Open Threads

Joe Scarborough says that Ron Rand Paul’s real mistake was going on MSNBC in the first place:

I will not mention any names, but I’ll just say one of the top conservative leaders in Washington, DC, not elected, but a real opinion-shaper, had two questions. First of all, how could he have been so stupid to have walked into this type of controversy? And secondly, this is part of a news story so I’m going to say it, what the hell was he doing on MSNBC? This isn’t an anti-MSNBC situation but you don’t find a whole lot of very liberal Democrats going on Fox News election night or the night after to do their victory lap. They’re wondering whether he’s ready for prime time.

Never mind that Paul announced his intention to run on Rachel Maddow’s show a year earlier.

Similarly, Jeff Golderg thinks Peter Beinart’s real sin was writing his anti-AIPAC/TNR/Weekly Standard piece in the New York Review Of Books because only Jew-haters read NYRB.

Now, I think that Democrats should not appear on Fox News. But if they go on Fox News and say something stupid, it’s their fault, and if they go on Fox News and say something sharp and confrontational, good on them. The idea that we should blame Paul’s gaffe on Rachel Maddow or condemn Peter Beinart for writing something reasonable in NYRB is beyond stupid.

But it’s also a natural continuation: if you can’t believe anything that the liberal media writes, then it follows that you can’t believe anything said on a liberal media outlet, even if you yourself said it.

The media is the messagePost + Comments (82)

I just said to hell with it and am just throwing down landscape fabric.

Open ThreadPost + Comments (55)

I don’t agree with the swipe at lefties, obviously, but otherwise Ann Althouse of all people nails what is so dumb about the libertarian anti-civil rights position:

A few years ago, I was at a conference with libertarians, and I was confronted with exactly this point of view. I expressed my concern that they were putting an extreme and abstract idea above things that really matter in the world. I challenged them — in what I thought was a friendly conversation — to explain to me how I could know that their commitment to the extreme abstraction did not, in fact, have an origin in racism. Which came first, the proud defense of private property or the shameful prejudices that polite people don’t admit to anymore?

For raising the subject, I was loudly denounced, both at the dinner table table, and on the Reason Magazine website. As I said at the time:

I am struck — you may think it is absurd for me to be suddenly struck by this — but I am struck by how deeply and seriously libertarians and conservatives believe in their ideas. I’m used to the way lefties and liberals take themselves seriously and how deeply they believe. Me, I find true believers strange and — if they have power — frightening.

I appreciate libertarians up to a point, but the extreme ones are missing something that is needed if you are to be trusted with power.

That’s always been my gripe with libertarians: they’re too happy to say things like “well, if we started starving the poor, they’d learn to feed themselves” or “if enough people got shot for starting fights, people would stop starting fights” or “eventually, the free market would make racism unprofitable.”. There really aren’t any reasons to believe any of these sorts of things, especially in the absence of any data. (EDIT: I mean data supporting these statements, not data refuting them.)

In theory, theory and practice are the samePost + Comments (85)

The most important quote in American politics, from Lee Atwater:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.

I *don’t* think that is what Rand Paul is doing here. He’s doing the opposite, in a way, spelling out his opposition to Civil Rights in a politically suicidal way for reasons I can’t ascertain. This may derail his Senate campaign. But it also appeals to racists:

In December, Chris Hightower, the spokesman for Paul’s senate campaign, was forced to resign after a liberal Kentucky blog discovered that his MySpace page had a comment posted around Martin Luther King Day that read: “HAPPY N***ER DAY!!!” above what appears to be a historical photo of the lynching of a black man.

What makes this whole discussion interesting isn’t figuring out whether Paul is racist or a Randian nut job or just an idiot, what’s interesting is that the entire modern Republican party is based on opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and yet it’s taboo to oppose the Civil Rights Act openly. Look, I know there’s taxes and foreign policy and blah blah blah, but the simple fact is that the south was dominated by Democrats before the Civil Rights Act and is dominated by Republicans today.

Can you think of another single issue that has completely changed the political climate of an entire region?

To take this one step further, the institution of slavery is often described as the “original sin” of the United States, but obviously there was nothing original about it. I’ll bet you that in any ancient civilization anywhere in the world, one of the first things people did once they’d figured out the really important stuff — how to feed themselves, how to produce booze and pornography, etc. — was start developing theories about why they were better than the people from nearby areas and why it might be a good idea to steal from these people and/or keep them as slaves. And so it is today, with William Saletan and the Bell Curve and Andrew Sullivan’s deranged readers.

Racism and tribalism have always been a big part of politics everywhere. Why do we have to keep pretending otherwise?

There’s no such thing as an original sinPost + Comments (138)

A fascinating snippet from a Broder thumbsucker about Bob Bennett:

At the fringe, the movement to purge him took on aspects of ideological extremism, Bennett said. “I was asked several times about my position on the 17th Amendment, providing for the direct election of senators,” he said. “They viewed that as the opening effort by Washington to usurp the power that the Constitution had placed in the hand of state legislatures.”

Have any of you heard of this criticism of the 17th Amendment before? I don’t understand how replacing a vote by a state’s legislators with a vote by the state’s citizens makes Washington more powerful.

Seventeen if you know what I meanPost + Comments (182)