudo statistics and emotionally manipulative language (used asymmetrically, as you point out). All of it conveys a sense of intimate urgency.
In concept I’m in agreement with some of what’s said, but I’m a stickler for consistency in arguments and being appropriately dispassionate. I expect clean, rational arguments without the selective emotive filler. Greenwald only seemed to do that about 10% of the time.
Danny
@El Tiburon:
Believe whatever you want, but bombing a soldier until he’s dead from an unmanned plane is no more or less “murder” than doing it from a manned plane. So it really does seem to me that the logical conclusion of what you’re saying is that war killings == murders. (It’s your responsibility to elaborate and lay out unambiguous criteria for when something is a murder and when it isnt.)
Should we have tried to catch more german and japanese soldiers in WWII?
Why do you feel the word “indiscriminate” is warranted? What is it referring to?
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
I have listened to his ideas on Very Important Issues, and they’re fucking insane. You may be able to ignore his actual policy stances and decide that when he says he wants to end drone attacks and end all humanitarian foreign aid, he only really means the part about ending drone attacks, but I can’t pick and choose the particular parts of his foreign policy that I like and declare that the parts I like represent his whole foreign policy, because it’s not true.
Benjamin Franklin
@OzoneR:
Back in Congressional laps………
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@El Tiburon:
We should end the Federal War on Drugs… but the State War on Drugs is fine and dandy.
We should not be intervening in other countries… unless its by hiring mercenaries to do our dirty work. Oh, and say goodbye to the Peace Corps and funding for AIDS treatments in Africa.
Yep, we really should be listening to those ideas. We’ll really make progressive inroads with the American electorate this way!
El Tiburon
@Roger Moore:
HA HA HA HA HA. That’s some funny shit. No, 007, this is not what the primary campaign is all about. But nice try.
Greenwald has done no “theoretical construct” of Ron Paul. Seriously, did any of you people read the article? For fucks sake Greenwald is not white-washing Ron Paul. For the millionth fucking time: Greenwald is pointing to Ron Paul as the ONLY candidate on the stage who is talking about these important issues and in a way agreeable to Progressives. If Obama were saying the exact SAME WORDS, we would not argue, we would love it.
No, 007, the theoretical construct you bitch about is being performed by the MSM and the candidates. Not by Greenwald.
slag
@OzoneR:
Well, if he’s going to go through the motions of trying to convince people of his righteousness, he may consider starting. Otherwise, his admonishments (as correct as they may be in some cases) aren’t going to be remotely effective. And I’m generously assuming his goal is to get more people on his side.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
What does Iraq have to do anything? There’s no daylight between Paul and Obama on that issue
I think what Chuck was trying to say is our drone attacks are a joke compared to what we proudly did to Monte Cassino, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
Svensker
@El Tiburon:
This.
barath
@El Tiburon:
You still haven’t addressed Paul’s indifference as to whether, say, Texas decides to double down on the drug war under a federally-indifferent policy in a Paul presidency. (Assuming, somehow, that it passes congress in the first place.)
FlipYrWhig
I think Greenwald, having been a latecomer to politics, reacted negatively to Bush on matters of civil liberties and concluded that his response made him a liberal Democrat. Then when he also reacted negatively to Obama on civil liberties he determined that Obama was likewise failing to be a liberal Democrat. But in actuality all that reveals is that Greenwald is actually a classic small-government conservative. He just doesn’t realize it because he only awakened to politics when Bush was president. But if that’s the game he wants to play, he’s welcome to it.
On the much more important question of the federal government’s role in protecting civil rights and the common good, from black people at lunch counters to children surrounded by lead paint chips to a gay couple trying to get benefits, Paul is disastrously wrong, fundamentally illiberal, and antithetical to any notion of “liberty” any self-respecting liberal would ever uphold. This libertarian dalliance is just a wrongheaded waste of time.
patroclus
Greenwald’s shtick about how Obama is as bad as Bush seems to be contradicted somewhat by recent actual events, such as the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Iraq, being on the side of the protestors in Egypt, aiding in the overthrow of Qaddafi, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the resultant change of mission in Afghanistan, the widespread opposition in Syria etc… In Obama’s time, I don’t recall hearing about any new Abu Ghraib’s or offsite worldwide torture facilities.
In my view, Obama has positioned the U.S. more on the side of the average Muslim, rather than their mostly autocratic rulers, although that is debatable country-by-country, than did Bush. He hasn’t started any new wars, thankfully; we aren’t rounding up hundreds and thousands of non-combatants nightly like we were a few Christmases ago, there haven’t been many recent baldfaced lies about WMD’s.
As for Ron Paul, he’s a racist, homophobic State’s Rightist who does not care one whit about civil liberties and he wants to destroy the entire banking regulatory system; not to mention most of the federal government. I could not care less about what he says about executive power, wars or weed. He’s a loon, and he’d be a terrible befuddled ineffectual President that would wreak havoc on America and the world.
OzoneR
@patroclus:
both of which, IIRC, Greenwald OPPOSED.
lamh35
Hmmm what’s not to love about Ron Paul…oh wait!
Ron Paul: Civil Rights Act of 1964 ‘Destroyed’ Privacy
Please follow Ta-Nehisi’s twitte feed:
https://twitter.com/#!/tanehisi
“Ron Paul slams the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It’s OK because he’s against the drug war”
“For the record “I’m against the drug war” has officially replaced “I have a black friend.”
“”I think lynching is just swell–but too be clear I oppose crack/cocaine disparities.”
But ya’ll know how much of an O-bot TaNehisi is!
ETA: BTW, I believe this is not from last year, this is from this morning on with Jake Tapper.
El Tiburon
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
Okay, then let’s listen to these ideas and see if you agree more:
1. Let’s continue the disastrous War on Drugs that costs billions and locks up a majority of minorities for no reason. It destroys lives and is also destroying the border region in Mexico and the US>
2. We should continue to intervene in other countries, especially Muslim countries, by full force of our military that we spend more on than the rest of the planet combined, or by secret drone attacks that continue to kill innocent women and children.
Do you even take yourself seriously? Did you even read what you wrote before hitting the SUBMIT button?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@El Tiburon:
Really?
Of course that’s only one example. there are three more in that same post. So either Greenwald isn’t the diligent researcher you claim him to be, or he just tiptoes around the truth, knowing that people like you won’t actually check his work.
Svensker
@OzoneR:
You may not have noticed that Feingold is not in government any longer. However, when he was in government, he and Paul agreed on many things. Paul and Kucinich have also joined on a number of issues. Should Feingold and Kucinich not have joined with Paul? Did you say “la la la can’t hear you” when they joined with Paul? I don’t get your argument here.
Benjamin Franklin
All I have to say is ‘hallelujah”
The King is dead. Long live the King,
Mnemosyne
@Svensker:
I don’t know that it’s blaming him personally so much as resenting the fact that people who supported the Iraq War like Greenwald feel comfortable lecturing those of us who were against it from Day 1 about how we’re not as moral and insightful as they are because they eventually figured out it was a clusterfuck.
I knew immediately that Bush was lying, that there were no WMDs, and that Colin Powell was feeding a line of bullshit to the UN, and I screamed about it for months. And now Greenwald is going to come along with his grand revelation that, hey, the Iraq War was wrong the whole time? Well, no shit, Sherlock. Don’t go blaming me for your own gullibility, and definitely don’t lecture me about how much more clearly you see things than me, who figured out it was bullshit long before you did.
FlipYrWhig
@slag: You assume he would be capable of shame about things. He isn’t. He’s a dogmatist with a very small litmus test, who thinks what he cares about is the only thing anyone should care about. I don’t see why he deserves more attention than a guy with a fixation on corn dogs saying we should look to Michele Bachmann as the most corn dog friendly candidate because when it comes to corn dogs she has a lot to teach us.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@lamh35: There’s better ones later in the feed. TNC nailed it.
Emma
@El Tiburon: oh sheeeeit. Of course I am capable. And have. As have many, many of his supporters on this thread. Now, are you capable of even considering why, in our view, it’s a really bad idea to dismantle the federal war on drugs and allowing the states to do whatever they want? Why is a really, really bad idea to dismantle the EPA and the department of Education?
For the record, I think the War on… whatever (terror, drugs) is the stupidest phrase on the planet because it allows the crazy to crank up the “military” aspects of it and minimize the “law enforcement” aspect. Clear? But I cannot help to see that Paul is the wrong standard bearer because he’s not interested in ANYTHING from the angle of improving individual rights. In fact, as a uterus-bearing person, a Paul presidency would be a complete disaster for me.
And I cannot separate the issue from the standard bearer, not if the price is an election. The Republicans terrify me, ok? They have slid into Chucky country and I don’t think there’s any getting them back to sane. They aren’t going to retake the White House without a fight from me.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
That’s lovely, you do realize those are NOT the arguments Ron Paul is making, right?
Roger Moore
@Benjamin Franklin:
He could have if he had been facing a strictly partisan move, but the detention parts of the NDAA had fairly substantial Democratic support. He can’t make it “their” problem when a big chunk of “them” is actually us.
barath
Here’s something else that irks me: since when did the opposition to the drug war by many members of the congressional progressive caucus (many of whom are also in the congressional black caucus) get such high praise from Greenwald and his fans? Why aren’t they highlighted on a regular basis as a sign that there are Democrats that get it on that issue and have a sane approach to resolving it and other related social problems (rather than just kicking the issue to the states many of which would make things worse, as Paul would do)?
Benjamin Franklin
Jeff Goldberg? I’m sorry. Anyone who gives Goldbrick a back-door compliment has to be of suspect character.
El Tiburon
@patroclus:
Fuck me running.
1. Withdrawal of troops from Iraq – Obama was forced to after Wikileaks exposed US atrocities. Iraq refuses to grant immunity to US troops.
2. Being on side of Egyptian protestors: After trying their best to make sure the Mobarak (or their henchmen) stayed in power. As an aside: it would be nice if Obama administration and State Dept. were on the side of the US protestors as much as they claimed to be for Egyptian protestors. Also, are you so naive that Obama administration is really for the overthrow of US puppet?
3. Qaddafi and bin Laden: so, US policy should now and forever be the execution and assassination of those we don’t like. Forget justice and the rule of law.
4. Off-site torture: You haven’t heard about any huh since Obama? I guess you only listen the Today Show.
https://www.google.com/search?q=torture+continues+under+obama&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Svensker
@Mnemosyne:
Glenn supported the Iraq War? I didn’t know that. I’d always assumed that he was against it from the beginning. He certainly got up to speed quickly, because that’s when he started blogging.
How come you and I knew it was total bullshit and all those smart wonks, pundits and politicians believed that crap? That’s the big mystery to me.
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
Yes, because if Obama were saying the exact same words, he would be coming from a liberal position where unprovoked war on other countries is bad, but humanitarian aid is good, rather than Paul’s position that any interaction with other countries is automatically bad.
Context matters.
OzoneR
@barath: Because Greenwald is also anti-partisan. He’s not going to praise committed and loyal Democrats or Republicans for taking positions he likes.
Ron Paul is a Republican outcast, he likes that about him. There are other Republicans who agree with many of these positions, people like Walter Jones and John Duncan, but they’ll never get any love for Glenn either, because they’re hardcore, loyal GOPers.
Benjamin Franklin
Hence, the problem. We need to rein in our own. Obama can help, but seems reluctant to do so.
magurakurin
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): thanks for that.
GG is a fuckwit.
He says this:
and then says this:
Jesus wept. A piece of paper is what protects the republic, not, you know, actual participation in the system by its citizen. I’m sorry, but if you feel that voting in not particularly important, then I can’t take you very serious as wanting to protect democracy in any way. Voting is the most basic and fundamental right of any citizen of a democracy. It is the bare minimum of participation demanded and anyone who does not do at least that is a fuckwit. And they can go fuck their face with their useless bullshit spew.
Christ, he didn’t even vote in 2004? He honestly believe letting Bush have another term wouldn’t have made a difference?
Fuck Greenwald. He doesn’t vote.
Morzer
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
This is just silly. You didn’t stop Bush invading Iraq, nor did I, nor did any of us. Trying to imply that Greenwald failed uniquely here is grotesquely unfair.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@El Tiburon: So you’re A-OK with state wars on drugs, Xe handling the Middle East, and letting AIDS run rampant over Africa. Awesome. I’ll remember to notify you the next time there’s a cross burning in our area, you can bring the gasoline and bedsheets.
El Tiburon
@OzoneR:
You know before you make a comment like that, it would be nice if you referred to the comment I was replying to. I was replying point by point to his comment. In that context you will understand what I was doing.
Darkrose
@El Tiburon:
…I’m sorry, that makes absolutely no sense to me. I don’t think it’s just because I’m black, either.
slag
@barath:
I totally get this. And, as an occasional Greenwald reader myself (moreso back in the day), I empathize with a lot of the feeling he expresses in some circs. But there’s a limit. Inflammatory language can get attention but it won’t necessarily get a job done. And for me, it’s finally turned me off. I think someone previously dubbed it “outrage fatigue”, but that’s not quite accurate, in my mind. Stridency can only go so far before it starts to eat into credibility. Greenwald has reached that point for me, I’m sad to say.
ETA If you haven’t seen The Nation’s panel on Occupy Wall Street, I highly recommend it. The juxtaposition between what the anarchist type guy on the panel and Renu Whatshername couldn’t have been more helpful. At one point, she even addressed their differences by referring to civil rights and the need to make government better–not nonexistent.
magurakurin
@Mnemosyne:
A-fucking-men. A-fucking-men.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@El Tiburon:
Right. Because those are the only matters that face the POTUS. Not like Paul hasn’t taken positions against gay marriage, the Civil rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, the EPA, etc., etc….
Yeah, I’ll amit that not all of them were bloody, but there were a fuckload of deaths in this country before we passed federal regulation to halt the practices that led to those deaths {just because most of this happened before you were born doesn’t mean it didn’t happen). In PaulWorld, those regulations would disappear.
Mnemosyne
@Svensker:
Yep, Greenwald was for it, as Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again) linked to.
I wish I knew how it is that we figured it out before people like Greenwald did, but I sure don’t like them lecturing me about how much smarter they are about the government than I am when they’re the ones who fell for the bullshit in the first place.
ETA: One of the reasons I like John is that he admits he fell for the bullshit and doesn’t try to claim that he knows better than I do because he eventually came around to where I stood.
micah616
Shorter Glenn Greenwald:
In all seriousness, this is the worst sort of “both sides do it” bullshit. He starts by conflating progressives, liberals, and Democrats. Maybe it’s not specifically his conflation, as too many blur those lines, especially when its to service a shitload of self-aggrandizement.
Greenwald’s problem is that he’s as big of a Manichean as Bush ever was. For all his bluster about “lying partisan enforcers,” he just assisted me in wasting 20 minutes of my life being trolled for hypocrisy and insufficient purity to his idea of my ideology.
Pro-tip, Glenzilla: Fallacies of composition embarrass you time and time again. Please stop.
El Tiburon
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
You are exhibt A as to what is wrong with you people. Yes, I said ‘you people’.
So I clearly state I am against the War on Drugs for the lives it ruins, especially minorities. And in your genius you come up with that I must be partial to the KKK? You really are a fucking idiot.
And really, your entire comment here is repulsive. You obviously have very little ability for critical thinking and conversation.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
I’m aware of what you were doing. You were making a progressive argument for your stances, but at the same time, in this entire thread, you are defending a guy who won’t make those arguments, which is exactly what Sheriff was saying.
Paul would not stand on a stage with Obama and say
Ron Paul would stand up there and say “Lets stop the disastrous war on drugs that gives the federal government unregulated power over the lives of civilians, and while we’re at it, lets get rid of the EPA, Dept. of Energy and Dept. of Education for the same reasons”
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Morzer:
It isn’t that he tried and failed, BUT HE NEVER TRIED, AND, IN FACT, REGARDED IT AS HIS DUTY TO FOLLOW THE PRESIDENT’S LEAD DESPITE HIS OWN SUSPICIONS THAT THE PRESIDENT WAS LYING!
Need I c&p the passage from the preface of GG’s first book again, or do you just want to scroll back up?
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
Then you do not fit the definition of a social democrat or a progressive, you fit the definition of an anti-federal government conservative.
Satanicpanic
It is really this simple- Paul couldn’t stop the MIC anymore than Obama could. There are too many institutional forces that would prevent Paul from implementing any of his reforms. We know this because Obama promised the same reforms and couldn’t deliver- unless you think Paul (the guy who didn’t see those newsletters that we printed in his name) has a monopoly on telling the truth, which I don’t believe. So we have to look at areas that Presidents actually can affect- Obama beats Paul in every single one of those.
FlipYrWhig
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): And that’s before even getting into business regulations like, say, OSHA, or restrictions on toxins, or compelling businesses to serve minorities, or compelling banks to lend to them, or restricting banks’ ability to confect misleading and fraudulent products. Federal regulation constrains “liberty,” so libertarians (at least consistent ones) would be against all of those.
El Tiburon
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
This is getting so tiresome, so to the joy of many of you, I will retire for a while after this one.
Again: Ron Paul in many ways is repulsive and many of his stances on issues suck. I mean really, really suck.
BUT, on many issues that are important to us progressives, he is the only one talking the talk. And it is on these issues we would like to move Obama to be more progressive on. We are in no way endorsing Ron Paul or his racism or other repulsive ideas. In fact, he would be a terrible, terrible president. On this we don’t quibble. So continue to bring up all of his negative traits because you are preaching to the choir. HE SUCKS!!!
But, on these issues…
It’s really not that hard.
Danny
@El Tiburon:
WTF? Do you guys seriously hate Truth or do you just dont give a fuck if you hurt her feelings? That’s so wildly inaccurate that even Glenn fucking Beck would be ashamed.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@El Tiburon: You’re the one saying we should listen to Ron Paul when his own fucking argument is replacing the War on Drugs and the War on Terror with Jim Crow and William Walker. And when its been brought up – repeatedly – you continue to ignore it. Ron Paul wants to set the clock on civil rights back 100 years, if not more, and that’s always been the central point of why he’s against the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, and you want us to listen to him again?
And you call me repulsive?
Fuck you, and fuck the rest of your Klavern, asshole.
Benjamin Franklin
You guys want to pretend this is Obama vs Paul, when it really is,,,
Obama vs Obama…
El Tiburon
@OzoneR:
Taken out of context, and I should have been more precise: I don’t care if this is what Ron Paul thinks, I only care about his stance on the War on Drugs.
I most certainly do care about any state or law that ultimately targets minorities.
FlipYrWhig
@micah616: Can I co-sign? Because you nailed it.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
Actually, you had previously admitted that isn’t true. Ron Paul doesn’t want to end the War on Drugs, he wants to end federal involvement in drug legalization and enforcement. He doesn’t care if Texas fights a war on drugs or Arizona does it. He’s fine with that.
patroclus
@El Tiburon:
Are you seriously arguing that Obama did not campaign on ending the Iraq war and then ended it? Please provide a reputable link to these events. I honestly remember him saying it in the campaign and then, this Christmas, it happened. Please provide the “Greenwald” perspective on these events.
amk
@Benjamin Franklin: What part of ndaa passing with 86-13 in senate do you not understand ? I’m tired of clueless, preachy moralists.
Congrats cole, you managed to troll your own blog with a shitty subject like gg.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
THAT IS PART OF HIS STANCE ON THE WAR ON DRUGS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
Morzer
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I think you should be honest enough to cite the full discussion. Greenwald makes it perfectly clear that he regrets having had such faith in Bush and the way in which he got most of the American people to buy into the Iraq war. You are distorting what Greenwald actually said in his books – and given that you didn’t stop the Iraq war either, it seems just a little hypocritical of you to lecture us on your superior virtue. Greenwald at least is candid enough to admit his mistakes and lay out why he made them.
Emma
@El Tiburon: Then what the hell are you saying? Because it seems the most remarkable amount of wankery. “I don’t support him and I won’t vote for him because he’s a crazy man, but I’m going to keep of touting him because his pet peeves are my pet peeves even though I understand that if he could get to implement his solutions to our pet peeves there would be fifty wars on drugs rather than one?”
patroclus
@Danny:
Indeed, El Tiburon seems to have gone on a flight of fancy here.
And Ron Paul wouldn’t end the War on Drugs, he’s just against the federal goverment being involved.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
WTF?!? Are you for real with this?
You’re approaching an Orly Taitz level of conspiracy theory now.
FlipYrWhig
@El Tiburon: So if you were a vegan, and Rick Santorum was also a vegan, would you expect to be able to say something like “on the issues I care about as a vegan, I like Santorum better than Obama,” without getting an earful about how repulsive Santorum was on any and all non-vegan issues? And if you stuck to your guns and kept defending Santorum anyway, would it be unfair to begin to suspect that it wasn’t really only the veganism that you liked about him?
Dr. Squid
@Observer: Because the media has assisted in making “liberal” a dirty word that people should fear to associate with.
Smarter monkeys, please.
Benjamin Franklin
Why you’re ok with it…
Darkrose
@El Tiburon:
Then how can you sit there and say that Ron Paul is awesome because he’ll end the War on Drugs when his stance is that he’ll kick the War on Drugs back to the states? Paul’s entire platform is based on the idea that the federal government is illegitimate, in its entirety. Therefore, no laws have the right to be passed at the national level.
States’ rights trump all. Hmm…now where have we heard that before…
Wannabe Speechwriter
Will Greenwald’s response to John be 20 pages or a mere 18?
Mnemosyne
@Darkrose:
I’m Whitey McWhiterson, and it makes no sense to me, either. State-level discrimination is a-okay as long as the feds aren’t actively participating?
FlipYrWhig
@patroclus: He’s against the federal government doing much of anything. ISTM that when the federal government does things lïberals don’t much like, we’ll find overlaps with libertarianism and Paul, but those overlaps seem little more than incidental rather than the basis for supporting a candidate even on a single-issue basis.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@El Tiburon:
I never realized that, as a progressive, I was supposed to prefer Letters of Marque to peace. Christ, maybe when President Paul gets huffy about Canada, my progressive friends and I can rent some jet-skis and make us some money on the Great Lakes, guilt-free!
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Mnemosyne: I’m getting the impression that the thought process goes ‘Ron Paul Is Against The War On Drugs’ and doesn’t get any deeper as to just why Ron Paul is against the War on Drugs or just who’s War on Drugs he’s against. He just is and that’s all that is apparently needed.
amk
@Benjamin Franklin: yeah, stay clueless.
micah616
@FlipYrWhig: I’d be honored
OzoneR
@Darkrose: @Mnemosyne: El’s “I care that he opposes the War on Drugs and really don’t care that he actually supports a different version of said war” was hilariously confusing until I saw El suggest that we only left Iraq because of WikiLeaks.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: It’s AOK if you’re a small-government conservative with libertarian tendencies who thinks intrusive federal government is always the problem even when well-intentioned. Which sounds a lot like Greenwald. Which is why the stupidest shit is why we’re supposed to view his critiques as liberal/left.
Benjamin Franklin
@amk:
I thought I could smoke you out. Mea Culpa.
But I will ask you again, and again, until you answer.
Stay tuned.
OzoneR
@Benjamin Franklin: This is a really intelligent way to avoid an unanswerable question like “How does the President stop a bill that’s going to pass with or without him?”
Benjamin Franklin
@El Tiburon:
I don’t like it when people pile on. The poison of Humphrey democrats still
lingers in my muscle memory.
amk
@Benjamin Franklin: Idiotic questions from the clueless won’t be answered. Stay on the line.
Benjamin Franklin
@OzoneR:
Sometimes principle is a pyrrhic victory. The Charge of the Light brigade is an example.
Benjamin Franklin
@amk:
I’m relentless.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Benjamin Franklin: Barring someone like Feingold taking the America’s Elect trophy, it doesn’t look good for a real challenge from the left in 2012. Which is why I think we should start laying the groundwork now for Franken, Gillibriand, or Warren in 2016.
Mnemosyne
@Morzer:
So therefore those of us who didn’t make his mistake in the first place should STFU and listen to his superior wisdom?
I don’t think that making a mistake gives you any special insight into anything except what made you make that mistake. It especially doesn’t make you morally superior to people who didn’t make that mistake in the first place.
slightly_peeved
@Dr. Squid:
Actually, I’d disagree with you but more so with Observer.
The reason Liberals are doing so badly in the U.S. is that someone convinced them that if they stayed home on election day, someone would notice and start giving them what they wanted.
What actually happened was that they stayed home So. Damn. Often that the U.S. as a whole gave up on them.
The main reason the elections of 2010 turned out the way they did was that old people got pissed off and voted. All the pissed off liberals seem to argue that not voting is the appropriate response, in the face of all the evidence both in the US and overseas. The reason the US has taken a right turn on certain issues is 30 years of consistent Republican turnout and pushing of a right-wing agenda. It didn’t happen just with Reagan, and the left-wing shift won’t happen just with Obama. Liberals have to show up and keep showing up if they want to be heard.
eemom
@Kola Noscopy:
Same here. Comfortably home with the hubster and kids, ate take out sushi and homemade pumpkin cheesecake, and clonked out earlier than I do most nights. Nothing more to be desired.
slag
@Benjamin Franklin:
Who’s “you guys”? Satanicpanic made that point just above you, and there were others before him. I don’t know all the various reasons why Obama has failed to live up to expectations in so many ways, but there’s no reason I can see to assume Paul would do any better.
Alan
I sometimes fantasize about a Ron Paul presidency. Just imagine his picks for the Fed and Treasury–the banksters would go absolutely insane. What about the Defense contractors, when he shuts down practically every military project? What will the drug cartels do when there’s no longer mega profits?
I don’t think he’d–literally–survive very long as President. The money interest would have his head.
OzoneR
@Benjamin Franklin: T
Oh yeah, this all started in 1968, before that Democrats were incredibly principled when it came to civil rights and peace.
We all should be more like Truman who vaporized two Japanese cities and sent troops into the Korean Peninsula in the country’s first undeclared war.
Keith G
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
Golly, I hate to get back into this thread as it has devolved quite a bit but:
I have seen an agument repeated several times here and I doubt it has real world validity.
I think that I am pretty safe in saying that without federal dollars there will be no war on drugs. Yeah, there will be random localities that go hard core, but money is tight. Without the feds providing intel, coordination, prosecutors, prison space, and most importantly cash, the war on drugs will become an occasional skirmish.
That said, it really does not matter who is in power, just like the War on Muslims there is too much corporate money being made for the War on Drugs to end anytime soon.
edited, but not enough
Chuck Butcher
@El Tiburon:
That’s about as honest a response as I’d expect from RealityChallenged. I don’t give a good goddam what war you pick from the time ordinance started flying around. I don’t give a flying fuck if its The Revolutionary War or whatever other one. The end result of ordinance being used is that people with no other fault than living where it is being used are going to get FUCKED OVER BAD.
That is exactly how it works. There is a measurement taken of what is acceptable. You might not like that calculation being made, but it has to be made because it is inevitible. It will be much lower when the area involved is rural and the warfare involves uniforms but things go to shit in a real hurry in urban and especially non-uniform combat.
I don’t give a good goddam what war you sign on for or don’t – the end result will include civilian casualities and to pretend different is to propagate a stupid video game idea of warfare.
I don’t give a damn how well trained a soldier is or how up close action is – innocents will suffer. You have a some sort of odd distinction between an artillery shell or bomb and a drone that I flatly don’t get.
I do not in any shape or form consider warfare to be anything other than an ultimate failure of reason. You seem to want to pretend it is something else, knock yourself the fuck out with that.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Morzer:
He laid it out in ’05, and doesn’t- unlike Cole- bring it up any more.
Fuck, how could he? Cole, at least, admits to being a run-of-the-mill young GOP yahoo, a not-very-serious thinker. Greenwald, OTOH, gives some reasoning grounded in principle. Greenwald, who was, ya know, a Constitutional lawyer, got played for the sucker. If he goes around admitting that, it raises questions over whether or not he’s allowing himself to be played for the sucker again…Which I’d actually prefer to him playing it so low-key that it seems as if he’s got something to hide.
And if you read the body of his work and compare his roster of facts to the entire body of facts related to the body of that work, it seems to me as if he really is hiding something: Has he got some hidden political agenda? Is he actually a political agnostic who’s just in it for the money? I don’t know. But I know that I’ve read enough misleading bullshit from him that I don’t trust him at all.
slightly_peeved
@Benjamin Franklin:
The Charge of the Light Brigade was a flat-out defeat. It was a failure borne of incompetence, in the finest British military tradition, that was later romanticised. The Light Brigade charged head on into a pile of cannon for no good reason, were slaughtered, and got nothing for it.
Describing it as a ‘pyrrhic victory’, when a quick wiki would tell you otherwise, is really only bolstering amk’s point.
amk
@Benjamin Franklin: Enjoy this while you do that.
OzoneR
@Keith G:
There’s a sheriff in Arizona who disagrees.
So you went from “there’ll be no war on drugs” to “an occasional skirmish”
ooook
eemom
@El Tiburon:
holy shit.
Where I “quibble” is where his entire thesis is that it’s ALL OBAMA’s FAULT that the republicans are the mouth-foaming far right freak parade that they are.
That’s where I fucking QUIBBLE.
You need help.
Benjamin Franklin
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
We can’t get fresh blood into the game until we get the money out.
Publicly Funded Elections. How many libertarians support that?
wrb
@Keith G:
Back to B-52s and blind over-the-hill artillery is what you are asking for, I guess.
OzoneR
@Benjamin Franklin:
none lol. Please tell me you knew that
Mnemosyne
@Svensker:
We’re talking about actual legislation that was being written, correct? I think that when you’re talking about drafting legislation, the basis of the politician’s beliefs matter quite a bit less than when you’re talking about who to support as a presidential candidate. You can have one legislator who thinks we need to end the federal War on Drugs because marijuana should be totally legal and another legislator who thinks we need to end the federal War on Drugs because it should be up to the states and be able to come to some agreement on what the subsequent law should be.
It’s when someone starts cherry-picking Paul’s foreign policies so they can claim Paul agrees with them that I think they’re being dishonest.
amk
@eemom: glenbots/poutraged left/pretend left have minds like a steel trap – permanently shut.
Benjamin Franklin
@slightly_peeved:
Ahhhhh, But so romantic !
Annnnnnd,,,,,principled.
OzoneR
@Svensker:
No, they didn’t. they ended up on the same side of a single issue and came to it from different places and managed to draft legislation from that, but they didn’t “agree”
Ron Paul and Russ Feingold opposed the PATRIOT Act for different reasons. I prefer Feingold’s to Paui’s.
Benjamin Franklin
@OzoneR:
I know. That’s the point. Did you know that?
BTW; Classical Liberal? Or, covert corn-fed conservative?
OzoneR
@Benjamin Franklin:
Of course I knew that, I don’t understand why you bothered to bring it up.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Nellcote:
That’s what kills me about these purity progressives; the selection of a President is literally “the lesser of two evils”. Nobody is going to get a candidate that they agree with on every single point, it will NEVER happen. Never. No matter who wins, they are going to do right and wrong through good and bad decisions. It can’t be avoided, the rails are greased and there’s no stopping the train.
The President isn’t perfect, he’s human. If you are looking for the perfect President then you can give up now. Your choice is one of the top two dogs in the fight because only one of them are going to win. You either pick the lesser of the ‘two evils’ and hope they win.
You can argue that if people will only vote for a third party candidate then they would have a real choice, but that argument isn’t going to go anywhere soon. The majority of voters are voting for a Democrat or Republican so it’s one or the other.
Or you can just waste your vote and then bitch moar when ‘more evil’ wins the election.
Because, admit it kids, that’s the way manic progressives roll. Outrage is good for business, much like it is on the far right. It’s just the other side of the coin in American politics.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@slightly_peeved:
Yeah, old Ben would have been wiser to bring up the Battle of Asculum.
Benjamin Franklin
To smoke out the ‘Ringers’.
Spectre
This is the most hilarious outrage by the Authoritarians in quite some time. You folks literally acted as described and predicted by Greenwald in his article.
Your position cannot withstand close scrutiny, so there can be no close scrutiny, and you all immediately resort back to some truly atrocious strawmen and ad hominems. Just like anyone that’s been caught with their hand in someone’s purse.
Exposed, would be an understatement.
dance around in your bones
Oh frack, who cares?
Gawdamn. Obama is the bestest choice. I iz SO sick o’ politics
P.S. But I lubs u Guys.
P.S.S, de grandkids were bangin’ around on de laptop…..so……oh, hell.
Chuck Butcher
@slightly_peeved:
And in the face of all available evidence people just like you continue to make the same stupid comment about ’10. Despite exit polling showing Ds turning out in ordinary numbers. Your fucking much beloved I’s, your fucking middle you so avidly suck up to – swappped. Not the liberals, not the Left, not your usual suspects who always show up – your much fellated middle screwed you right in the ear.
Keith G
@OzoneR: Come on. You seem to be argumentative just for the sake of an argument.
“War on Drugs” has a meaning. Yes there would be hard-assed localities that try to go medieval, until their tax payers get tired of being 100% on the hook for the cost of such silliness. And that would not take too long.
Already, an even with access to fed funds, localities are currently looking for ways to stop using law enforcement dollars and jail space on non violent behavior.
Spectre
@Mudge:
Strawman #1. I refer you back to Greenwald:
“Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?”
Next.
wrb
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
And an awful lot of dead muslim babies resulted.
But Glenn favored killing those muslim babies.
With the foreknowledge that comes from launching B-52, artillery and cruise missile strikes.
Dude is lying hypocritical evil.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Spectre:
Yeah, sure. It isn’t like Greenwald isn’t using some self-fulfilling solipsistic horseshit of a positive feedback loop, amiright?
Spectre
“Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?”@Libby:
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@wrb:
Yep.
And Greenwald slunk off the sinking ship silently only to sail back in and slander the salvage team.
Spectre
@WereBear (itouch):
You must be some kind of self-parody. “GLENN WAS GOOD WHEN HE WENT AFTER DEM AND NOT UZ!!!”
Benjamin Franklin
@Libby:
Missed that. Thanks Spectre.
I agree wholeheartedly. But GG is not flipping the switch for Republicans,
It’s like the Right saying the Left hates the US. because we criticize. We want it to be better, that’s all.
Spectre
@wrb:
Only relevant if:
1) He hasn’t blatantly change his way of thinking. He has.
2) The discussion was about Greenwald’s 2002 politics.
What you’re saying, even if TRUE, is an AD HOMINEM. Address his arguments, or faux outrage harder.
Authoritarians be failin’
Spectre
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
That makes your Obama apologetics even more bizarre. He tried to extend our stay in Iraq.
Chuck Butcher
Some people are relentlessly… obtuse. Ron Paul does not care about the war on drugs – he cares about the FEDERAL war on drugs. He is not on your side, not even remotely. He doesn’t get there for any reason you’d like and the outcome would be something that ought to scare the shit out of you depending on where you live or travel, personally – and for the general public’s good should bother hell out of you.
Spectre
@Donna:
Oh the illiteracy, how it burns. Again, until it sinks in:
“Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?”
“I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy”
Read it. Then read it again.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Spectre:
No, he didn’t. He withdrew in a manner that would minimize the damage. And he did it according to the rough timeline he laid out during the campaign.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Chuck Butcher:
I said it at the ass-end of another Paul-themed thread this week: Progressive Paultards are Molotov to Paul’s Ribbentrop.
Spectre
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
That’s incorrect. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/united-states-and-iraq-had-not-expected-troops-would-have-to-leave.html?_r=3&hp
He tried to extend the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, but failed to get immunity provisions, so he was forced to stick to Bush’s timeline.
And that’s the guy that an alleged anti-war advocate like you supports. Shameful.
Spectre
Also, the lack of utter self-awareness by Obama apologists here is mind boggling.
“OKAY HE’S BETTER ON SOME STUFF LIKE WAR AND DOMESTIC STUFF, BUT HE’S ALSO A RACIST RIGHT WING REACTIONARY!!”
True. What does that say about Obama that such a guy can be to his left on various key issues?
The petard you lot are hanging from is one of your own making.
Keith G
@wrb: No.
Wrongful death is still wrongful death whether it be Dresden, Coventry, the Christmas bombings, or miscellaneous civilians in Pakistan (people living in a land we are not at war with).
I am very glad for the vast improvement in the numbers; still, wrong is wrong. As Chuck points out, warfare kills innocents and that must be taken into account. I would add that warfare-like activities have gotten so easy to commence and so tidy (for our society) to experience that we might well grow to accept it as a natural and ongoing activity. And that just creeps me out.
So, we end up killing fewer with each accident, but our accidents will keep on keeping on well beyond the horizon. That’s just great.
Anya
@OzoneR:
No, it’s a Glen Greenwald level of conspiracy theory.
virag
@eemom:
what exactly is wrong about gg’s guardian piece? it was pretty simple, pretty obvious stuff. there was nothing in it controversial or bad form. bho is an old-school rock-ribbed republican, just like clinton was. anybody who doesn’t see this is pretty fucking dense.
Chuck Butcher
@Keith G:
You got segments of society that’re – odd.
They got it coming because they’re …
Oh well, wasn’t anybody I know
Didn’t see it, don’t know about it
We’re really good at this, why the fuss about a couple?
Accidents happen … so?
This shit will happen, stop it
wilfred
Oh, the War on Drugs:
“In 1986 the federal prison population was 36,000. Today it’s 216,000. And in the 25 years since, more than half of federal prisoners are brought in on drug charges. The prison population is disproportionately black and Hispanic. The federal government does about 25,000 cases a year and only one out of four of those defendants is white. Also, it’s widely believed that crack cases are mostly minorities, while the powder cocaine cases are mostly white, but that’s a myth. It’s true that only one in 10 crack cases are white, but the overwhelming majority of powder cocaine defendants are still black or Hispanic.”
Yeah, what’s the point of ending it, right? And Ron Paul is a racist, too.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Spectre: The only reason Paul is to the “left” of Obama on some issues is that politics is not linear. I find lots of conservatives that believe we need to get out of Iraq; most of them, though, supported the invasion. I may like their final position, but I don’t like how they set it up.
Spectre
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Let’s pretend that’s true. So what?
Obama is still more reactionary on all these issues than the aforementioned bad-faith reactionary. And that’s without even parsing how Obama morphed into these positions.
He went from “Iraq War? Howabout nah?” to “Let’s extend our troop presence!”
He’s a butterfly that morphed back into a caterpillar.
Allan
This thread needs James Bond.
Cacti
Ron Paul is the new Ralph Nader of the white left.
Allan
@El Tiburon:
There’s your problem right there.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@wilfred:
Now give us the corresponding numbers in the state systems.
Kenneth Almquist
It’s strange that Greenwald thinks that every liberal is in a fit to be tied over Ron Paul just because a few folks come out of the woodwork to flame Greenwald when he mentions Ron Paul. My opinion is that Ron Paul agrees with liberals on a handful of issues and therefore has no chance of winning the Republican nomination. If the Republican voters prove me wrong, I’ll start taking Ron Paul a bit more seriously.
Jewish Steel
♪Ding♪ Paging Mr Cole. Your fever swamp is ready. Thank you.
dww44
@Wannabe Speechwriter: Sometimes I just wanna say I “like” by clicking on something.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Spectre:
What does it say about you that you honestly think a states rightist like Paul is to Obama’s left?
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Keith G:
If only it were that easy. ‘We need to keep these drug-running gangs off the streets, so we’re raising taxes and cutting back on social programs. For the children.’
AxelFoley
@rikyrah:
This. All this.
Fuck Ron Paul and all his supporters.
Spectre
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
:Yawn: more ad hominems. Apply the same extension:
Ron Paul: Bad. Crazy. Reactionary. “States rightist”, JerrySanduskyist, etc.
Still better on issues like “don’t let the president assassinate U.S. citizens”. “Don’t have perpetual war”.
This reflects very poorly on your candidate.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Spectre:
Another neo-Confederate apologist? Yawn indeed. Go back to your Klavern too.
gwangung
@Spectre:
That’s not an ad hominem.
THis reflects very poorly on Paul that a supposed supporter is so poorly educated.
Of course, all candidates attract trolls, so…
dance around in your bones
@Jewish Steel: Heh the fucking heh.
Keith G
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-: Well it is that easy.
And even the stupid realize that something different needs to be done. Even though their first steps are too silly for words, they will bow to reality and get it right.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@gwangung: Dave Neiwert is an authoritarian too, dontcha know.
BONUS: C-SPAN footage of Ron Paul defending his newsletters.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Keith G: Anecdotal evidence is a kind of evidence? And the PA article only mentions ‘non-violent’ offenders, I have a hard time believing his final plan won’t be as lenient on drug cases.
There’s multiple reasons why there is a War on Drugs. As much as I would hope there would be, there really are no magic wands to make the problem go away.
gwangung
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-: When it comes to some assholes trying to oppress me, I’m a’goin’ to be a fucking authoritarian, too.
(And no doubt I’ll be considered parochial or having a narrow interest.)
Mnemosyne
@Spectre:
Yep, there’s nothing more left-wing than being a complete isolationist who thinks that all foreign aid should be ended because it’s “worthless.” That’s why Pat Buchanan is recognized as one of the left’s foremost thinkers when it comes to foreign policy.
Spectre
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
Who the hell is apologizing besides you guys? I think both Paul AND Obama suck. They’re far too right wing.
It’s just amusing how you (correctly) tear down Paul, without realizing that it also further condemns Obama’s record of authoritarian policies.
FlipYrWhig
@Spectre: I don’t mind you saying that in your opinion Paul is “better” on these issues. That’s fine, knock yourself out. I mind a lot when you suggest that he is “more progressive” on them. Honestly it sounds more apropos to call you, Paul, and Greenwald all small-government libertarian-leaning conservatives who add to that different amounts of actual liberalism — then presume to lecture liberals about how they’re not as liberal as they ought to be. There’s a long history of conservative paranoia about jackbooted thugs taking away your liberties in the night. Maybe you, Glenn, and Ron can swap fantasies around an unlicensed libertarian campfire.
Spectre
@gwangung:
Who the hell is supporting Paul? Again, as Greenwald pre-empted:
“no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite.”
So that takes care of you. As for Paul being “on balance” more left-wing than Obama, that was never the claim (both are too right of center to make that discussion worthwhile).
The claim is that Paul has better positions on things like war, assassinations, drone campaigns, etc. Critical issues. The fact that Paul is a moron and can still do those bits better than Obama, is really bad for Obama. None of your lies, and attacks at writers can ever change that.
wilfred
378 comments and not one mention of Paul’s opposition to blind US support of Israel or Administration drumbeats for war against Iran.
Cydney
Did any of you actually read GG’s essay? He never, ever endorsed Ron Paul. All he wanted progressives to do is acknowledge that our guy, Obama, has committed many of the sins we wanted to hang Bush for and that Paul is the only candidate who challenges the hegemonic American empire and the drug war.
NO OTHER CANDIDATE ON EITHER SIDE IS AGAINST THE DRUG WAR.
NO OTHER CANDIDATE EVEN QUESTIONS THE ALLIANCE WITH ISRAEL OR THE NUCLEAR CHICKEN GAME WE’RE PLAYING WITH IRAN.
NO OTHER CANDIDATE CRITICIZES THE PATRIOT ACT OR THE INCREASED DRONE STRIKES OR OUR SECRET ENDLESS WARS.
Do you all understand that we live in a country that can’t even have a mainstream conversation about these issues? That every news outlet and major candidate takes it for granted that killing a shitload of Muslim civilians with drones is just “collateral damage”, that this massive secret security apparatus is necessary for security, and that the drug war is just?
I’m voting for Obama next year, but I have to acknowledge that in many ways, he’s actually WORSE than Bush. And the same progressives who when Bush was in office, wanted to end the Patriot Act, end drone strikes, close our secret prisons, etc. are the same ones who now refrain from criticizing a president and even praise a leader who is doing more and worse than Bush in these areas.
Obama isn’t demanding entry into my womb, but he’s just another motherfucker who wants to cut entitlements (though less insanely the the Repukes), ask the 99% to tighten our belts, accept the new security state, increase unchecked executive power and kill a shit ton of Muslims to boot. If any of you had any fucking honesty, you’d acknowledge that even while you voted for him.
Our guy isn’t the “good” guy. None of these people are the “good” guy. The last good guy was Jimmy Carter, and progressives treat him like our embarrassingly flatulent uncle farting at the family dinner.
gwangung
And the fact that he has poorer positions on such things as civil rights, environmental protection, the banking system, reproductive rights and consumer protection is irrelevant? Those are critical issues as well.
None of your prevarication and straw manning on issues can ever change that.
And note that this is not an ad hominem.
Spectre
@Mnemosyne:
That’s nice. What does that have to do with the claim that his policies in certain areas such as, assassinations, war, drone bombings, eavesdropping, etc, are better than Obama’s?
The fact that he’s a right wing toolbag just makes that a far more damning contrast for Obama.
gwangung
@Spectre:
Well, if you ignore all the other stuff that makes him a right wing toolbar, yeah.
You may not know your rhetorical terms, but you know your trolley well.
Spectre
@gwangung:
It’s relevant if one endorsed Paul over Obama. Greenwald didn’t.
What’s at issue is that such a reactionary is being contrasted with Obama, and in several areas Obama comes out badly.
So many liberals are either ignoring principle totally, or weigh X domestic polices over the deaths of many innocents. It merits honest reflection.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Spectre:
And as we’ve pointed out, repeatedly, is just how Paul has come to those positions on assassinations, drone campaigns, war, etc. None of which has anything to do with progressive values and everything to do with neo-Confederate states rights values.
FlipYrWhig
@Cydney: Anyone whose view begins and ends with the idea that the federal government should do, basically, nothing is going to blunder into taking many positions that make would-be progressives happy: basically, any area in which the federal government does things we don’t like, you can say we’d be better off doing nothing. The problem is that bracketing every other discussion of the rightful use of federal power, including those on which Paul is obscenely wrong and utterly antithetical to liberal means and ends, is hopelessly stupid. It’s like saying you like tax cuts but you also don’t like service cuts. Well, no shit, Sherlock. The discussion is how to balance the two.
Paul wants the federal government to get out of the business of some things. He then does a lot of handwaving about the states and private enterprise doing them instead. Does Greenwald like that? Presumably not. Does he talk about it? No. Why? Because it would collapse his willfully stupid thought experiment whereby he gets to pit his very favorite Paulisms against his very least favorite Obamaisms, then smirk about his own cleverness and principle.
Spectre
@gwangung:
Let’s use your own words here:
Paul is a right wing tool bag. We agree. We also agreed that Paul is, in contrast, better on war, assassinations, domestic spying, etc.
Implication: Something must be really fucking wrong with the priorities of the Obama administration if a moron like Ron Paul is better on them on a lot of these issues. See how that works? That’s how that works.
Mnemosyne
@Spectre:
Sure, if you want to cherry-pick from Paul’s actual foreign policy and only look at the parts that you like while ignoring what he’s actually saying, he looks pretty good compared to Obama. Heck, I can pull bits from Bush’s foreign policy and claim that he was to the left of Obama because his AIDS policy for Africa was in some ways better.
But trying to claim that the right-wing isolationist is right when he says that America needs to end all foreign involvement like wars and assassinations when his actual foreign policy plan is to end all foreign trade, close down the global economy, and stop humanitarian aid, which will as a byproduct end those wars and assassinations, just makes you look dishonest. His main FP goal is not to end war and assassinations — it’s to remove the US from the rest of the world and keep us as an isolated backwater. But, hey, it’s all good as long as you like the side effects and ignore the primary effects of Paul’s policies like the total collapse of the US economy.
Spectre
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
Which still is quite a way short of actually killing people. Which is what Obama is doing, among other things.
That a man with “neo-confederate” values can be better than Obama on these key issues, is absolutely sickening. For shame Obama.
slag
@Cydney:
Cut the crap: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705395124/Rocky-Anderson-forms-Justice-Party-plans-to-run-for-president.html.
What you’re really saying is that he’s the only C-list celebrity in the Republican Sur Reality show making these statements. Well, that and a buck fifty…
FlipYrWhig
@Spectre: All it shows is that the things you and Greenwald want to tag as crucial liberal principles are actually nothing of the sort. There’s no One True Liberal view on drones. Greenwald doesn’t like them, you don’t like them, Paul doesn’t like them. Congrats.. Maybe you’re all consistent right-wing libertarian isolationists.
Spectre
@Mnemosyne:
Oh the illiteracy, how it burns!
From Greenwald:
” no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite.”
Mnemosyne
@Spectre:
Paul’s policies would lead to the deaths of many innocents both here and abroad. But I guess you think the death of a Muslim child from dysentery or malaria that could have been prevented with humanitarian aid is A-OK since, after all, we didn’t kill them by bombing them.
Mnemosyne
@Spectre:
As I said, you love Paul as long as you can ignore his actual stances and the results of his actual policies and pretend that he only likes the things you do.
Pretending to take a lofty view where Obama’s policies lead to death and destruction while Paul’s policies lead to puppies and rainbows is not an honest position to take by either you or Greenwald.
FlipYrWhig
@Spectre: “I’m not expressing support for anyone! I’m just incessantly using my platform to defend him, minimize his horribleness, and mock anyone who challenges me for defending him! And I’ve done so in the past! That’s not ‘support’! Oh, incidentally, if you support Obama you’re a monster who supports everything about him and wants to kill sweet little babies and Bradley Manning.”
Spectre
@FlipYrWhig:
Actually that seems to have been the point a lot of us were making. A lot of partisan democrats simply have no principles at all.
He even linked to an article about how consistently liberalism can be inconsistent about set principles: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/matt-stoller-why-ron-paul-challenges-liberals.html
Do try to read next time.
Spectre
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s an ad hominem. Even if you think Greenwald actually does support Ron Paul (he doesn’t), his arguments at face DON’T.
So they must be addressed as such on their merits. Clearly you can’t, because his arguments are valid and sound. Keep throwing up smokescreens though, it’s amusing.
FlipYrWhig
@Spectre: No, you and Greenwald seem to think you’re liberals even though all of your most cherished views about executive power and civil liberties are at home on the paranoid fringe of the right, as for instance the John Birch Society, the militia/patriot movement, and this other crackpot with twenty years of bizarre newsletters who ran for president a few times.
Spectre
@Mnemosyne:
No one took that position. But I agree with you. Paul’s motivations, and almost all of his policies are bad.
Yet he still beats Obama on a lot of these outcomes! What does that say about Obama!
Also, this motivation thing is quite amusing. As if Obama were noble? His policies are a byproduct of wanting to maintain U.S. imperialism abroad, and economic hierarchy domestically, mixed with some naked self preservation. I wonder how that weighs on the scale.
That smell, it’s your standard again being exposed as sophist bullshit.
Spectre
@FlipYrWhig:
You do me great offense sir. I don’t think I’m a liberal. I just stated how most liberals are right wingers that will defend almost anything.
Notice how you returned it back to a conversation about the writers though! Oh the desperation, how it burns!
You’ve earned a re-post then of a question that controls:
““OKAY HE’S BETTER ON SOME STUFF LIKE WAR AND DOMESTIC STUFF, BUT HE’S ALSO A RACIST RIGHT WING REACTIONARY!!”
True. What does that say about Obama that such a guy can be to his left on various key issues?”
OzoneR
@wilfred:
He doesn’t want to end it for chrissakes, he wants to kick it to the states.
FlipYrWhig
@Spectre: You keep saying ad hominem when I think you mean non sequitur. Whatever. The point is that Greenwald is free to say he likes Paul’s views on a small set of questions. It’s pretty bogus to say after that that no views on any other questions are germane, but, fine, for the sake of argument, let’s do that too. Even so, Glenn Greenwald doesn’t get to lecture me on what liberals should believe. I don’t see any evidence that he’s a liberal, or that he thinks like a liberal, or that he has any knowledge of the traditions and canons of liberalism. Everything I see from him suggests instead that he’s a small government conservative with a lot of hangups about “liberty” _that truck very closely with right wing hangups about liberty_. So… Why should I take it as a sharp rebuke when one paranoiac small-government libertarian applauds the views of another paranoiac small-government libertarian? They’re two peas in a pod. Just keep that pod the fuck away from me.
OzoneR
@Keith G:
There are few things taxpayers don’t mind paying for- jailing pot-smoking hippies and minorities are one of them.
Get a clue.
OzoneR
@Spectre:
What does it say about you that you think his positions are too his “left?”
FlipYrWhig
@Spectre: It’s not The Left, for Christ’s sake. Paul’s views are more right wing paranoid libertarian than Obama’s. If you’re a right wing paranoid libertarian, I guess that means something. If you’re on the left, why should it matter? If Eli Manning says his favorite team is the Giants, does that feel particularly persuasive or even interesting to an Eagles fan?
Spectre
@FlipYrWhig:
Another ad hominem. Greenwald = wrong because (you allege) he is a “small government libertarian”. Yeah…that’s about as deep as you can go into the cesspool of illogical nonsense.
You aren’t addressing the arguments, because you can’t. Either that or you’re too dishonest.
Until it sinks in:
“no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite.”
and from me:
““OKAY HE’S BETTER ON SOME STUFF LIKE WAR AND DOMESTIC STUFF, BUT HE’S ALSO A RACIST RIGHT WING REACTIONARY!!”
True. What does that say about Obama that such a guy can be to his left on various key issues?”
What does it say about your candidate that a “paranoiac small-government conservative”, is better than him on these issues?
Emma
@Spectre: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on a donkey to Egypt. He’s not “to the left” of Obama. He SOUNDS to you like he is because you never bother to look beyond the wonderful news that he wants to stop all wars and let you all smoke weed in peace.
He wants to end all wars because he wants to end our involvement with other nations. It’s called isolationism. He would not only not fight wars; he would end all foreign aid, and I mean all, including those meant to keep disease under control. His BEST idea is to hire mercenaries to fight our wars — and if you think we’re not popular now, wait to see what happens when uncontrolled, for-profit, soldiers are acting in our name.
He wants to end the war on drugs at the federal level, not at the state level. That means that each state could act as they see fit. Say California wants to decriminalize drugs while Texas wants to use half of its police budget to go after major drug gangs, including throwing minors in jail for life for smoking one joint. All legal to Mr. Paul, because it’s the states’ business. And the whole “there won’t be any money” is wishful thinking. Since he would be fully eliminating half the government, there would be no need for the states to contribute anywhere near as much to the national welfare. Texas could raise state taxes as much as it liked and sweep up the cash that its citizens are not contributing to the federal government.
(edit) And I hope to God you don’t have daughters. A President Paul would turn them into walking incubators.
Can you get through your heads that context bloody matters in politics?
Spectre
@OzoneR:
Ad hominem. :Yawn: This has to be performance art on you people’s part at this point.
What’s at issue is not “me”, it’s that a reactionary like Paul is better on things like “don’t let the president assassinate U.S. citizens”. That’s downright shameful.
Spectre
@FlipYrWhig:
Now you’re reduced to lying. How humiliating for you. I never claimed Paul’s views were the left. Oh the illiteracy, how it burns! I claimed he was to the left of Obama- on some of these major issues
It’s true his views are right wing paranoid libertarian. On the issues in question, Obama’s views are manic right wing authoritarian.
What does that say about your candidate?
Spectre
@Emma:
Obama wants to interact with other nations and go to war because he wants to dominate them economically. It’s called imperialism.
Consistent is not you.
Spectre
@Emma:
Now you’ve really overextended yourself. Not only is this a large part of the status quo, but Obama is vastly escalating @ an unprecedented rate:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/15/counterinsurgency-outsourcing-americas-new-mercenaries-in-afghanistan-middle-east-africa.html?cid=hp:mainpromo2
What does it say about Obama that he would endorse should a moronic policy, advocated by others like the idiot Ron Paul?
Spectre
@Emma:
All legal under Mr. Obama too, the only difference being that he is also escalating the drug war on a federal level, and prevents the Californias from balancing out the Texas’s.
Furthermore, Paul openly advocates for legalization. Obama doesn’t. Despite being an admitted former coke user, he advocates prison sentences. For shame.
What does it say about your candidate that he’s more extreme than the right wing fool Ron Paul on this issue?
slag
@OzoneR:
Funniest comment I’ve read all night: It’s as if The Dukes of Hazzard never existed…. Sad. But true.
Odie Hugh Manatee
This Spectre quotes GG enough that I’m beginning to think it’s him.
Just because you quote someone who you think is right doesn’t mean they are right, it just shows that you know how to copy and paste.
Congrats on that. Enough already, we get too much GG here as it is.
Spectre
@Emma:
Until it sinks in:
“no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite.”
“Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?)”
You should really read his article before you spout opinions on it. It helps with coherency.
Spectre
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
People are using ad hominems and strawmen to claim that he said X, or thinks Y- as if it’s true/relevant.
So I’m posting what he actually said. The fact that people are attacking before reading, merely proves his point. A lot of people are instinctively defending Obama, not out of principle, but because they are democrat partisans.
Read his article before commenting on it. It will make you sound a lot more coherent. Also you didn’t address the arguments given. I wonder why that is?
FlipYrWhig
@Spectre: We can have a different discussion of whether it’s right or wrong to handle drug policy or terrorism policy the way Obama has, or the way Paul apparently promises to do (although as we’ve seen on issues like Guantanamo, sometimes Congress refuses to play ball anyway and throws sand in the gears). On these threads my issue is actually not that. It’s the rightness of whether any of these stands have anything to do with left and right. In my view, they don’t. And that knocks out one leg of Greenwald’s critique, which is that on some small set of issues Paul is “to the left” of Obama and that Obama fans refuse to see it because of reflexive partisanship. That’s total bullshit because skepticism of executive power is not a left-right issue. And in fact I would say that it is closer to being a right-wing issue.
So I’m actually fine with Greenwald liking Paul better than Obama on these hobbyhorses of his. I am not fine with this left-right nonsense, which is a game Greenwald likes to play.
Spectre
@FlipYrWhig:
“In your view”
Your view isn’t evidence, as you’ve already demonstrated that you’re either extremely dishonest, or cripplingly illogical.
Ad hominem. Whether Greenwald likes to “play” this or not, is irrelevant to the arguments at face. Which you’ve once again shamelessly dodged. So you get a repost:
“no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite.”
“Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?)”
““OKAY HE’S BETTER ON SOME STUFF LIKE WAR AND DOMESTIC STUFF, BUT HE’S ALSO A RACIST RIGHT WING REACTIONARY!!”
True. What does that say about Obama that such a guy can be to his left on various key issues?”
What does it say about your candidate that a “paranoiac small-government conservative”, is better than him on these issues?
FlipYrWhig
@Spectre: Cut and paste with another dance partner. I’ve wasted more than enough time trying to deal with you seriously.
Spectre
@FlipYrWhig:
I cut and paste @ you because you keep dodging arguments. What little you do post is just ad hominems and strawmen. You’re an apologist, and you’re getting called on it for once.
But of course, in your last post you’re trying to act like I’m being the abusive one. :lol: please.
T-R-A-N-S-P-A-R-E-N-T
Address the arguments, or save us all the time.
OzoneR
@Spectre:
No, it’s not, it’s not surprising and it’s not shameful. Paul has his reasons and they’re horrible reasons to support good positions.
If a candidate said he would push gay rights by jailing or killing religious opponents of LGBT rights, that doesn’t make him better on the issue- at all.
slag
@FlipYrWhig:
This is true. I can’t understand why civil libertarians aren’t running away from Ron Paul.
Could you imagine if prominent liberals started hugging Lyndon LaRouche just because he supports reinstating Glass-Steagal? We have enough credibility problems to deal with. No mas!
FlipYrWhig
@Spectre: You haven’t addressed dick. You’re trash talking and cutting and pasting Greenwaldian self-aggrandizing spew. And we’re done.
OzoneR
@slag:
Clearly you missed the nice lady who ran in the Texas 22nd district in 2010.
Admiral_Komack
@Baud:
Yes, please warn before linking to GG.
I don’t like my time wasted.
Fuck Glenn Greenwald!
slag
@OzoneR:
You’re right. And in the process proved my point. No one talks to you after pulling that kind of shit. It’s a cautionary tale.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Spectre:
You sure you wanna do this, sport? Because I’ll start breaking this shit down from the top.
Let’s see…Set up in the first couple of paragraphs and…BOOM! FALSE EQUIVALENCE!
Ya see, John Kerry came from money: His mother is a Forbes. He was aa elected official as a DA and then Lt. Gov. of MA when his wife, due to her own depression, requested a divorce in ’83. He ran for and won election to the US Senate in ’85, and married Teresa Heinz, whom ge’d known for 5 years, in ’95.
Got that?
John McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, didn’t grow up with a ton of money, but, ya know, upper-middle class. He married his first wife in 1965, and he asked her for a divorce in 1980, after meeting his future second wife in 1979. He’d never held elected office. Then, in 1982, he ran for and won his seat in the US House.
See the differences there? See the nuance? Kerry: Established pol for 10 years, divorced for 12 when he remarries; McCain: Divorces first wife months after meeting second, then runs for office.
See, this is how Greenwald operates by omission, creating a false equivalence. He attempts to mislead the reader into believing that both sides do the same thing. They don’t.
You want more? Because I’ve got more. Can you handle more?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Fuck it, you’re getting it anyway. GG’s next paragraph:
Just plain bullshit. No one on the progressive end of the spectrum demanded Kerry was better than Bush because Kerry had combat experience where Bush didn’t, or that Obama was superior to McCain because the former would be a fresh, energizing outsider bringing a much needed civilian viewpoint to the table rather than the stale old military viewpoint. No, in the first case, Bush had already gotten us entangled more deeply in Iraq than he said he would, and in the second case, McCain had not only been a protected fuck-up in the Navy (with two crashes and the USS Forrestal fire to his credit before he was shot down), but he’d also been taped singing Bomb, Bomb Iran.
False equivalence #2. In setting this up as a Both-Sides-Do-It argument, GG fails miserably, batting 0-2, both weak grounders to 2nd.
More?
AA+ Bonds
@FlipYrWhig:
I’d say for about half of them, Tex, it ain’t.
This is one of those things where you want to check Pew Research on the last few elections before shooting your mouth off.
Or abandon the Catholic vote to the Republicans, a vote you can easily win, sure, go ahead and do that instead.
Yutsano
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Please roll on. I really want this 500+ comments by morning. :)
FlipYrWhig
@AA+ Bonds: Um, good, because by the terms of my analogy Greenwald is falsely promoting something to a core ideological principle when it isn’t.
Triassic Sands
I’ve agreed with a lot of what Greenwald has said in the past, but this wasn’t a very good column. According to Glenn, apparently none (or most) of the people I know and associate with don’t even exist, because Glenn doesn’t think “progressives” can’t admit that Obama is a lesser evil.
Greenwald gives an extensive list of Obama’s failings, and I have no trouble recognizing and accepting his list. I don’t even see how an intellectually honest person could deny those failings — they’re real. And they’re very serious. So serious that I don’t think Obama deserves to be re-elected.
But I’m going to vote for Obama without hesitation. I won’t be happy about it; in fact, it will be the most unpleasant vote I’ve ever cast. But the alternative is so bad — what I consider an imminent existential threat to this country and what little is left of its positive values and qualities — that I even hesitate to vote for Obama.
The United States may or may not be a marginally better place than it was in 2000. It is somewhat better than when George Bush was in office, but Obama’s worst failings, in my opinion, are those that follow the worst failings of Bush. His signing statement aside, Obama’s human rights record is dreadful. I don’t expect that to change in the next five years (should Obama win re-election). Of course, if a Republican is in office — and it’s not going to be Ron Paul — our human rights record will almost certainly be much worse after a Republican administration than after four additional years of Obama. So, Obama’s worst failings are no help to the GOP when I consider how to vote.
What makes it relatively easy to vote for Obama is what I expect of him — almost nothing. As far as I’m concerned his only job between 2013 and 2016 is to prevent a Republican Congress from trashing the country. All that requires will be a few vetoes (or maybe a lot of vetoes) and enough House or Senate Democrats to prevent overrides. I don’t expect Obama to champion a bunch of progressive causes; he’s not a progressive and fighting for things (other than being elected and re-elected perhaps) doesn’t seem to matter much to the president. If the House and Senate are both under Republican leadership (likely, if not inevitable), then it’s hard for me to imagine any legislation that I will support. Because he won’t want to appear to be obstructionist, Obama will probably sign some pretty horrible legislation, but on the big issues (especially the social safety net) I hope that Obama will prevent utter destruction.
I’m not interested in fighting or arguing about Obama. His record is out there for people to see and I think Greenwald does a reasonably good job of characterizing it. If someone disagrees, fine. There’s no point in engaging in an argument, however, because I’m going to vote for Obama, and a chorus of apologists trying to pretend his record is better than it is will neither persuade me they’re right nor change the way I’ll vote, which is something they don’t want to do anyway.
I thought 2008 was the most important election of my life (my eleventh presidential vote), because getting the GOP out of the White House was mandatory. I didn’t expect much of Obama, but he was easily better than McCain. This year, the stakes are just as high, in fact, even higher, since the threat seems so much more imminent given the likelihood that Republicans take the Senate and hold the House. And this year, I have no doubt that in voting for Obama I’m voting for an “evil.” I would love to have a viable alternative, at least one other than giving up and passively allowing the Republicans to turn this into their own private Hell! But we’ve got a two-party system with two corrupt parties, one of which is bat shit crazy. The choice may be unpleasant, but it’s definitely an easy one.
A Humble Lurker
The thing about Ron Paul is you can’t only take the good, because the good and bad are connected. Paul thinks the (federal) drug war is bad for the same reason he thinks the Civil Rights act is bad. Both ideas come from the same core.
magurakurin
Over 400 posts and the Greenwald lickspittles have said nothing about the fact that the great defender of of the Republic…doesn’t vote.
What really is the proposal if representative democracy is a no go? If voting has no particular value, what the fuck is the point at all? Why bother writing a political blog unless the only purpose of it is to get people worked up in a frenzy to drive up your page hits and keep the checks rolling in from the Salon Corporation?
Not once have a heard a genuine proposal on how to fix things from Greenwald or any of his supporters that wouldn’t somehow need a strong voting block. Yet, votes don’t matter? Election don’t matter? Whoever wins is the same or only so marginally different as to be of no particular importance?
Fuck Glen Greenwald.
(keep on trucking for 500…)
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Next paragraph:
More bullshit, in which GG would have the reader believe that there only exist two points of view, when, of course, there are Libertarian Doves, Republican Hawks, Democratic Hawks, Democratic Doves who didn’t support the invasion but favor a longer, more careful withdrawal, Democratic Doves who didn’t support the invasion but favor quicker withdrawal, Leftist Doves who want ’em all back NOW, and Lefty Hawks like Hitchens, with long established stances against despotism, who favored nation-building efforts so that the future despots couldn’t raise their heads above ground…..And, ya know, a lot of in between and surrounding those…But for GG and his cult it’s boiled down to fer it or agin’ it. So anyone who ain’t agin’ it like GG is agin’ it is fer it, thus just as bad as Obomber, who’s just as bad as Shrub and Darth Cheney.
This continues in his ironic following paragraph, where he accuses those against him of embracing a, “…with-us-or-against-us mentality…,” and he drops this irony without a hint of a sense of self-awareness.
But it’s in the former of the two paragraphs where the real irony occurs. Where Greenwald chastises what he falsely perceives (giving him the benefit of the doubt that it’s a problem with perception) as over-simplification, of black-and-white thinking, it’s GG himself who is starting to polarize the thinking on Paul: That there is Paul, the dove, who is a wholly separate entity from Paul the states’ rights advocate, the deregulator. Therein lies the true fallacy: That you can go to the mall and Build-a-Candidate, when, in fact, you cannot. You can no more discuss Paul by components than you can discuss any other candidate in that manner. Stupor Mundi was much more than the wars in Asia- he was also the guy who pushed for NCLB, shitty Medicare reform, shitty environmental deregulation, etc.; Obama is more than the guy who didn’t get out of Asia quick enough, but the guy who got Congress to pass Lily Ledbetter and the repeal of DADT, but also the guy whose seemingly weak negotiating skills cost us the public option.
See what I’m on about here? Shorter me: You can’t accuse anyone of playing unfair by bringing up Paul’s less savory stances, because, on their own, they’re deal-killers. They aren’t ginned-up, they’re the bigger and uglier rogue elephant in the room that also contains the cute puppy you would like everyone to notice. And I, for one, don’t want to be trampled by that elephant just because you and GG insist I go in that room to pet the fucking puppy.
dance around in your bones
Oh Gawd,
Do I REALLY have to read a 400+ thread? Maybe tomorrow.
Larry the Greek
If Paul had saved us from exploding Ford Pintos I might be willing to take a second look.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Yutsano:
In the nicest way I can possibly say it: Unless you’re willing to contribute more than a couple of two-graph-per-comment/one-sentence-per-graph comments, you can fuck straight off, kibitzer!
I keeeeeed already! :P
Until the Paul swarms began again in earnest, the last time I put so much energy into one thread anywhere was here. And that was a lot more fun.
ETA: Happy New Year, bud!
Cydney
@FlipYrWhig:
At any point in my did I claim that Ron Paul was a viable candidate? No, I didn’t. His positions are not progressive and not based on progressive principles. I would not want RP to be my president, but like Kucinich and Sharpton, he’s one of the few people who is saying something *different*, who isn’t a part of the pro-war, pro-moneyed interest, pro-drug war, anti-civil liberties echo chamber of acceptable opinion.
I disagree with RP, but his opinions make me think and help me understand why Libertarianism is not beneficial to society. RP’s positions might at least get people to start re-thinking our alliance with Israel, the reflexive anti-Iran war mongering, the drug war, etc. even if the foundations of his positions are bullshit.
Somebody needs to be the shit-stirrer.
FlipYrWhig
Basically, to paint it in the best possible light, Greenwald’s point is that not enough people engaged in politics want to discuss civil liberties and executive power in ways he deems appropriate and with the urgency he finds essential. Maybe the reason has something to do with the fact that every libertarian is a bullying, accusatory, purist, would-be know-it-all above-it-all douchenozzle, which puts what you might call a “natural cap” on their ideology’s appeal.
More to the point…
ISTM he wants to say, wouldn’t it be great if someone was a libertarian on his pet issues and also a liberal on other issues, because that would totally rock. Hypothetically, it would. In actuality, politics is transacted through the kinds of people who devote their lives to it, which winnows the field. And pining for Candidate Messiah, or, more to the point, spending time demanding that supporters of non-Messiah candidates prostrate themselves in abjection for their many failings, is purposeless. You don’t vote for principles untethered to candidates. You vote for candidates, preferably for the one that best matches up with what you find important. The one who matches up with your opinions in every respect… that person ain’t coming. Suck it up.
FlipYrWhig
@Cydney: I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Ron Paul is not against “moneyed interests.” He didn’t like the bank bailouts because it was out of bounds for the government to intervene in markets, not because it enriched banks. He has no problem with rich bankers or banks. He doesn’t believe in regulation, including financial. That would be a bonanza for bankers.
ETA: But, overall, I think it’s fine to say that Paul stirs the shit a different direction. I just don’t think that there’s anything progressive about it, or anything that it teaches Democrats or liberals (or, as Greenwald would have it, that shames them into taking stock of their own views).
Sly
Saying that Ron Paul is “to the left” of Barack Obama on any issue demonstrates a level of political naivete that is truly awe-inspiring to behold. Each and every one of Ron Paul’s political positions stems from his sincere belief that the modern state – or every development in institutional political power since the Civil War – should be completely destroyed. One outcome of that is that we go to war (somewhat) less. Much in the same way that one outcome of swallowing a liter of strychnine is that you won’t have to concern yourself with the perils of heart disease as much as you previously did.
Plus, I like how this surreptitious Ron Paul support (no wait it isn’t support!) is coming in the “I’m just putting the issue out there!” format that is the favorite of conspiracy kooks, political frauds, and congenital liars.
gerry
Yay John! You are starting to get the hang of it. I’m shocked at Lemieux’s take. Could Greenwald have called it any more clearly?
Pat In Massachusetts
I guess it’s because I’m dead against killing teenagers with Drones because their dad may or may not have been a terrorist sympathizer, even though our Leader decided ON HIS OWN that he surely was.
That’s why Obama sucks and the thought of voting for him again makes me want to throw up.
It’s as simple as that.
Free Bradley Manning.
Darkrose
@Spectre:
Uh, no, we didn’t. I don’t think deputizing privateers counts as being “better” on assassinations.
Paul begins and ends with “the Federal government has no legitimacy”. I can’t buy that any of his positions are “better” than Obama’s because I reject the central premise of his arguments.
Quiddity
FireDogLake has a lot of posts that piss me off, Stormfront takes the opposite position, but I still think that FireDogLake is a far better website than Stormfront. Why is that so hard to understand?
John’s use of a strawman is a classic example of how a cult operates.
Cydney
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s fair. I just don’t understand why people around here are going apeshit. It seems to me that GG has a point about progressive hypocrisy.
Emma
@Spectre:You know, for all the “progressive left” complains about the rigidity of conservatives they are wonderful at setting up a black and white universe of their own.
Imperialism bad =/= isolationism good. It has nothing to do with consistency. It has to do with seeing the world as it is, not as I would like it to be. The United States is enmeshed in a large number of sociopolitical and economic relationships. Their collapse would be a disaster.
Emma
@Spectre: Got it. It’s really is all about the pot. Bored now.
Emma
@Spectre: It says that he lousy at this issue. It doesn’t change the fact that enacting Paul’s agenda would put this country back in the 1890s. Thanks but not thanks.
Emma
@Spectre: Then why are you fighting so hard for him? Because IN THE REAL WORLD a Paul presidency would be a disaster. Oh, wait. You constituted yourself the contrarian-at-large for this thread, right?
kay
Ron Paul is now connecting the Civil Rights Act to the Patriot Act on grounds of federal intervention and “privacy”.
Which is consistent with hard Right libertarians,like Barry Goldwater.
Ron Paul himself is making Flipywigs argument.
Ron Paul himself is outlining the difference between liberals and libertarians.
All of thepeople insisting Ron Paul shares “progressive” views on state power should stop reading GG on Ron Paul and start reading Ron Paul on Ron Paul.
Greenwald is wrong. I know that because I read Ron Paul.
El Tiburon
@Cydney:
You must be new to the neighborhood. Mention Glenn Greenwald or Jane Hamsher and the batshit irrationality flies like a gaggle of geese heading south for the winter.
Because you see, Greenwald talks to much and he never admits when he is wrong and ABL and Grover Norquist. Saying at least the Nazis had the trains running on time means you are pro-concentration camp. The Romans gave us running water means you nailed Christ up on the cross.
El Tiburon
@Cydney:
Why do you hate all black people?
El Tiburon
@eemom:
Oh, like this part:
But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm. The president’s 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street “reform” package – tepid and inadequate though they were – are genuinely at odds with rightwing dogma, as are Obama’s progressive (albeit inconsistent) positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and protecting a woman’s right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the outcome of the 2012 election.
Or the part where he quotes Paul Krugman?
No, tell me specifically where Greenwald is wrong.
Is it this part:
But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush’s terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?
Please tell me specifically where in this paragraph the error is, okay?
El Tiburon
@Chuck Butcher:
Are you arguing with yourself? You are the one who stated innocent people are going to die in war and that’s the way it is, like in WWII now the Revolutionary War. I’m saying whereas those wars may have had legitimate merits – and thusly the civilian deaths were a part of it; the Iraq War had NO legitimacy and therefore no civilian deaths (or soldier deaths) are warranted and are murder. Fuck it, you are a moron.
El Tiburon
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
As a progressive, do you like to hear talk about ending the War on Drugs or the War on Muslims?
Do you? If you do, then name the only presidential candidate to be talking about these issues.
And for the millionth and one time: nobody is endorsing the lunatic. Why can’t you simpletons digest this concept in the grey matter that obviously is a waste of space inside your head?
El Tiburon
@Wannabe Speechwriter:
Ha ha that’s funny. Oh man. Yeah.
@FlipYrWhig:
Well, you know I really don’t consider being a vegan an important issue to progessives on the level of the War on Drugs. But I’ll play your sill game: If Santorum wanted to promote being a vegan and Obama wanted to continue Bush’s policy of jailing vegans, then I’d say Santorum was better than Obama on this issue, but that Santorum is a repulsive prick, I could not endorse him for President and would have to vote for Obama. And if the BJ idiots wanted to dump on me for that sentiment, that is their problem not mine
.@Darkrose:
It is stunning how fucking stupid all of you are. Is it really so goddamn hard for you to get this concept. For the billionth time, and listen real good okay: Ron Paul is a repulsive racist. I’m from south Texas. I know men like him. Believe me, I know of what I speak. I don’t think he is awesome. I think he is REPULSIVE. But on certain major issues that mean a lot to me personally, such as the War on Drugs, etc. he is the ONLY candidate talking about them. And therefore we need to listen and amplify it so it will ge the other candidates to listen to him. Can you understand this concept, or is it too difficult for you? You know I hate poison, I really do. But if poison in the form of chemotherapy is the only way to keep a loved one alive, then I say go for it! Do I think poison is teh Awesome! Fuck fuck fuck.
You know if Bill Moyers were running for President, I am sure Greenwald would be talking about him in the same way.
@OzoneR:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/15/1032527/-Saluting-WikiLeaks-As-%28Most%29-US-Troops-Leave-Iraq
@Mnemosyne:
But here’s the thing: HE IS NOT SAYING THOSE WORDS. So he is not coming from any position, much less a liberal one. So you see the pickle we are in: Accept the status quo where NOBODY talks about these issues except how to make more war on Muslims and minorities, or listen to someone like Ron Paul and amplify his message. Do you get it now?
kay
What’s interesting is this same issue, “progressive” vs “libertarian” views on the basis of federal power came up in RAND Paul’s Senate race.
Rand’s opponent made the argument that Rand (like all libertarians) believes the modern (post FDR) interpretation of the commerce clause is UNLAWFUL
Would have been a great debate for liberal vs libertarian, because the commerce clause is the crux of the whole difference, but Rand dodged it.
nastybrutishntall
@Nellcote: YES YES YES. Thanks for that link. Brilliant.
jayackroyd
@nastybrutishntall:
The central claim in that post is that everything the president has done to erode US civil liberties and to kill people on his own say-so, accepting the death of innocents in the process, is based on the threat posed by al qaeda.
Do you really believe that al qaeda is a threat that justifies these actions?
The Raven
“Obama has done a lot of those things that piss me off, Paul has opposed them, and I still think that Obama is a far better choice than Paul.”
It is better to have pneumonia than cancer.
Croak!
So far as I can tell, progressives say that Paul’s positions on war and civil rights are better than Obama’s only because they have not carefully examined Paul’s positions. Yes, he wants to end US imperialism but he wants to accomplish this in a way that would lead to foreign wars and domestic unrest. Yes, he wants to end Federal civil rights abuses, but by allowing state civil rights abuses.
It is, in this light, difficult to see why any progressive would support Paul: everything he advocates, including those policies apparently attractive to progressives, is poison.
As for Obama, I may vote for him, but I do not have the heart to work for any centrist candidate. That is the real problem here: progressives have been the foot-soldiers of the Democratic Party for 50 years. As it becomes clear that the Democratic Party is now dominated by the centrists, fewer and fewer progressives are willing to come out and march for the party. Energetic young progressive activists are much more likely to involve themselves with Occupy, which looks more and more like a nascent national party.
But, meantime, are we willing to risk President Romney? Or worse, President Paul?
El Tiburon
@jayackroyd:
This is basically the reply I wrote on that smarty pants blog. What a bunch of pretentious boot lockers over there. Worse than over here.
Sly
@El Tiburon:
Not when its couched in a ruinous ideology, no.
What you fail to realize is that Ron Paul does not endorse any of your policy positions. At all. None of them. As an addendum to this, you do not realize that having Ron Paul “in the discussion” does not advance your preferred policy positions by one iota. Greenwald doesn’t realize these things because he’s a shallow thinker. He attempts to hide this shallowness underneath a thick varnish of pointless sanctimony, much in the same way that Tom Friedman tries to mask his shallowness behind layers of mixed metaphors and David Brooks behind clumsily decontextualized historical figures, but it has gotten very, very old.
It’s lazy, it’s boring, and it’s stupid. Just like all the dipshit leftists who are reduced to pimping Ron Paul because “Hey, he says some things that make sense!” and “He’s bringing the important issues into the discussion!”
jayackroyd
@The Raven
Links, please? That’s certainly not true of Glenn’s post.
And, FWIW, my post on the subject: http://kroydblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/ron-paul.html
jayackroyd
@Sly:
How about the converse? Do you endorse forever wars on drugs and muslims if they are couched in a “progressive” ideology? That’s essentially what Stoller asks in his piece.
Larv
@micah616:
Love the shorter. That’s pretty much why I stopped reading GG. Aside from the exhausting verbosity, his posts always have a very lawyerly feel, like he’s taken on a new client named “Civil Liberties” and his duty as a lawyer is to act as an advocate for his client. Unfortunately, the job of the lawyer-as-advocate is frequently to be a bullshit artist, and that doesn’t mix well with GG’s lack of pithiness. It sucks to climb all the way up Mt. Prolix only to find a pile of crap at the top.
FlipYrWhig
@Sly: It’s kind of like saying that you want the Amish candidate to win so that we can have a conversation about energy conservation, and anyone who doesn’t agree isn’t a real and thoughtful environmentalist, and anyone who brings up any other aspect of Amish-ness is just obfuscating.
jayackroyd
@FlipYrWhig:
Who has said they want Paul to win?
FlipYrWhig
@jayackroyd: Fine, it’s like saying the Amish candidate is “fascinating” and a great boon to the national political discussion because he has something to say about the environment. No, he doesn’t have something to say about the environment, he just utterly rejects electricity.
kay
I think this is a great, great conversation for liberals to have.
I think a real debate over the difference between liberals and libertarians is LONG overdue, just like the debate overthe differences between liberals and DEMOCRATS was long overdue, but we had that one, in the “obots” vs “Firebagger” wars.
This goes back to Barry Goldwater, and it’s time to look at it again.
It is much, much bigger than “red vs blue cagematch”.
It’s bed rock beliefs, and I think liberals have the better arguments.
I think it will end up being worthwhile, if we stay away from getting bogged down in any one pundit/editorialist views, and just look at Paul’s actual statements and work.
The Raven
@jayackroyd:
Anti-Paul progressives are angry with Paul because he is co-opting their rhetoric. Despite all claims to the contrary, Stalin was never a friend to the working class and right-wing libertarianism was never about freedom. In like manner, Paul is not for peace, nor civil rights.
GG is falling right into Paul’s rhetorical trap, as are surprisingly many net.progressives. I’ve had many discussions with where it was clear they just didn’t know what Paul stood for: they were listening to the soundbites, rather than reading the whole platform.
We run a real risk of enacting superfically anti-imperialist and pro-civil-rights policies that are actually isolationist and states rights policies. Times are unsettled and many people are willing to try anything. I’m getting in on the ground floor of the opposition to Paulism.
kay
It’s beautiful, because Barry Goldwater made Ron Paul’s “privacy” argument on the Civil Rights Act.
Paul is taking it one step further, Paul says (today) that the Civil Rights Act led to the Patriot Act, but it’s Goldwater’s argument.
Ron Paul is making the case all by himself. He’s telling us,every day, that his views are not progressive.
FlipYrWhig
@The Raven: I have a similar sense but I actually wouldn’t say that _Paul_ is co-opting anyone’s progressive rhetoric. Paul-curious civil libertarians are spontaneously translating Paul’s rhetoric into progressive rhetoric, and would-be progs are falling for that.
Larv
@The Raven:
I sympathize with this, but is that really a problem of the Democrats or is it just a structural result of a two-party system? On the other side of the aisle social cons have been the foot-soldiers of the Republican party, but I’m not sure they have very much to show for it either.
Isn’t the problem that both parties have an incentive to favor the center, in that centrist votes will always be more valuable than votes from farther toward the poles because centrist votes are swing votes? Progressives may not vote for Obama, but they’re probably not going to vote for his opponent (while a centrist swing voter likely will).
As long as there are a lot of centrist votes out there, it makes political sense to put off your base and court the middle. If your job is to win elections, I don’t see how you ignore that. The problem is that the center in this country is huge, largely apathetic and easily swayed by advertising (particularly of the negative sort). I’m not sure what the Dems can do about that. The ugly truth is that our electorate kind of sucks.
Admiral_Komack
@magurakurin:
Greenwald and his ilk don’t do solutions; they’d rather whine and bitch.
FlipYrWhig
@kay: IMHO there are a lot of people who frequent liberal blogs who care quite a lot about the “privacy” set of issues and cultivate a “leave me alone” attitude about authority. I’m not trying to deny that those are important, but I think they’re a lot less important than other matters of protecting and assisting the vulnerable, which is more of the “bleeding heart liberal” tradition. For someone as far removed from bleeding-heart liberalism as Paul to get praise, even targeted and qualified praise, from would-be liberals just turns my stomach. It really does verge on The Big Lebowski’s “at least it’s an ethos” line.
Gus diZerega
@Larv: I am not so sure there are so many centrist votes- depends on how polls are worded. But I am sure that the two party oligopoly ensures Progressives get very few opportunities and oligarchs control the better part of both parties. What we get are choices between two kinds of oligarchs.
There is a possible solution and I have seen very few Progressives astute enough to support it: state initiatives installing majority vote elections. THAT would at least make third parties potentially viable because you would not help the party you hate most by voting for a third party.
The alternative – campaign finance reform – is a pipe dream under current conditions, but an initiative is not if Progressives and others dissatisfied with two parties had the energy to go for it.
El Tiburon
@Sly:
Such a deep, deep thinker you are.
Pointless sanctimony Wow, in just two words you are able to load up so much bullshit. All of you Deep Thinkers are so concerned about the origins and ideology behind all of these positions. Ron Paul’s underlying motives and ideology are moot when it comes to bringing to the table the issues at hand. Because no one is talking about supporting Ron Paul. Even Thom Friedmann writes a decent column twice a year.
When will you realize we are not fighting your fight about Ron Paul. We are fighting the fight against the disastrous policies of both parties: War on Drugs, War on Muslims, etc.
If I have to get to Pittsburgh for an emergency surgery to save my life by end of week, I don’t care to hear the difference between the mechanics and politics of train travel vs. flying vs. the car. I just need to get there.
What Obama has proven, especially to those of us who believed in his Hope and Change, is that there is no Hope and Change by continuing on with politics as usual. Because neither party is willing to discuss really changing that which is so disastrous. It is a shame that the only person discussing some of these issues is Ron Paul. But he is.
So to simply dismiss him as a loon and a crank and thereby negating his stance on this issues does a disservice to the national discourse. His racism and stances on other topics does not concern me because I don’t see him as a viable candidate for President. He can be contained, IMHO.
El Tiburon
@Admiral_Komack:
As you whine and bitch.
kay
Flip, I think your arguments have been great.
I agree with Raven, though.
I think libertarians co-opt liberal positions all the time.
I don’t know why liberals let them do it, because liberals have a much better RECORD of tangible success than libertarians do.
Libertarians got nothing but theory.
Barry Goldwater led to Ronald Reagan.
That’s what happened.
Benjamin Franklin
@FlipYrWhig:
If it is praise, it’s the faint praise of equivalence. No, I don’t think anyone is propounding that Paul makes a better candidate. But is is rather odd that he
seems more progressive than Obama on one or two issues.
And this is a lot like 1964, only the ‘mushroom cloud’ is being produced with the oppositions money.
And it’s a lot crazier.
Admiral_Komack
@El Tiburon:
Nope.
Just telling you what they do.
If you don’t like it, tough.
eemom
@kay:
I agree, but sadly we are not having it. The actual subject has been lost in the miasma of Greenwald and Ron Paul, neither of whom, imo, has a principled bone in his body of either the liberal or the libertarian persuasion.
On the positive side, the ultimate significance of Ron Paul in the real world is somewhere around one ten-zillionth of the attention he has received on this thread, and Greenwald’s is even less.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@El Tiburon:
And the problem with understanding this concept, as we’ve explained repeatedly, is why do we want to amplify a message of ‘states rights’? Because that is the message Paul is preaching – not anything progressive about the war on drugs or indefinite containment.
The ends do not justify the means.
EDIT: And I’ll go one further that pushing Paul because he’s the ‘ONLY’ candidate speaking on these topics reeks of the wrong sort of desperation. Especially when Gary Johnson’s been standing over there all along wondering when he’s going to get his own blimp.
JR in WVa
@Spectre: Frankly, I suspect President Obama wanted to do “our best” to leave Iraq after getting closer to leaving a stable democracy behind, and knew that it would take longer. We can argue about whether it is possible to leave behind a stable democracy anywhere in the middle east; I personally think it is not possible no matter how long we work on the problem.
For what it is worth, I opposed the War on Terror from the git-go, believing that the FBI/law enforcement approach to law-breakers would work out best long term. I managed to make arguments to this effect with my boss, a retired military Republican without getting fired/demoted.
That being said, there were certainly justifications for going into Afganistan as Bush did. I admit to being surprised at how well the CIA/Northern Warlords did against the Taliban-controlled central government, and only regret that Bush managed to FU getting the terrorists in question in that stage of that war.
El Tiburon is a troll, nothing more, and ranting about him is a waste of finger-waving. Sherrif is a Ni, I’m mostly with you, but it’s time to give it a rest, the troll is already about to burst with overfeeding.
GG was interesting for about a month back in 2002, when blogging was invented. I haven’t been to Salon in a year or so, they have nothing to say (outside that guy who writes about professional pilots).
My biggest gripe with the President is his lack of work to protect personal liberties and his willingness to let torturers go unpunished, which may be intertwined problems.
My biggest problem with Republicans is that they no longer care a whit for the USA, and are totally in the game for what they can get out of it in terms of money and power. They don’t deserve a single vote from anyone who is a patriotic American. Their average voters are total dupes who want to help the country out but who are too dumb to know how to do that.
Happy New Year, all. You too, John!
kay
@eemom:
I think it’s been pretty good. It would be better (IMO) if the springboard weren’t GG, because that whole thing is so distracting, but I’ve been reading the threads and I think it’s good to hash it out.
Part of the reason libertarians are able to co-opt liberal positions is because (I believe) liberals haven’t given enough thought to what their positions ARE, and I absolutely include myself in that. I think liberals left an opening there, and “libertarian” can, on the surface, look like a good fit for that space, so libertarians rush in.
The truth is liberals disagree on US intervention overseas, and both sides have good faith arguments. I think we saw that w/Libya. That’s not true of non-interventionist libertarians like Ron Paul.
Ron Paul would never, ever make a humanitarian intervention argument, but liberals make those all the time, on both domestic and foreign policy. Not all liberals, but plenty, and they’re still liberals.
So I think these discussions are worthwhile, in the same way that I (eventually) thought Obots vs Firebaggers had value, underneath all the screaming, because what we were really arguing about was “what is a Democrat?” and “what is a liberal?”
I don’t think we (liberals or Democrats) do enough of that.
Conservatives and libertarians do endless rounds of navel gazing, and then, oddly, LIBERALS also do endless rounds of discussions on conservatism and libertarianism. What liberals DON’T do (enough) is discuss…liberals.
What do we believe? Screw Sullivan and the rest of the conservatives, and their opinions on liberals.
What do we, as liberals, believe?
I’d like to define ourselves, rather than leaving that job to libertarians and conservatives.
wrb
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
nicely done
kay
@El Tiburon:
I don’t think it’s your message. Paul’s is an anti-intervention message, but it isn’t a liberal anti-intervention message.
A lot of liberals object to the mandate in the health care law. Libertarians and conservatives also object to the mandate in the health care law, but they are suing on the commerce clause.
Liberals don’t want to make a commerce clause argument on the mandate in the health care law, because the entire House that FDR Built, the constitutional foundation for that, is the (modern, liberal) interpretation of the commerce clause.
Liberals can’t go that way. They have to argue something else. There’s a good, broad liberal argument against the mandate in the health care law, but it isn’t the commerce clause, because if the commerce clause is dramatically narrowed, The House That FDR (and later, LBJ-civil rights) built falls down.
I think you have to watch where you’re going. If you build your argument on a libertarian foundation, that is going to come back and bite you in the ass.
FlipYrWhig
@JR in WVa: Nah, El Tiburon isn’t a troll (or a shark), s/he actually believes what s/he’s saying and listens to counterarguments before dismissing them. There’s a difference between trolling and being dug in. Now, Spectre was trolling. You can tell by the taunting and repetitiveness.
Crusty Dem
For Cole:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfeVF9QjHlQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player
FlipYrWhig
@kay: Agreed. If you elevate individual liberty to a cardinal political position, a lot of dire things are going to come along for the ride, including the federal government’s inability to regulate economic activity and to enforce equal treatment. I don’t want legalized weed _that_ badly.
FlipYrWhig
@kay: Now, OTOH, I think there’s some merit to the notion that we should think about what we want and how to get it _first_, rather than trying to join an ideological team and adopt all its positions in a “seamless garment” way. So, sure, less war, less prosecution for nonviolent drug users, great. Where the rubber hits the road is when you realize that a lot of your allies on those issues are crackpots on just about everything else you care about, and that might not evince your inconsistency (as Greenwald would have it) but their foolish consistency.
Benjamin Franklin
@kay:
@kay:
I think the same can be said of conservatives and libertarians. You can’t pigeon-hole individuals as strictly as we would like for discussion purposes. People have diverse views within each group. But you can break it down, albeit with a simplism:
Property before People? That’s concrete conservatism. Libertarians are all over the map on that issue, liberals populate the reverse of that idea.
Unfortunately, a lot of folks hide behind label as though they reject the bad PR and the critique it isnpires. They espouse a more politically correct pov, while secretly embracing the hard line. Liberals (when the derogation reached peak) called themselves ‘moderates’ to deflect the critique. Now, conservatives hide behind ‘libertarian’ in much the same way.
That’s the hell of it. You can’t always assume a position taken is the static, accepted trope of that category. But we do it all the time.
kay
@FlipYrWhig:
Right. Ron Paul doesn’t believe the drug war is imoral. Ron Paul believes the drug war (federal) is unlawful. Extra-constitutional. Outside the law. He also believes that about regulating economic activity at the federal level.
He doesn’t care what the results are (although he believes, all evidence to the contrary, that it will be JUST FINE) because it doesn’t matter. It’s against the law!
We’ve already run into this contradiction, in California. The federal government is enforcing federal law in California, re: medical marijuana. We don’t want that. But we DO want the federal government to regulate health insurance and a SHIT LOAD of other things in California and everywhere else, including, presumably, federal criminal statutes, right?
So we have to watch where we’re going, and not make a libertarian argument on federal drug law, because that’s going to bite us in the ass almost immediately, because it’s incoherent and inconsistent.
kay
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s because you’re a liberal Democrat.
You’re already looking for loopholes :)
I get it, because I am one. But. I do get tired of ONLY looking at liberals through the lens of how liberals ARE NOT conservatives and libertarians. It’s like we can’t have a discussion without a conservative or libertarian, in a sense, leading it.
It seems somehow wrong to me. It seems, honestly, to give liberals short-shrift. Liberals are something more than NOT conservatives or libertarians.
FlipYrWhig
@kay: That’s why I think I would say, trying to be generous, that Paul is a potential ally in Congress for any effort to rein in the war on drugs. There, liberals of the bleeding-heart variety can join up with liberals and libertarians of the privacy/civil liberties persuasion and form a reformist coalition that is ideologically heterodox. But I really don’t think radical skepticism about executive power suits the executive branch.
nastybrutishntall
@jayackroyd: as opposed to? or, in other words, do you think Al-Qaeda is *not* worth fighting? do you think the fact that they have basically disappeared from the whole “bombing the West” campaign in the past two years is coincidence? or that it has nothing to do with our Commander-in-Chief degrading their capabilities in the targeted way he said he would?
If you were Obama, would you twiddle your thumbs for a few years in the hopes all those mean people would just leave us alone? Really?
Gus diZerega
@eemom: As a former libertarian I have an insight to add that might be useful.
Libertarians in general are excellent defenders of liberty when it can be stated in atomistically individualist terms. That is why they are so good on war, civil liberties, and drug issues. But their image of what it is to e an individual is woefully myopic. They are not changed by their circumstances, upbringing, or relationships. All are irrelevant. The rich and the desperately poor have equal freedom in all relevant senses.
Consequently, any issue that requires a more sensitive understanding of what individuals are will usually find libertarians on the wrong side of the issue, because they cannot understand how individuals can be anything but free or threatened with physical violence.
It is a kind of Calvinism dressed up in secular garb. I am no longer a libertarian once I realized that for all their praise of individuals, they do not understand what one is.
FlipYrWhig
@kay: I think you’re right, and I’m very interested in the history of the English-speaking world’s approaches to modern liberalism. I think left-leaning libertarians (giving Greenwald the benefit of the doubt) are prioritizing what political-theory types would call “republicanism” over “liberalism.”
Yutsano
500! YAY!!
Mnemosyne
@kay:
@FlipYrWhig:
Just from watching the back-and-forth at Balloon-Juice, I think one of the huge divides among liberals is interventionist vs. pacifist foreign policy. I think that a lot of pacifist liberals mistook liberal opposition to the Iraq War as being a pacifist stance and were bitterly disillusioned when it turned out that a lot of liberals (like me) were opposed to it because it was a stupid, unproductive, and unprovoked war, not simply because it was a war and all war is bad.
I’m not really sure how we get around that, because I think that conflict is one that leads pacifist liberals to de-attach from the political process so they’re not forced into a position where they have to support a candidate who’s okay with, say, participating in the bombing of Libya.
kay
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t know. I think he’s deeply confused. I read everything I could find on his position on the Civil Rights Act and he’s not talking about the same history or country that I know.
He says that “social” norms would have changed, re: civil rights, so we didn’t need the Civil Rights Act. One of the reasons we needed the civil rights act, and later, the voting rights act, was because black people couldn’t vote. The state was stopping them. They had a constitutional amendment. They had state law. They STILL couldn’t vote.
How were they supposed to change state law? They couldn’t vote.
That’s why they went across that bridge, to civil disobedience.
Ron Paul seems to be unaware of all this.
That’s delusional. I don’t want him as an ally because he’s delusional. We couldn’t agree on basic facts. WTF? “Social” changes? Before or after the firehoses and extra-judicial state-sanctioned murders?
kay
@FlipYrWhig:
I’m stuck on Ron Paul and the CRA because THE STATE was acting UNLAWFULLY to stop civil rights demonstrations, and Ron Paul STILL doesn’t see a need for federal intervention?
How is that protecting “liberty”? They needed (federal) protection from state actors. I would think a “libertarian” would be all over that. But, no. Instead, he natters on and on about private fucking property. They were throwing them in jail! For exercising First Amendment rights! That should be a four alarm fire for liberty lovers like Ron Paul.
FlipYrWhig
@kay: But when it comes to legislation, motives don’t really matter. The person who wants to send aid to Israel because of the Rapture, the one who believes in a haven for Jews, the one who just wants votes in his district, they can all vote the same way. In Congress, you really can disaggregate and reaggragate different coalitions and try to get things done across ideological lines. For a president, though, the overarching vision is important, because the thought processes spill over into other areas.
FlipYrWhig
@kay: Oh, I know, it’s abhorrent. It flows from extreme distrust of federal goverrnment and a view that governing should be both minimal and close at hand rather than maximal and distant. And it’s a pretty predictable implication of how libertarians and states-righters think. I want the federal government to be able to trump local authorities on matters of civil rights. Paul doesn’t. “Liberal” ought to be shorthand for “takes a liberal, i.e. generous, view of the use of governmental power.” If you don’t feel that way, you just might be a
redneckconservative.kay
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t know. I watched legislation in my own area, juveniles, become incredibly fucked up because legislation (state level) was grounded on some bad, wrong ideas and questionable motives.
The whole “boot camp/incarceration/get tough re: juveniles” craze (which was and is an absolute unmitigated disaster) happened because insane alliances were formed btwn conservatives and liberals.
Jesus. “Tough love”. DISASTER.
It’s happening again, with sex offender status and juveniles.
It’s an unholy alliance btwn liberal social workers and Federalist Society prosecutors. Millions of juveniles are going to be labeled sex offenders FOR LIFE.
I’m all for forming bi-ideological coalitions, but I wish it had a better track record.
Kola Noscopy
I posted in another thread about republicans’ WILLFUL delusions. Most of them are smart enough to know better, but its not in their tribal interest to admit it.
So it is with this entire RP/GG/BO discussion. BO partisans willfully pretend not to be able to grasp that no one here is promoting a RP presidency.
Likewise, they pretend not to grasp that it is entirely possible rational and valid to use the FP questions raised by an RP candidacy to shine light on Obama’s horrendous record in that area.
It’s an Obot pose familiar to anyone who reads this blog: “Obama’s Got This! Shut the fuck up, that’s why!”
El Tiburon
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
So if we say we like that Ron Paul is against the War on Drugs, we must also accept his stance on state’s rights? We can’t use Ron Paul as a means to get the discussion going? We have to accept ALL of what he says? I don’t buy this argument.
Can I despise the Catholic Church and its pedophile scandals and many other aspects, yet agree with its stance on the death penalty? While also disagreeing with its stance on abortion? We can’t pick and choose? It’s all or none? I mean, I understand the dilemma of elevating someone to use them for one issue (Jane Hamsher – Grover Norquist/ Hillary Clinton – Newt Gingrich) but isn’t this political reality?
Unfortunately Ron Paul is all we go (ok, Gary Johnson somewhat) who is speaking about this. So I don’t have a problem with using him as the conduit to get these topics more exposure.
kay
@Kola Noscopy:
This is what Ron Paul is talking about:
Is that the liberal argument against the Patriot Act? Is that what Russ Feingold argued? On the Patriot Act, are Ron Paul and Russ Feingold THE SAME?
This is the liberal argument on the Patriot Act.
Read those two arguments, the liberal and the libertarian, and see if you think they are THE SAME.
They’re not. The liberal argument IS BETTER. Which is why liberals shouldn’t let libertarians co-opt it.
Kola Noscopy
@kay:
But Kay, it seems to me that you are preoccupied with Liberals vs. Libertarians and who gets the credit, and I just want the Patriot Act dissolved and the government out of our bedrooms, and I want to know why Obama is going in the opposite direction.
Also, too, and furthermore, additionally: I want Obama called out on these issues from inside his own party. If it takes reference to RP, then so be it. That shouldn’t be the case, but I don’t hear those questions being asked otherwise.
sparky
@kay: as far as i can tell, libertarians tend to privilege property fairly highly, to the point where it is apparently coequal with liberty. implicitly many (most?) people assume liberty is a higher value, so libertarian thinking seems incomprehensible.
not defending just sayin
Admiral_Komack
Glenn Greenwald defends ‘Obama could rape a nun’ attack on supporters
http://www.thegrio.com/politics/glenn-greenwald-defends-obama-could-rape-a-nun-attack.php?page=1
Stay classy, Glenn!
sparky
to go wayyyyyyy back to the original post, GG makes people mad because (leaving aside the provocations and rhetorical excesses) who wants to be complicit with what the US does? no one, really. but who wants to think about what supporting Obama (or any major candidate/the Empire) necessarily entails with respect to civil liberties and foreign policy? no one, really. thus, all the messengers must be silenced, with good or bad reasons. it’s the only thing to do when the alternative–denouncing the entire structure–is un-believe-able in the sense that the alternative lies outside the self-imposed straitjacket of conventional thinking.
is the inability to admit these consequences (having acts done in your name) “wrong” in the sense that it’s irrational? maybe. but it seems a pretty deep-rooted bit of human wiring.
OzoneR
@Kola Noscopy: ,
Because if you do it the wrong way, you won’t only get the Patriot Act dissolved and the government out of our bedrooms, you’ll have them out of your milk regulations and civil rights too.
Context matters- the fact that you’re willing to give up everything else just to get those things through indicates that you are NOT a progressive, but rather a small-government libertarian.
If you’re a progressive, you want them done progressively, not any way possible.
OzoneR
@El Tiburon:
Because once the discussion gets going, what you’re going to hear is “government is too big and too intrusive,” which is going to hurt progressive stances on civil rights, healthcare, education, the environment.
You don’t want Ron Paul to “get the discussion going” because he will damage other issues progressives care about.
OzoneR
@kay:
Because they’re desperate to win by any means possible, even if it means hurting issues that are secondary to them.
Plus I think a lot of people who we consider liberals, aren’t liberals at all. They’re libertarians disguised as liberals because of the most prominent issues in any given time (war, torture, law and order)
That’s why liberals get fucked over in social welfare issues, once those take prominence, they lose their allies in anti-imperialism and civil rights.
Admiral_Komack
Ron Paul Bashes Civil Rights Act
Posted on 01/02/2012 at 9:56 am by Bob Cesca
No, not in a newsletter from years ago. It was yesterday. He bashed the Civil Rights Act yesterday.
WASHINGTON — Despite recent accusations of racism and homophobia, Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) stuck to his libertarian principles on Sunday, criticizing the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it “undermine[d] the concept of liberty” and “destroyed the principle of private property and private choices.”
“If you try to improve relationships by forcing and telling people what they can’t do, and you ignore and undermine the principles of liberty, then the government can come into our bedrooms,” Paul told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And that’s exactly what has happened. Look at what’s happened with the PATRIOT Act. They can come into our houses, our bedrooms our businesses … And it was started back then.”
What exactly does Ron Paul think should have continued?
The Civil Rights Act repealed the notorious Jim Crow laws; forced schools, bathrooms and buses to desegregate; and banned employment discrimination. Although Paul was not around to weigh in on the landmark legislation at the time, he had the chance to cast a symbolic vote against it in 2004, when the House of Representatives took up a resolution “recognizing and honoring the 40th anniversary of congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Paul was the only member who voted “no.”
Of course, this will only make him more popular with the fringe of the far-right (Ron Paul has the most conservative record of any congressman between 1937 and 2002).
Also, Ron Paul is so supportive of privacy rights that he wants to criminalize abortion. The privacy rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment are irrelevant to this so-called Constitutionalist — this hero of liberty believes state lawmakers should control what happens inside a woman’s body.
http://bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2012/01/ron-paul-bashes-civil-rights-act.html
Benjamin Franklin
@sparky:
I’ve seen the same sort of reaction at conservative blogs when the subject of Bush’s war of choice comes up. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the conscience burns, so the flame must recede.
Benjamin Franklin
@Admiral_Komack:
Is someone here supporting Paul?
kay
@Kola Noscopy:
Liberals have been saying for years that Obama muddles/damages the liberal message.
Now you’re ready to adopt Ron Paul as a messenger?
Why? Liberals have the better argument. You can have civil liberties and civil rights! But NOT if you’re a libertarian.
Corner Stone
@Admiral_Komack: ABL is on record saying if she caught Obama fucking a goat it wouldn’t change her support for him.
So, I guess she’s objectively pro-goatfucking.
Kola Noscopy
@OzoneR:
Thank you for exemplifying my earlier comment about BO supporters being willfully obtuse. Nowhere did I say I was willing to give up anything to fucking Ron Paul…but you already know that and are dishonest in your argument.
It would be more credible of you to just comment SHUT UP over and over and over again. As that is your actual meaning.
kay
@Kola Noscopy:
Your way to pressure Obama is through Ron Paul?
Obama? You’re going to get his attention by relying on Ron Paul, who trashes the Civil Rights Act every day?
Come on. How is this even good politics? It’s nonsensical. Ron Paul supporters are going to sway Barack Obama? In what fucking universe?
Turn around. You’re going in the wrong direction :)
Kola Noscopy
@Admiral_Komack:
What does any of that have to do with the topic of discussion in this thread, RP’s positions on war, drones, FP in general?
You’re once again obfuscating.
Just write SHUT UP. DISCUSSIONS PERCEIVED AS EVENT THE TINIEST BIT DETRIMENTAL TO THE RE ELECTION OR GENERAL IMAGE OF HIMSELF ARE NOT PERMITTED.
OzoneR
and now where did I mention Ron Paul.
You said this
and I’m asking you- at what cost?
Kola Noscopy
@kay:
Obfuscation! No one is adopting Ron Paul. His mere presence in the election race raises the questions, and if he’s not around the questions will be dropped, as Obama wants.
Plus, Mr. O certainly isn’t going to be liberals’ messenger on this.
OzoneR
@Kola Noscopy:
No, it doesn’t. His presence raises the question of big government, it doesn’t raise the question of human rights. That’s where your context is lost.
No, he’s not, your liberal messenger on this lost his reelection campaign in Wisconsin 14 months ago.
A Humble Lurker
@Corner Stone:
Link?
Besides, you’re hands aren’t clean on the whole hero-worship bit. All a poster had to do was say boo about little Glenny Greenwald and you pop out of the dirt like a worm after heavy rain.
kay
@Kola Noscopy:
Or, alternately, you’re going to sway the GOP primary field with Ron Paul?
Why do I care whether the GOP primary candidates learn anything?
Not that they will, but say they did. Say Romney comes out tomorrow and says “I too believe the Patriot Act is a lot like the Civil Rights Act!”
Where am I then? No place good!
I swear, you are now barred from ever again claiming one or another Democrat muddled the liberal message. Ron Paul is your messenger.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Kola Noscopy:
I can see it now. Two years from now, you, El T, Spectre, and the others will be camped out in the remote Michigan wilderness, keeping an eye out for black helicopters, and telling the Nuge all about how the party left you.
Kola Noscopy
@OzoneR:
At the cost of RP being in the race as long as possible, and then losing. Is that really too much for Obama to handle? I think it’s quite clear RP will never be elected.
But my point has been made over and over by other commenters as well, and you Obama supports refuse to admit that you already know what we mean. Why so fearful?
You seem to care about nothing other than Obama.
Couldn’t I say: Obama in the White House murdering people with drones: AT WHAT COST?
kay
@Kola Noscopy:
Nonsense. You told me I needed his voice. He’s talking! It’s getting worse! Now we’re connecting the Patriot Act to the Civil Rights Act.
Turn around, Kola. This is going nowhere good :)
Admiral_Komack
@Benjamin Franklin:
I provided the link.
YOU answer your own question.
OzoneR
@Kola Noscopy:
No, it’s not, because Barack Obama will beat Ron Paul like a drum while being out and proud about how he sent in drones to kill terrorists and kept marijuana out of high schools.
And you know that
And then you’ll have to vote for him anyway.
Then what?
I have never once mentioned Barack Obama in any of my responses to you. It is you that is obsessed with the man, not I.
So what’s your point again?
Kola Noscopy
@kay:
Your word twisting is something you should be ashamed of.
That said, if Ron Paul is the only candidate, including the noble democrat Barack Obama, who will raise the question of illegal war and drone murder…well, that’s certainly not a set of circumstances I’m responsible for. I’d lay that at the feet of BO, who has had three years to show his true colors and made it pretty clear where he stands.
OzoneR
@Kola Noscopy:
Except Ron Paul has not raised that question- AT ALL.
His entire campaign has been about eliminating departments, opposing the Civil Rights Act, getting rid of federal regulations, social welfare systems like Medicare and Social Security, and pulling of the UN.
I mean have you listen to the man talk? He’s barely mentioned drone strikes and indefinite detention. The only people trying to raise the question are idiot so-called liberals like you and Glenn Greenwald pathetically trying to grasp for attention through him.
A debate with Barack Obama is not going to be about ending the war on drugs or ending drone strikes- its going to be about switching to the gold standard, getting rid of the FDIC and SEC, and getting rid of income taxes. That’s what the debate is going to about.
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
Given that Ron Paul is not actually against the War on Drugs, only against the federal government’s participation in the War on Drugs, yes, we do kind of need to mention that Paul is perfectly fine with the individual states putting as many (or as few) restrictions on drugs as they want:
He thinks as a personal matter that adults should be allowed to use drugs as they want, but if individual states want to ban them and criminalize them, he’s fine with that. He’s only opposed to the involvement of the federal government in drug regulation.
Chris
@El Tiburon:
Much as I empathize with the Obama-Disappointment-Sydrome, I don’t understand this at all.
You’re saying I shouldn’t be concerned about Ron Paul’s opposition to civil rights, opposition to the welfare state, and opposition to any and all international obligations by the United States. Because he’s not viable enough to push these things through, so, nothing to worry about.
Okay. By the same token, why should I care about his war on drugs/get out of Afghanistan stance? It’s nice that he happens to agree with liberals on these things, but since he’s so non-viable, who gives a shit? Either he’s significant enough to warrant our attention (all around), or he’s not and it doesn’t matter what he thinks on any issue because he’s too insignificant to matter.
(I think the latter, by the way. Someone farther upthread talked about Progressive Caucus members who were also against the war on drugs. If so then it seems to me if that’s really your issue, you’re better off focusing on these guys: they’re with us on a lot more issues and there’s more of them).
kay
@Kola Noscopy:
I’m not saying you’re “responsible” for anything. I hate that whole line of argument. You’re “responsible” only to the extent that you’re powerful, and one vote isn’t all that powerful.
I do think it’s a shame that liberals have decided they share the “same views” as Ron Paul on these issues, because 1. they don’t, and 2. liberal views are better, more successful, more substantive, have more history, than libertarian views.
Look, Barry Goldwater didn’t lead liberals to “liberty”.
Barry Goldwater led directly to Ronald Reagan.
If you want to lend some liberal patina to Ron Paul, be my guest, but Paul gets the better end of that deal.
Mnemosyne
@Kola Noscopy:
Because Republicans and their fellow-travelers have already dragged the country to the right to an astounding degree in the past 30 years, and we’re trying to prevent you from dragging the discourse even further to the right by insisting that a right-wing Bircher isolationist is somehow “to the left” of a mainstream, centrist Democrat.
You don’t bring the country back to the left by lionizing a guy who’s further to the right than any other Republican candidate.
Though I do have to say it’s hilarious to see the same people who complain about Obama “enabling” Republicans pushing the noxious ideas of a Republican who’s further to the right than any of the other Republicans running for the presidency right now.
Mnemosyne
@Mnemosyne:
Or, to paraphrase an old cliche, pushing right-wing ideas to move the political conversation to the left is like fucking for chastity.
JR in WVa
@magurakurin: I agree with this 100% My spouse worked in the news media, and had co-workers who thought it was unethical to vote – that’s BS.
It’s an obligation of citizenship to be informed about candidates, and to help choose the best ones. I think since I was 21 and got out of the service I’ve missed like one levy election that was a shoo-in. I’ve voted for dam few candidates that were elected, and I’m proud to say Pressident Obama is one of them.
Not that he’s perfect, just so much better than McCain, who started out in the USN as the son and grandson of Admirals, and didn’t amount to a bucket of spit there. He called his wife a c*** in public, which is despicable. No, we got the best one in that election.
FYI, in Australia, you get to pay a hefty fine for failing to vote! One of the few things I admire about their government is that everyone’s involved. Ignorance must be part of their problem…
JR in WVa
@Pat In Massachusetts: How does the choice between Mittens Romney and Barack Obama make you feel? ‘Cause that’s what we’re gonna get. Or some other Repugnant even worse than Mittens.
I’m not crazy about President Obama, but I don’t think he’s power-mad, otherwise crazy, or greedy, which isn’t true of any of the other choices.
jayackroyd
@nastybrutishntall:
No, I do not think al qaeda is a significant threat. No, I don’t believe in the tiger repellent arguments you are making. That is, I don’t believe the intrusions on civil liberties in this country, the drone assassinations of people in other countries nor the surveillance state has improved the security of the country by any significant amount.
I didn’t think so when Bush was fearmongering, and I don’t believe it now. You, of course, supported those policies under Bush, right?
jayackroyd
@FlipYrWhig:
You do see that’s quite a bit different, don’t you? Before Paul became unignorable, discussing alternatives to the Forever War was in Jay Rosen’s Sphere of Deviance. The idea that these wars might be bad public policy as well as very unpopular progtrams could not be mentioned in the traditional media. Paul has made it more difficult to do so (as has the OWS movement.)
That doesn’t equal “support” for Paul. That is recognition that nobody will entertain any debate on these issues. The bat shit crazy stuff–the gold buggery for instance–is in the traditional media, at the WSJ, CNBC, FOX. But the military industrial complex, sponsors of the Sunday morning shows, is not a permissible topic.
Benjamin Franklin
@jayackroyd:
Huzzah ! +1
jayackroyd
When prepping for my talk with Corey, I found this email convo with Larison very helpful: http://bit.ly/vZL3oM
El Tiburon
@Chris:
I go back to the “Run Bill Moyers as President” theorem by Molly Ivins. Put Bill Moyers on the debate stage and see the conversation take a turn to the left.
Ron Paul is not insignificant by a long shot. He has an outside chance at the Republican nomination. Moreover he has the national platform. And he is the ONLY GUY talking about this shit. Obama certainly is not.
So, it’s not that Ron Paul doesn’t matter – he does to a lot of the Republican loons. But as progressives/liberals, can we not use him to the extent of getting these topics on the national radar? Or, are we content to just accept the War on Drugs and the War on Muslims and so on?
Ron Paul is a useful idiot.
El Tiburon
@Mnemosyne:
Sorry to burst your bubble, but states can and do regulate alcohol. In Texas, you can’t purchase liquor in certain counties or within certain city limits. Guess what? That’s right.
Otherwise I liked about everything Ron Paul had to say in the quote you did above.
FuzzyWuzzy
@Mark S.: So what if it’s true, right? Just brown people, not like Obama could do anything.
anim8sit
@Keith G: See…I just love this argument….it’s the muslim children argument all over again. How many people have drone attacks killed? hmmm? Is that in any way comparable to the number of innocents killed in Iraq? Is it any different than tossing cruise missiles into countries we aren’t at war with? I do not like any collateral damage but what I find incredibly dishonest is that what Obama is doing is in any way as destructive as the previous white house occupant, and I don’t see any understanding by you that the US government as whole has believed since at least the end of WWII that it was free to operate militarily in any way it sees fit. By this standard alone I consider Obama to be less violent than his predecessors. Is it perfect?…far from it…but the drone attacks conducted by the administration are not the moral equivalent of destruction from the Iraq war, or frankly, from the no fly zone instituted over Iraq for a decade. That fact is essentially lost from arguments about the dead brown people. Why is it important? Because it is indicative that Obama is moving the issue forward, albeit at a glacial pace. But being upset that he is moving to slow isn’t sexy enough…so we have to pretend that Obama’s “wars” are as destructive as previous, when what we are really seeing is a much lighter kind of footprint in approaching these matters…It is far from ideal, but does represent a small move
anim8sit
@Mnemosyne: It’s the Hamsher syndrome!