Month: December 2011

– Neil Cavuto, Fox News.

Michael Brendan Dougherty puts the Paul newsletters in context: 

These newsletters were published before a decade of war that has exhausted many Americans, before the financial crisis, and before the Tea Party. All three made Ron Paul's ideas seem more relevant to our politics. They made anti-government libertarianism seem (to some) like a sensible corrective. But in the 1990s and 1980s, anti-government sentiment was much less mainstream. It seemed contained to the racist right-wing, people who supported militia movements, who obsessed over political correctness, who were suspicious of free-trade deals like NAFTA.  At that time a libertarian theorist, Murray Rothbard argued that libertarians ought to engage in "Outreach to the Rednecks" in order to insert their libertarian theories into the middle of the nation's political passions. Rothbard had tremendous influence on Lew Rockwell, and the whole slice of the libertarian movement that adored Ron Paul. 

But Rothbard and Rockwell never stuck with their alliances with angry white men on the far right. They have been willing to shift alliances from left to right and back again. Before this "outreach" to racists,  Rothbard aligned himself with anti-Vietnam war protestors in the 1960s. In the 2000s, after the "outreach" had failed, Rockwell complained bitterly about "Red-State fascists" who supported George Bush and his war. So much for the "Rednecks." The anti-government theories stay the same, the political strategy shifts in odd and extreme directions. 

As crazy as it sounds, Ron Paul's newsletter writers may not have been sincerely racist at all. They actually thought appearing to be racist was a good political strategy in the 1990s. After that strategy yielded almost nothing – it was abandoned by Paul's admirers. You can attribute their "redneck strategy" to the most malign kind of cynicism or to a political desperation that made them insane. Neither is particularly flattering. 

I'd say that both are pretty disgusting. Ed Kilgore has more on why today’s "wild and wooly GOP is a much friendlier venue for the Ron Paul Revolution than it’s ever been." 

I argued that Ron Paul is relatively electable. Steven Taylor counters: it's way too soon to tell. I agree, by the way. But on the data we now have, he's certainly as competitive with Obama as any other not-Romney.

The above video gives you a jarring sense of what it's like in the war zone of Baba Amr, Homs. Brian Whitaker wonders how long Assad can continue to kill like this:

[R]eforms, on a scale that would satisfy the protesters (including renouncing the supremacy of the Baath party), are not a practical option for Assad. At the same time, he has to continue delivering economically for his support base – which is proving increasingly difficult.

Daniel Serwer has five suggestions for how the US can help midwife the process of Assad's collapse. Inna Lazareva tracks the internal debate about Assad amongst his Russian patrons. Arab League delegates have just arrived [NYT] in Syria. Lebanon's Daily Star reports on the ominous history of the monitor mission's Sudanese leader. Juan Cole collects news coverage of the assault on Idlib. The video below is supposedly some of the only footage of the mass slaughter in Idlib that claimed the lives of around 100 Syrians:

This is a funeral/protest likely from Da'el, in the Hauran region:

Finally, this man – George Hayyar – was killed in Homs:

A first:

Dan Savage reflects on the moment:

The growing civil equality of gays and lesbians—from marriage equality in Canada and New York to the end of DADT in the USA—is revealing a lot of things. We're no more a threat to the institution of marriage, for instance, than we are to military order and morale. But it's also revealed that there are and always were a lot more of "them" out there who are happy for "us" than we ever realized. Not just our family and friends, but strangers in parks, our straight shipmates and their partners, and shoppers at the mall who stopped to watch some ladies in Christmas sweaters and sunglasses dance to Katy Perry and wound up clapping and cheering for two young gay men who want to spend the rest of their lives together.

And this is why I believe in America. Know hope. This year was a miracle in so many ways.

Adam Serwer is unsurprised:

The progression of his views on the subject are really classic Romney: First he's against [an unauthorized incursion into Pakistani territory to get Bin Laden] in principle, then he clarifies that he's only against announcing that he'd do it while basically announcing he'd do it, and now he's saying it's a decision any president would have made. From abortion to health care to immigration to Iraq, Romney's shifting positions on Bin Laden track with his tendency to adopt whatever position is most politically convenient at the time. 

Why I love the Interwebs:

A slightly different perspective:

Why not Paul, when, in many instances, Paul’s voting record and political leanings have been more progressive and in-line with Black America’s than Barack Obama’s …? Why not Paul, when he’s been one of the most vocal opponents of America’s continued support for the War on Drugs, an issue that many say is destroying black America. “The War on Drugs is a total failure,” Paul told time magazine. “It’s created a monster of a problem for us.” And while many an African American activist and political theorist have highlighted the problems with the U.S. military spending and the War on Drugs, most politicians have been flat out afraid to be labeled soft of defense and drugs.

A reader adds:

Let’s see: does a candidate who does any of the following seem like a racist or bigot to you? 1) Be the only one in a Republican debate to oppose racial profiling 2) Frame his opposition to the death penalty and end of the war on drugs in terms of discrimination by the law and law enforcement 3) Implore citizens of Christian America to put themselves in the perspective of Muslims in the Middle East when thinking of our foreign policy?

But all these current stands are aparently irrelevant when compared with racist newsletters written by someone else two decades ago which Paul now condemns. Conor makes related points in a must-read of intellectual honesty:

What I want Paul detractors to confront is that he alone, among viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies, including policies that explicitly target ethnic and religious minorities. And that, appalling as it is, every candidate in 2012 who has polled above 10 percent is complicit in some heinous policy or action or association. Paul's association with racist newsletters is a serious moral failing, and even so, it doesn't save us from making a fraught moral judgment about whether or not to support his candidacy, even if we're judging by the single metric of protecting racial or ethnic minority groups, because when it comes to America's most racist or racially fraught policies, Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them.

His opponents are often on the wrong side, at least if you're someone who thinks that it's wrong to lock people up without due process or kill them in drone strikes or destabilize their countries by forcing a war on drug cartels even as American consumers ensure the strength of those cartels.

In supporting Ron Paul, I am backing one of the few candidates in the GOP field not to have exploited racial code words, homophobia, illegal immigration, or generalizations about Muslims that come easily to the mind of, say, Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain, who actually said he wouldn't appoint a Muslim to his cabinet! I am backing one of the few GOP candidates not to have endorsed torture and to have opposed the Iraq war. To pick Paul out as the core bigot in this crowd, and to regard anyone who backs him as tainted by bigotry … seems to me to be perverse.

[The first version of this post muddled a reader email and a blog-post. Apologies.]

Central, Hong Kong, 11.18 am