The in-tray continues to be flooded with criticisms of the Dish defending Ron Paul. First, a general dissent:
Unendorsed? Riiight. You're clearly still pimping Ron Paul on your blog, especially with that ad featuring the African-American guy. And you still have yet to really post anything on Jon Huntsman, the one you supposedly decided to endorse. For someone who was on Sarah Palin's case 24/7 about being Trig's real mom, you've been very dismissive of Paul's newsletter debacle to the point where you're now showing his "alternative" ads for not being a bigot even though he really has avoided and deflected this whole thing when questioned on it in a way that would make Palin proud. As a fan of your blog I'm actually shocked you've let something like this slide this easily.
The Dish has done its best to air the strongest criticisms of the newsletters – see here, here, here and here for just a handful of posts. Find another Paul-friendly blog that has aired them more thoroughly – not just this time but last time as well. As for Huntsman, he is, alas, a one-state candidate who is currently losing to Paul in his targeted state. He has even been unable to capture some of Gingrich's voters, most of whom have gone to Romney. But Huntsman is now targeting Paul, as Zeke Miller notes of the above ad:
Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is emerging as the strongest critic of Rep. Ron Paul in the Republican field, with a hard-hitting new video that collects some of the libertarian candidate's incendiary remarks through the years. Paul is what stands between Huntsman and second place in the New Hampshire primary, and Huntsman is willing to do what it takes to position himself as the only alternative to Mitt Romney in the Granite State.
Another:
Like you and Greenwald, I am saddened that this "associations" game is being played. Yes, Ron Paul needs to have a sitdown about the newsletters in the same way Obama sat down with the Tribune on Rezko. But, while I think Paul is an important voice in the process, I could never actually give him my vote. To me, it is the extremity of his arguments that disqualify him – his ridiculous call for a return to the gold standard, the absolutism of his isolationism, combined with his pride that he has had only one bill with his name on it passed in all his years in Congress. It is important to have a core set of values; it is also important to work with other members and compromise – to have positions on which you will bend and principles on which you will not. But he presents himself as someone for whom his positions and his principles are one and the same (the newsletters notwithstanding). His absolutist stances, and his unwillingness to support any bill that doesn't meet his very narrow purity test, suggest to me that he is not the person who should be holding the veto pen.
Another:
You wrote: "And it has shown that the left is ultimately more concerned with the hunt for damning ideological associations, than with the ideas that Paul has promoted – even when those ideas are closer to some of candidate Obama's than president Obama's."
Where to begin? First of all, Obama did not espouse anything close to Paul's isolationism when he ran for president. He threatened to bomb Pakistan if our allies there proved unwilling or unable to strike al Qaeda. He wrote a long piece outlining his foreign policy, in which he stressed the need to refocus the war on terror on the Af-Pak border region. On domestic policy, again: huh? Obama would have nothing to do with Paul's strange idea of freedom, in which any kind of persecution, discrimination and repression is fine as long as a state government does it, rather than the federal government. Can you imagine Obama arguing that states should be able to outlaw abortion, or that the Civil Rights Act is an unconstitutional violation of freedom of association? This is a dangerous and asinine position. For all of Paul's fetishisation of what he imagines the Constitution to mean, he seems to have missed the 14th amendment, which applied the Bill of Rights to the states. The Supreme Court had ruled, in 1833, that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. The 14th amendment applied them – or incorporated them- to the states in what is known as the "incorporation doctrine."
Another defends Paul:
I think you are not seeing these dununciations against Paul for what they are: attacks not from the left-right partisans but from the established business wing of both parties. The truly progressive and intellectually honest leftists I know, including myself, both agree and disagree with Paul about his issues, just like all fair-minded and politically engaged people. I wanted to vote Paul in 2008 but couldn't, and I had hoped that Obama would not continue awful Bush-era policies, but he has of course disappointed true liberals all over the map, and I will hope to vote Paul this fall. I will vote Paul over Obama, Obama over Gingrich or Santorum, and I will not vote if it is Romney/Obama. Those two are cut from the same cloth.
True liberals – those of us that believe in the middle class, not fighting stupid wars – would love to see Paul in the Oval Office, or Kucinich, or that guy in Brittain who is railing against the EU. We see them as being the only sincere politicians – at least I do. I know that they believe everything they are saying.
I abhor voting corporatist Democrats, but the Republican party has been trying to drive this country off of a cliff since the second Clinton term. The GOP and Dems are the right and left wing of the American Business Party, and Paul stands outside of it. If he pulled a miracle and won next November, I would predict that he would be hedged in by Congress even worse than Obama, but I take comfort that these libertarian ideas are growing and spreading.
It is a shame that Paul is so old. This movement – the new one not yet coopted by religionists and business interests, as the Tea Party has – will need a new voice or it will fade away and the oligarchs will have won. I am not an Occupier, but I hear their message. As a nation we cannot endure what the two parties have wrought for much longer.
The Dish 