Month: December 2011

A news item you're unlikely to find on Drudge.

Erick Erickson bashes Santorum as a "fake conservative:"

Rick Santorum participated in raiding the federal treasury as an earmarxist, perfectly happy to pork away on Pennsylvania’s behalf. He did not join conservatives who fought against No Child Left Behind. He did not join conservatives who fought against the prescription drug benefit.

Rick Santorum was part of the problem in Washington. He was one of the Republicans the public rejected in 2006. The voters in Pennsylvania rejected him in 2006 because of his and the Republicans’ profligate ways. Along with Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum led the K Street Project, which traded perks for lobbyists for money for the GOP funded with your tax dollars through earmarks and pork projects.

Jennifer Rubin, by contrast, thinks Santorum's swell:

And, unlike Ron Paul, he is solid and knowledgeable on national security.

Do even those who disagree with Paul think he has no "knowledge" of the issues around foreign policy? Notice how for neocons, those who disagree with them simply don't know enough. This from the people who assured us there was no sectarianism in Iraq before the war. By "solid", of course, Rubin means an advocate of Greater Israel and war on Iran. Santorum is indeed a classic big government Christianist, a pro-torture Catholic, and now an advocate for industrial policy.

"One of Ron Paul's biggest attributes is his sincerity. He doesn't bullshit. Which is why this is so disappointing. He's either lying, completely removed from reality, or really still believes (or at least doesn't find offensive) everything in the vile newsletters that bear his name, save for "eight to ten sentences." In which case he's a bigot. These are the only three options. All of them are ugly," – Radley Balko, libertarian icon.

The Manchester Union-Leader's publisher, John McQuaid, goes apeshit over Ron Paul. My favorite line:

A Wall Street Journal columnist notes that Paul is “a leading spokesman for, and recycler of, the long and familiar litany of charges that point to the United States as a leading agent of evil and injustice, the militarist victimizer of millions who want only to live in peace.”

Well, that settles it. The quote, from Dorothy Rabinowitz, is in a piece that did not cite anything Paul has actually said to back up her remarkable slur. But it is surely revealing that she does not see Paul as that different from Obama:

The world may not be ready for another American president traversing half the globe to apologize for the misdeeds of the nation he had just been elected to lead. Still, it would be hard to find any public figure in America whose views more closely echo those of President Obama on that tour.

Yep: Rabinowitz believes that the president who surged in Afghanistan, launched a global drone war, killed Osama bin Laden and much of al Qaeda's leadership, dethroned Qaddafi, shored up alliances in India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan, and finally ended the Iraq war … is an America-hater just like Ron Paul.

But take a look at the comments under the editorial. In 2008, the campaign to make Paul merely fringe succeeded. This time? Well, we'll see soon enough.

Josh says Mitt has won it. I suspect that this campaign may well end being seen as a tale told by eight idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying … Romney.

He's still re-printing, as if it means anything about the Obama record, the Obama administration's predictions of future growth and employment from January 2009. He uses the discrepancy between the prediction and the reality to argue that the stimulus didn't work. What he ignores – and has ignored in his propaganda from Day One – is that the forecast was based on a badly wrong statistic, believed by both the public and private sector at the time. Back then, the consensus was that the economy had shrunk some 3 percent in the last quarter of 2008. That was the data on which Romer at el based their predictions. We now know the recession was far worse – with a decline in the fourth quarter of 9 percent – three times the contemporaneous assumption.

So all the graph shows is what happens when you input a core piece of data that is off by 300 percent or so in the month before you take office. Maybe the Obama administration should have guessed better. But the data is designed to be independent of political meddling. And in the original prediction, we find the following caveat:

Second, as emphasized above, there is considerable uncertainty in our estimates: both the impact of the package on GDP and the relationship between higher GDP and job creation are hard to estimate precisely. In light of the substantial quarter-to-quarter variation in the estimates of job creation, we believe a reasonable range for 2010 Q4 is 3.3 to 4.1 million jobs created.

A footnote to the passage above warns:

These estimates, like the aggregate ones, are subject to substantial margins of error.

So what Reynolds argues is evidence of Obama's incompetence in government is rather evidence of how bad the economy was in the last months of the Bush administration, and how government and private sector statistics badly misjudged the severity of the downturn. A near-nine percent collapse in GDP in one quarter is not a normal recession. It's near total collapse, actually. But all of it, and all the debt that automatically accrues as a great recession intensifies, is Obama's fault in Reynolds' version of history. Even though the report Reynolds cites includes caveats about the margin of error in estimates of growth and employment.

Pathetic. But it's all they've got.

This pretty much sums up the season:

(Hat tip: Buzzfeed)

That's my esteemed colleague Michael Tomasky's view of Ron Paul. I'm not sure how one locust, let alone a little one, could be "pestilential", but leave that as it is. Michael then says:

My esteemed colleague Andrew Sullivan should bear in mind that while it’s nice that Paul supports everyone’s right to privacy in the bedroom, if someone gets beaten to a pulp on the street simply for being who he is, don’t go knocking on Paul’s door, as he’ll be nowhere to be found, hate-crimes laws being a threat to the freedom of the hater and all.

But that's one reason I like him! I despise hate crime laws, and all the claptrap associated with them. And Mike's logic here is bizarre. If I got beaten to a pulp for being gay, any president is required to enforce the laws against assault, as are the local police. There is absolutely no need for hate crimes laws to bring violent individuals to justice. If the authorities tried to turn such an assault into a hate crime, I would strongly object. I am not a gay person first and foremost. I am a person. I need no liberal sanctimony to remind me of that.

Dan Savage runs a letter from a reader pushing back against his tolerance of Paul’s record on gays:

Ron Paul does not advocate for leaving gays alone. He simply advocates for the states to be able to oppress them instead of Washington. Take, for example, this 2003 article. Paul decries the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v Texas decision that eliminated state sodomy laws:

“Consider the Lawrence case decided by the Supreme Court in June. The Court determined that Texas had no right to establish its own standards for private sexual conduct, because gay sodomy is somehow protected under the 14th amendment ‘right to privacy.’ Ridiculous as sodomy laws may be, there clearly is no right to privacy nor sodomy found anywhere in the Constitution. There are, however, states’ rights—rights plainly affirmed in the Ninth and Tenth amendments. Under those amendments, the State of Texas has the right to decide for itself how to regulate social matters like sex, using its own local standards. But rather than applying the real Constitution and declining jurisdiction over a properly state matter, the Court decided to apply the imaginary Constitution and impose its vision on the people of Texas.”

Essentially, Paul has no interest in leaving anybody alone. He only wants to get rid of one government scared into submission by oppressive douchebags and replace it with 50 governments scared into submission by oppressive douchebags. That’s not really any better, and I think you may have missed that in your statement to Dave Weigel.

All this is true. Paul really is a federalist in the extreme sense, and he would give states and their courts the power to decide issues such as these. Of course, that also means that those states, like Massachusetts or Iowa or New York, can advance gay equality in a more organic, less top-down way – and Paul, unlike his colleagues, does not back a federal marriage amendment to prevent them. And note that Paul finds anti-sodomy laws “ridiculous”. Sorry to break the news, but he’s a libertarian.

He is the target now of ads run by NOM because of his refusal to sign their heteros-only marriage pledge. He is not for marriage equality – but the rest of the field are just as bad (as is Obama on the marriage issue alone). Now we find some ugly early statements about people with AIDS, from the 1980s:

“The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim – frequently a victim of his own lifestyle – but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care.”

The first point is callous, the second undeniable – but intrinsic to all group insurance. And in terms of libertarianism, you could easily substitute “lung cancer” and get the same result. This is Hitch’s view of his own illness. I certainly take responsibility for mine as well. The absence of any core compassion – and from a doctor! – is awful and glib and nasty. As for the rest, it’s libertarianism writ large. I too loathe identity politics, back limited government, and states’ rights.

I’m no longer endorsing Ron Paul, because he has failed to take responsibility for the newsletters and because his libertarianism really is too extreme for me. But I think the attacks on his writing over two decades ago – when attitudes toward gays and HIV were extremely different than today – is less important than his commitment to limiting government, at home and abroad, now. And I do not believe that he is a bigot. In fact, I think he is remarkably free of such prejudice for a man of his background and generation. Which may be why opponents have to trawl through material two decades old to get him.

A new poll out of Iowa shows Newt's numbers dropping while solidifying the neck-and-neck narrative between Romney and Paul:

Romney drew the support of 23 percent of likely caucus-goers in Iowa … ahead of Paul, at 21 percent. They are followed by Santorum at 15 percent, Texas Gov. Rick Perry at 14 percent, Gingrich at 13 percent and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann at 6 percent. … The NBC-Marist poll conducted in late November had Gingrich in the lead among likely caucus-goers at 28 percent, Romney and Paul tied at 19 percent, Perry at 10 percent, Bachmann at 7 percent and Santorum at 6 percent.

Blumenthal and Silver have more on Santorum's streak. A reader can't resist:

I for one hope that Santorum makes a strong third place showing, only to hear him remark without irony, "I am nearly number two."

Rick Hertzberg predicts a nasty end to the Gingrich campaign:

Newt does not respond well to nonrecognition of his world-historical destiny. His exit will not be pretty. He may act out. There is a certain wan dignity, though, in the fact that the "baggage" that is proving to be Newt’s undoing is not so much his rabbity love life or his lucrative, un-historian-like subprime lobbying as it is his past forays into unorthodox decency, such as recognizing that mass roundups and deportations of undocumented immigrants and their children is inhumane as well as impractical, acknowledging that global warming is a reality, not just a secular-socialist hoax designed to crush freedom, and (the latest news from five years ago) suggesting that medical care should be available to everybody—all hundred per cent, which necessarily includes even more of the undeserving, the improvident, and the ungodly than does the ninety-nine per cent.