This nonsense has been nagging at me for the past month or so…..how the hell is it that so many liberals and Leftists who are otherwise smart and astute would even turn their support towards Republican candidate Ron Paul as the “anti-war” candidate???

It’s not just the fact that Paul is still a registered Republican, who’s only difference from the GOP establishment is his watered down 1930’s isolationism (a la Robert Taft).

It’s not even the fact that he has simply NO chance to get nominated under the Republican banner (last time I checked, the fundamentalist base was locked by Mike Huckabee, and John McCain and Rudy Giuliani were duking it out for the GOP establishment).

All that pales, however, to the basic fact that Paul has…shall we say….a very checkered past; a past that happens to include some of the most virulent racism and sexism and homophobia.

The New Republic website just came out with an article by James Kirchick in which he combs through the pages of Ron Paul’s newsletters from the past 20 or so years.  Needless to say, it paints a pretty nasty picture of a man who either (1) openly allows the most bigoted and racist sentiments on his bylines, or (2) doesn’t care enough to read his clippings for imflammatory material. 

The whole article is worth reading…but here’s a sampling:

To understand Paul’s philosophy, the best place to start is probably the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Auburn, Alabama. The institute is named for a libertarian Austrian economist, but it was founded by a man named Lew Rockwell, who also served as Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982. Paul has had a long and prominent association with the institute, teaching at its seminars and serving as a “distinguished counselor.” The institute has also published his books.

The politics of the organization are complicated–its philosophy derives largely from the work of the late Murray Rothbard, a Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who viewed the state as nothing more than “a criminal gang”–but one aspect of the institute’s worldview stands out as particularly disturbing: its attachment to the Confederacy. Thomas E. Woods Jr., a member of the institute’s senior faculty, is a founder of the League of the South, a secessionist group, and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, a pro-Confederate, revisionist tract published in 2004. Paul enthusiastically blurbed Woods’s book, saying that it “heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole.” Thomas DiLorenzo, another senior faculty member and author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, refers to the Civil War as the “War for Southern Independence” and attacks “Lincoln cultists”; Paul endorsed the book on MSNBC last month in a debate over whether the Civil War was necessary (Paul thinks it was not). In April 1995, the institute hosted a conference on secession at which Paul spoke; previewing the event, Rockwell wrote to supporters, “We’ll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it.” Paul’s newsletters have themselves repeatedly expressed sympathy for the general concept of secession. In 1992, for instance, the Survival Report argued that “the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society” and that “there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we too should consider it.”

The people surrounding the von Mises Institute–including Paul–may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history–the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent Washington libertarian told me, “There are too many libertarians in this country … who, because they are attracted to the great books of Mises, … find their way to the Mises Institute and then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of libertarian thought.”

 Lew Rockwell, incidentally, is well known as one of the more outspoken “conspiricy theorists” out there, who talks openly about “black helocopters” and the “Bilderburger” conspiracies to implement “one world socialism”.  Yeah, pretty damn progressive.

And oh, it gets so much worse from there…..witness this excerpt in which Paul through his “newsletter” sounds off on the 1992 “riots” which followed the acquital of the cops who beat Rodney King:

Paul’s alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began,” read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with “‘civil rights,’ quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda.” It also denounced “the media” for believing that “America’s number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks.” To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were “the only people to act like real Americans,” it explained, “mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England.”

Uh-huh. Then, I guess that the cops who beat up King are actually heros acting in self-defense???

Oh, and just to show that Paul’s groupies don’t just cast their gaze towards Black folk; there is an equal hatred towards GLBT’s:

Like blacks, gays earn plenty of animus in Paul’s newsletters. They frequently quoted Paul’s “old colleague,” Representative William Dannemeyer–who advocated quarantining people with AIDS–praising him for “speak[ing] out fearlessly despite the organized power of the gay lobby.” In 1990, one newsletter mentioned a reporter from a gay magazine “who certainly had an axe to grind, and that’s not easy with a limp wrist.” In an item titled, “The Pink House?” the author of a newsletter–again, presumably Paul–complained about President George H.W. Bush’s decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite “the heads of homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony,” adding, “I miss the closet.” “Homosexuals,” it said, “not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.” When Marvin Liebman, a founder of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom and a longtime political activist, announced that he was gay in the pages of National Review, a Paul newsletter implored, “Bring Back the Closet!” Surprisingly, one item expressed ambivalence about the contentious issue of gays in the military, but ultimately concluded, “Homosexuals, if admitted, should be put in a special category and not allowed in close physical contact with heterosexuals.”

The newsletters were particularly obsessed with AIDS, “a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby,” and used it as a rhetorical club to beat gay people in general. In 1990, one newsletter approvingly quoted “a well-known Libertarian editor” as saying, “The ACT-UP slogan, on stickers plastered all over Manhattan, is ‘Silence = Death.’ But shouldn’t it be ‘Sodomy = Death’?” Readers were warned to avoid blood transfusions because gays were trying to “poison the blood supply.” “Am I the only one sick of hearing about the ‘rights’ of AIDS carriers?” a newsletter asked in 1990. That same year, citing a Christian-right fringe publication, an item suggested that “the AIDS patient” should not be allowed to eat in restaurants and that “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva,” which is false. Paul’s newsletters advertised a book, Surviving the AIDS Plague–also based upon the casual-transmission thesis–and defended “parents who worry about sending their healthy kids to school with AIDS victims.” Commenting on a rise in AIDS infections, one newsletter said that “gays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense,” adding: “[T]hese men don’t really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners.” Also, “they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.”

Remember…this is the kind of “libertarianism” that has so seduced far too many liberal and even Leftist intellectuals to even consider supporting him….merely because he happens to be the only consistent opponent to the Iraq war. (Never mind that there are far more progressive antiwar opponents and more principled Leftists out there…..like, for instance, Cynthia McKinney???) 

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day…..but that doesn’t mean we ignore the other 98% of the time when it is very, very WRONG.

Let me spell it out for you Clones: Ron Paul is a right-wing reactionary crank bigot masquarading as an anti-war candidate.  He  has no credibility and no legitimacy as a true anti-interventionist, and his acceptance of the rankest bigotry should immediately disqualify him even the hint of being a true progressive. Those who are so seduced by his anti-war rants to back his campaign are at best mindless fools…..and at worst, knowing enablers of fascism. Don’t even waste your time or money for him…..hold out for a real progressive. (Hell, I’d vote for Hilliary before I ever pull the trigger for Ron Paul…and you know how much I despise Dimocrats.)

————————————  

UPDATE:  Apparantly, I’m not the only one who’s getting tired of the Ron Paul cheerleading from certain elements of the Left. Quoteh Elizabeth Schulte via Dissident Voice, posted today:

The formula of supporting a candidate with antiwar views, no matter how right wing they are on other issues, is disastrous for anyone who wants to rebuild the left.

Consider this quote from another one-time presidential candidate: “We stand with Cindy Sheehan and the memory of her son which should spur all truly patriotic Americans to demand an end to this war for Israel, this war against America, the Iraq War.”

The author of those lines is neo-Nazi David Duke.

Goff may believe that Paul’s antiwar platform is the primary point of his campaign, but Paul and his supporters are pushing the complete package.

In Iowa, for example, as the caucuses approached, Paul used his Internet-raised millions to fill the TV airwaves with a xenophobic ad about “protecting” U.S. borders. It begins with images of people swimming across the Rio Grande and warns in a menacing voiceover, “Today, illegal immigrants violate our borders and overwhelm our hospitals, schools and social services.”

Paul’s promise: “Physically secure the border. No amnesty. No welfare to illegal aliens. End birthright citizenship. No more student visas from terrorist nations.”

For his supporters on the left, this bigotry is excused by claiming that Paul has found a way to win the support of “hard-working folks” who the leftist “elite” have ignored. But the unstated assumption here is that the “hard-working folks” are white, and the only antiwar candidate they’d support has to be anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and “passively racist.”

For one thing, this is a condescending — not to mention, completely wrong — stereotype of working-class white people.

But more importantly, “hard-working folks” are also immigrants, Blacks, Latinos, Arabs and Muslims. They are gays and lesbians (Paul voted to bar gays from adopting children). They are women who depend on their right to legal abortion under Roe v. Wade, which Paul has called “the worst of all rulings” and said should be overturned.

If the point of supporting Paul is to make the antiwar voice in the U.S. stronger, then you have to ask how diverse groups of people will be drawn to any movement against the war associated with a candidate who heaps abuse on some of them.

[...]

Opposing right-wing ideas that make any movement weaker isn’t “sectarian.” It’s basic solidarity. The proudest moments in the history of the U.S. left are bound up with struggles to defend the principles of solidarity, by any means necessary. It’s a sign of the disorientation of the left today that such ideas can be looked upon so cynically.

This isn’t, as Goff and Frank suggest, an argument for having a checklist of political requirements for someone to be involved in the antiwar movement. If Paul wants to bring a blimp to the next antiwar protest, I don’t really care.

But it is an argument for rejecting a candidate who doesn’t believe in what you believe in. We say it about the Democrats — and we should it all the more loudly about a reactionary like Ron Paul, even if he does oppose the war.

Besides, we already have a genuine progressive anti-war candidate in the running already…..perhaps we might try supporting her instead?? 

———————-

UPDATE #2: And right on cue, here comes one of the Paul groupies to prove my point exactly.  Posted as a comment to Elizabeth Shulte’s article:

It would seem that Elizabeth Shulte is the one who is out of tune with what America wants and not Ron Paul. As an educator I can tell you that a great many of us would like to see the national Dept. of Education abolished. Education should be a local thing. To a one most teachers abhore the “No child left behind” which is hogtieing school systems nationwide. Few Americans are against “Immigrant rights”, but a vast majority of American citizens are vehemently opposed to granting undeserved “rights” to Illegal Aliens who scoff at our laws. A majority of Americans are also opposed to “Gay marriage”. Ron Paul is personally opposed to abortion having devoted his life to delivering babies, ie. bringing lives into this world. However, he said that is something that should be relegated to the states. How can Ron Paul be considered a ‘reactionary” when all he asks for is to respect our Constitution. I am thankful that those who think like Miss Shulte are a tiny minority of non-thinkers in our nation. It is time for the majority to be heard. 
[lorena redbrook said on January 9th, 2008 at 11:40 am #]

Yup…that sure sounds like a progressive I’d vote for.  Uhhhh….not.

Tags: faux liberalism, Ron Paul