Community | April 29, 2011 | 45 comments

Ron Paul: A Lesser Evil?

source: http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/04/ron-paul-a-lesser-evil/

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Radical_Centrist
Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I’ll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn’t protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn’t overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government’s criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

Yet, ask a good movement liberal or progressive about the two and you’ll quickly be informed that, yeah, Ron Paul’s good on the war stuff — yawn — but otherwise he’s a no-good right-wing reactionary of the worst order, a guy who’d kick your Aunt Beth off Medicare and force her to turn tricks for blood-pressure meds. By contrast, Obama, war crimes and all, provokes no such visceral distaste. He’s more cosmopolitan, after all — less Texas-y. He’s a Democrat. And gosh, even if he’s made a few mistakes, he means well.

Sure he’s a murderer, in other words, but at least he’s not a Republican!

Put another, even less charitable way: Democratic partisans – liberals – are willing to trade the lives of a couple thousand poor Pakistani tribesman in exchange for a few liberal catnip-filled speeches and NPR tote bags for the underprivileged. The number of party-line progressives who would vote for Ron Paul over Barack Obama wouldn’t be enough to fill Conference Room B at the local Sheraton, with even harshest left-leaning critics of the president, like Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, saying they’d prefer the mass-murdering sociopath to that kooky Constitution fetishist.

As someone who sees the electoral process as primarily a distraction, something that diverts energy and attention from more effective means of reforming the system, I don’t much care if people don’t vote for Ron Paul. In fact, if you’re going to vote, I’d rather you cast a write-in ballot for Emma Goldman. But! I do have a problem with those who imagine themselves to be liberal-minded citizens of the world casting their vote for Barack Obama and propagating the notion that someone can bomb and/or militarily occupy Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya and still earn more Progressive Points than the guy who would, you know, not do any of that.

Let’s just assume the worst about Paul: that he’s a corporate libertarian in the Reason magazine/Cato Institute mold that would grant Big Business and the financial industry license to do whatever the hell it wants with little in the way of accountability (I call this scenario the “status quo”). Let’s say he dines on Labradoodle puppies while using their blood to scribble notes in the margins of his dog-eared, gold-encrusted copy of Atlas Shrugged.

So. Fucking. What.

Barack Obama isn’t exactly Eugene Debs, after all. Hell, he’s not even Jimmy Carter. The facts are: he’s pushed for the largest military budget in world history, given trillions of dollars to Wall Street in bailouts and near-zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve, protected oil companies like BP from legal liability for environmental damages they cause – from poisoning the Gulf to climate change – and mandated that all Americans purchase the U.S. health insurance industry’s product. You might argue Paul’s a corporatist, but there’s no denying Obama’s one.

And at least Paul would – and this is important, I think – stop killing poor foreigners with cluster bombs and Predator drones. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief, Paul would also bring the troops home from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Europe, Korea and Okinawa. There’d be no need for a School of the Americas because the U.S. wouldn’t be busy training foreign military personnel the finer points of human rights abuses. Israel would have to carry out its war crimes on its own dime.

Even on on the most pressing domestic issues of the day, Paul strikes me as a hell of a lot more progressive than Obama. Look at the war on drugs: Obama has continued the same failed prohibitionist policies as his predecessors, maintaining a status quo that has placed 2.3 million – or one in 100 – Americans behind bars, the vast majority African-American and Hispanic. Paul, on the other hand, has called for ending the drug war and said he would pardon non-violent offenders, which would be the single greatest reform a president could make in the domestic sphere, equivalent in magnitude to ending Jim Crow.

Paul would also stop providing subsidies to corporate agriculture, nuclear energy and fossil fuels, while allowing class-action tort suits to proceed against oil and coal companies for the environmental damage they have wrought. Obama, by contrast, is providing billions to coal companies under the guise of “clean energy” – see his administration’s policies on carbon capture and sequestration, the fossil fuel-equivalent of missile defense – and promising billions more so mega-energy corporations can get started on that “nuclear renaissance” we’ve all heard so much about. And if Paul really did succeed in cutting all those federal departments he talks about, there’s nothing to prevent states and local governments — and, I would hope, alternative social organizations not dependent on coercion — from addressing issues such as health care and education. Decentralism isn’t a bad thing.

All that aside, though, it seems to me that if you’re going to style yourself a progressive, liberal humanitarian, your first priority really ought to be stopping your government from killing poor people. Second on that list? Stopping your government from putting hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens in cages for decades at a time over non-violent “crimes” committed by consenting adults. Seriously: what the fuck? Social Security’s great and all I guess, but not exploding little children with cluster bombs – shouldn’t that be at the top of the Liberal Agenda?

Over half of Americans’ income taxes go to the military-industrial complex and the costs of arresting and locking up their fellow citizens. On both counts, Ron Paul’s policy positions are far more progressive than those held – and indeed, implemented – by Barack Obama. And yet it’s Paul who’s the reactionary of the two?

My sweeping, I’m hoping overly broad assessment: liberals, especially the pundit class, don’t much care about dead foreigners. They’re a political problem at best – will the Afghan war derail Obama’s re-election campaign? – not a moral one. And liberals are more than willing to accept a few charred women and children in some country they’ll never visit in exchange for increasing social welfare spending by 0.02 percent, or at least not cutting it by as much as a mean ‘ol Rethuglican.

Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum, for example, has chastised anti-Obama lefties, complaining that undermining – by way of accurately assessing and commenting upon – a warmonger of the Democratic persuasion is “extraordinarily self-destructive” to all FDR-fearing lefties.

Full Article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/04/ron-paul-a-lesser-evil/
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45 comments // Ron Paul: A Lesser Evil?

  • Clevelandchick
  • AmericanStandard
  • claybird121
  • xena
    • +1
      xena  

    • Just viewed an excerpt of Paul's "debate" with fake Obama on Stossell show. Don't know why Paul would do such a thing since it makes him look like part of a joke and undermines his credibility as a serious candidate.

      I will vote in my own best interest and that of the country's, esp. poor, middle-classed, and otherwise disenfranchised. And it won't be for a Ron Paul who based on his comments regarding regulation, supports corporations more than people. I do not agree with Obama on everything but I'd vote for him over Paul any day. I wish Mr. Obama was more liberal. I've never thought of him as that but he is a progressive.

      It is always much easier to say what you'd do if... Mr. Paul is not yet in the White House so we don't really know what he'd do. While those who run for the presidency are certainly not immune to lying, I imagine that there are many things that we aren't privy to, that makes doing some of what they ran on impossible for them to implement. I believe strongly that it is our duty as citizens to hold the feet of the elected to the fire, Obama included.

    • 1 year ago
  • xena
    • +1
      xena  
    • xena:

      And just because I don't agree with you on Paul doesn't mean I suspect you of drinking the koolaid or any other insults about one's intellect, education, judgment or patriotism. I assume, based on our own interests, experiences, research and beliefs, that we've come to a different conclusion. I'd appreciate the same courtesy.

      "As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods, or tactics, or strategy." Malcom X

    • 1 year ago
  • claybird121
    • -1
      claybird121  

    • I think the comments have basically proven this to some degree:

      "Yet, ask a good movement liberal or progressive about the two and you’ll quickly be informed that, yeah, Ron Paul’s good on the war stuff — yawn — but otherwise he’s a no-good right-wing reactionary of the worst order, a guy who’d kick your Aunt Beth off Medicare and force her to turn tricks for blood-pressure meds. By contrast, Obama, war crimes and all, provokes no such visceral distaste. He’s more cosmopolitan, after all — less Texas-y. He’s a Democrat. And gosh, even if he’s made a few mistakes, he means well."

      Voted up. Especially for the Emma Goldman write in idea.

    • 1 year ago
  • Playgroundforthegays
  • Radical_Centrist
  • kennymotown
    • +2
      kennymotown  

    • I found the funniest thing said was Liberal pundits endorsing the killings of thousands of civilians. That's pretty strange cause I've been listening to Liberal pundits that have been saying from day one Afghanistan would be Obama's downfall. More clap trap propaganda by Paul supporters. Voted down! Big time.

    • 1 year ago
  • Radical_Centrist
    • -2
      Radical_Centrist  
    • kennymotown:

      No were did he say they endorsed anything, here is what he actually said.

      "My sweeping, I’m hoping overly broad assessment: liberals, especially the pundit class, don’t much care about dead foreigners. They’re a political problem at best"

    • 1 year ago
  • kennymotown
  • Radical_Centrist
  • kennymotown
  • PressCore
    • 0
      PressCore  
    • Radical_Centrist:

      Too bad we can't vote for Ron Paul as Secretary of the Treasury.
      He'd make the best one this country ever had. Too bad we can't
      all vote for the Secretaries of Agriculture, etc equaly as President,
      so that they all had an equal voice in every aspect of American life.
      Maybe then we could start to turn things around. I know that's not
      the way the founding masons envisioned it to be by the way they
      wrote our charter law 237 years ago. But the way the Banksters,
      Industrial Military Complex, Corporations carry on like a bloody
      machine...And with 20 levels of security clearance ABOVE the
      presidential level, the ones who run the dog & pony show behind
      closed doors on Wall St aren't the ones WE the People vote for
      anymore. We only get to deal with their store clerks like Nobama
      who sweep up after them. The powers that be are too important
      to be seen and heard from. That might make us feel like they have
      to be accountable. So they foist loosers like Nobama on us to sucker
      our votes into oblivion, promote apathy & disillusionment over a
      corrupt, rotten to the core system that's only good at cranking out
      Batman's Jokers. Like Arkam Asylum, the inmates realy are running
      the show now. The USA is in such deep, deep, deep shit that it
      reminds me of the Jauggernaut that inspired the movie Avatar. Look
      up the Wikipedia definition of Jauggernaut. It was Hitler's dream
      for Germany. Wars W/O End is the transition into Orwell's nightmare.

      Though I support Ron Paul, get his Emails, as I do Michelle Bachman's..
      And though I will sign some of their petitions, (whereas I'd spend hours
      researching animal rights causes to sign), I won't give them blanket
      support. And no matter how much I loath cheap hacks like Palin,Trump
      Gingrich, Huckabee et al who jump on the terrorism bandwagon. Because
      they're all mindless chumps. And because there're too many ignorant,
      unthinking stupid humps mind controlled by TV who curse us by voting
      at all, the USA has had almost nothing but loosers as presidents most
      of my life. As Greek Socrates said: " Fear not that you will aim your arrow
      to high to hit your mark. Be very afraid that you will aim too low and hit
      that instead "

      Einsenhaur & Kennedy were greats. But after JFK was killed, and after
      people stopped gasping only to yawn, and go back to sleep, even good
      people like Jimmy Carter & Walter Mondale were ineffective. The now
      featured prez reminds me more of Heath Ledger's character in the Dark
      Knight sequel. More B movie Show Biz. Only riding a mechanical bull like
      John Travolta in a 1980 pop movie. Nobama isn't in control. That's all too
      obvious, isn't it ? Nobama figured since the CIA was preening him as
      Rostradamus pointed out with proof to back it up, that with GWB and his
      NWO cronies supporting Nobama behind the scenes, it was going to be
      Nobama's rodeo from 2008-2016. And that Nobama would be the bull rider.

      I fear Americans have cursed themselves. Once we let a WW2 war hero,
      and one of the greatest men ever to have lived, and his A.G. brother,
      whose hand I shook as he passed by my high school in his motorcade.
      be Murdered by rogue elements, and then yawn as if Justice didn't matter,
      we doomed ourselves to a dark, dark future. Amercians no longer have
      " the Indian problem " as they did in the West to deal with. Now in 2011,
      sadly, we have become the problem for the top of the food chain like Gates
      & Monsanto execs to deal with. We're meat for the grinder of Food Inc.

    • 1 year ago
  • Persecuted
    • +2
      Persecuted  

    • ron paul isnt any better... hes nuts... and some of his views are so outlandish. hes way too radical, but not radical in a good way... radical in a wearing his underwear over his pants kind of way. i'd never vote for ron paul because he'd destroy the country while stuffing cheerios up his nose

    • 1 year ago
  • Milieu
  • onemalefla
  • Radical_Centrist
  • Ricky84
    • -1
      Ricky84  

    • "Even on on the most pressing domestic issues of the day, Paul strikes me as a hell of a lot more progressive than Obama. "

      [ ] Not Told
      [ ] Told
      [ ] Really Told
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      [X] Cash4told.com
      [X] No country for told men
      [X] Knights of the told Republic
      [X] ToldSpice
      [x] The Elder Tolds IV: Oblivious
      [x] Command & Conquer: Toldberian Sun
      [x] GuiTold Hero: World Told
      [X] Told King of Boletaria
      [x] Countold Strike
      [x] Unreal Toldament
      [x] Stone-told Steve Austin
      [X] Half Life 2: Episode Told
      [x] World of Warcraft: Catoldclysm
      [X] Roller Coaster Toldcoon
      [x] Assassin's Creed: Tolderhood

    • 1 year ago
  • Radical_Centrist
    • +3
      Radical_Centrist  

    • I see Charles was talking about most of you all. This snippet seems to sum up well why no "thinking" progressive would vote for Obama over Ron Paul.

      "Let’s just assume the worst about Paul: that he’s a corporate libertarian in the Reason magazine/Cato Institute mold that would grant Big Business and the financial industry license to do whatever the hell it wants with little in the way of accountability (I call this scenario the “status quo”). Let’s say he dines on Labradoodle puppies while using their blood to scribble notes in the margins of his dog-eared, gold-encrusted copy of Atlas Shrugged.

      So. Fucking. What.

      Barack Obama isn’t exactly Eugene Debs, after all. Hell, he’s not even Jimmy Carter. The facts are: he’s pushed for the largest military budget in world history, given trillions of dollars to Wall Street in bailouts and near-zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve, protected oil companies like BP from legal liability for environmental damages they cause – from poisoning the Gulf to climate change – and mandated that all Americans purchase the U.S. health insurance industry’s product. You might argue Paul’s a corporatist, but there’s no denying Obama’s one."

    • 1 year ago
  • ThatCrazyLibertarian
  • Milieu
    • +2
      Milieu  
    • Radical_Centrist:

      As one who was "In The Field" working for Carter because I believed a lot of the position papers he released as he was running, I was sorely disappointed when he pitched most of his Liberal positions after being elected.

      But I now know that many of those went by the wayside because he ran into the Washington Machine. Even with the titular support of Tip, much did not happen because the Power of the BeltWay.

      With the Senate rules changed since then, and the fact that we have had 30+ years of many of the Oligarchs spending Billions of dollars to gain sources of power, and adding in the fact that there are no reasonable {read: willing to work on compromise} Republic Syndicate members how was Obama supposed to change much?

      Even Paul Krugman thought parts of TARP were worth keeping.

      And lastly, there are, what 30% - 40% who are going to openly support fighting anything Obama does simply because he's the wrong colour.

    • 1 year ago
  • Radical_Centrist
  • ThatCrazyLibertarian
  • Radical_Centrist
  • letsliveinpeace
  • artemis6
    • +4
      artemis6  

    • He always seemed crazy evil to me . That is the problem , we are always voting for the LESSER of all the evils . We need a new set of options altogether .

    • 1 year ago
  • Milieu
  • Swisher
  • Milieu
  • timetide
    • +1
      timetide  
    • Milieu:

      don't forget, FAIR litteraly has had booths set up at klan rallies to recruit members. i would call them racist, but the teabaggers keep telling me that calling out racism is racism so I guess I should bite my tounge.

    • 1 year ago
  • Radical_Centrist
  • Milieu
    • +2
      Milieu  
    • Radical_Centrist:

      Let's see:

      Supported by Klan and Anti-war:

      which would make the most important impression on me as to how I'd vote?

      Geez, let me ponder this...................................... Well, after MUCh Serious thought, I'll always vote against the Klan backed candidate.

    • 1 year ago
  • tlbuffin
  • letsliveinpeace
  • Radical_Centrist
  • tlbuffin
  • letsliveinpeace
  • Radical_Centrist
    • -1
      Radical_Centrist  
    • tlbuffin:

      Why is it so crazy to believe the Government should not have the right to force people into business transactions with other people? I mean if the Government has the right to force me to sell you stuff then logic follows they have the right to FORCE you to buy stuff from me.

      I own a Construction Company I am going to see if Congress can pass a law FORCING all Gay people in South Texas to have their homes constructed by me whether they want them to be or not. I mean you can see how crazy the idea is when the shoe is on the other foot. Personally as a businessman I think the ONLY color that counts is Green, but thats me.

      I believe in a "FREE COUNTRY" you should not have to do business with any one you do not want. I know if I went to a Restaurant that did not like White People I would not feel comfortable eating the food in the first place even if they had to serve it to me. Which Congressman is going to prevent them from spitting in it?

    • 1 year ago
  • Richard_Wyatt
  • letsliveinpeace
  • Radical_Centrist
    • -1
      Radical_Centrist  
    • Richard_Wyatt:

      You do realize even if SS is around when you retire and that is doubtful it will not be enough to live on right? You would be MUCH better off if the Government allowed you to put your money in a traditional IRA.

    • 1 year ago
  • Milieu
  • mrtraffic
  • Radical_Centrist
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