Ron Paul: the mystery continues (Updated)

Watch out for flaming rightwingers

This Sunday's Meet the Press featured Timmy Russert interviewing the current darling of the white-supremacist right, Ron Paul: 2008 Presidential Contender Ron Paul, John Harwood, Chuck Todd 12/23/07. Transcript available.

Among other things, Paul explained why he was against the 1964 Civil Rights Act banning racial discrimination in interstate commerce and also thought it was a bad idea for Lincoln to fight the Confederacy. And this business about abolishing slavery without compensation for the owners, well, Paul thinks that was just going too far!

The "mystery" I'm referring to in the title is why so many war critics and civil libertarians still seem to be making admiring comments about this man and his vapid, far-right ideology. Three things are clearly apparent just in this interview, where Russert let Paul duck out on some of the more embarassing points:

• Paul's criticisms of the Iraq War and the Bush Doctrine are suprisingly weak and ill-informed.

• He argues like a typical old Bircher, with disjointed arguments and a weird intensity in which every point he makes seems to be equally important and in an unchanging tone of trying to convince the doubters that every point he makes is just plain common sense.

• He's a flaming rightwinger.

Before talking more about his interview, I should point out that in the "horse race", Paul's fundraising feats haven't been accompanied by notably stronger poll showing in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Think I'm exaggerating about the Lincoln and slavery business? Here's the "libertarian" Ron Paul laying out his version of the neo-Confederate view of American history:

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..

MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach. (my emphasis)

The man is pimping straight-up neo-Confederate pseudohistory.

[Update: A comment made me think I should expand on this a bit. Paul's response just quoted contains several stock pieces of neo-Confederate hokum.

One, that the evil Lincoln started the Civil War. It was actually the Confederate states seizing federal forts and rejecting the operation of the federal government in the South that initiated the war. And, yes, the Confederates fired the proverbial first shot at Ft. Sumter. But it was not the first shot at Ft. Sumter that caused the war. Seizing the forts and expelling the federal authority were the Confederate acts of war.

Second, neo-Confederates like to claim that Lincoln acted as a dictator. Some pro-repression Republicans (are there any other kind these days?) have also pointed to some of Lincoln's actions against Confederate sympathizers in the North to justify the Cheney-Bush policies. Although some of his actions were later ruled unconstitutional by the pro-Southern, pro-slavery Supreme Court that had made the war inevitable with the Dred Scott Decision in 1857, only with the wildest imaginations could he be called a dictator. Only by rank dishonesty could his actions be compared to Cheney's and Bush's illegal surveillance state.

Third, the Southern slaveowners had rejected as decisively as they could any scheme of compensated emancipation by the time Lincoln took office in 1861. Paul's comment on that notion is just ridiculous.

His comment about how "every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war" is also silly, though you could comma-dance over which ones count as "major" countries. There was a series of anti-Spanish rebellions and internal civil war in Mexico before slavery was abolished. Toussaint L'Ouverture led a famous slave rebellion in Haiti that expelled Napoleonic France from that country and also scared the bejeesus out of North American slaveowners. If Mexico and Haiti don't count for Ron Paul as "major" countries, surely Imperial Spain and Napoleon's France qualify.]

Paul takes the "libertarian" scam to the extreme, wanting to essentially abolish all civilian government functions, leaving only the police and the army. He "softens" it the way that segregationists always "softened" their support of apartheid laws and their opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation (aka, hate crimes laws) by claiming they were simply appealing to the pristine value of "states rights".

There have been times in American history when states actually did defend individual freedom and democratic goals against the federal government's actions, notably in the fight against the Alien and Sedition Acts (the USA PATRIOT Act of the John Adams administration, only worse) and later in the struggle against the Fugitive Slave Law during the decade of the 1850s.

But it also often been the case that state governments themselves acted against democratic rights and principles, not least in the states of the old Confederacy from roughly 1875-1970 in suppressing the basic rights and political participation of African-American citizens. The Constitution requires the federal government to ensure that people in all states have a "republican" form of government. And the 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to restricting the ability of the states to violate those basic freedoms in state law.

So, it's all very nice for "libertarians" and Paulians to claim that they favor wide personal freedoms. But without a federal government to enforce them, what's going to restrain states and private corporations from violating those freedoms?

Ready to give up federal food inspections and drug testing for medicines? Ready to operate in a "free market" in which all manner of quack medical scams can compete on a equal basis? It's wonderful freedom: if your doctor who isn't licensed by the state and didn't even go to medical school gives you an untested drug that kills you, well, I guess you just "made bad choices", as conservatives like to say. The next time you'll know to shop around a bit more before going to the doctor in an emergency.

I have to wonder how closely war critics who praise Paul's foreign policy comments are actually listening to what he says. On Meet the Press, his case for bringing US troops home from South Korea seemed weirdly light on factual information. Even worse, he couldn't give estimates of how much revenue would be lost by abolishing the income tax as he calls for, or how much he would save from his proposed military cuts. He did have a vague number of $1 trillion for the amount that it costs to maintain troops outside the US.

When Russert asked him about an assertion of his that Israel wanted the US to bomb Iran on their behalf, he couldn't cite a single Israeli official suggesting such a thing. He just referred generally to newspaper reports, also without mentioning a specific newspaper. That shouldn't be that hard, especially for a politician campaigning for President with the Iraq War as the center of his public position. Such a thing has been widely reported. And he could have said, "The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reports that so-and-so was calling for the US to bomb Iran."

He even makes a poor case for the idea that Bin Laden and his Al Qa'ida are motivated to attack the US because of US policy in the Muslim world. The neocon and Cheney-Bush party line is that "they hate us for our freedoms", which is their way of avoiding about talking about the dynamics of US policies in Muslim countries, particularly the Middle East, and how the publics in those countries respond. It is a notion is widely and rightly criticized. But Paul criticizes like a simpleton, in a way that is very easy to spin into an "it's all America's fault" claim. And I'm not even sure that would be a false spin. But most literate war critics can articulate it better than he did on Meet the Press.

Here's Paul's bit on Israel wanting us to bomb Iran:

MR. RUSSERT: This is what you said about Israel. "Israel's dependent on us, you know, for economic means. We send them" "billions of dollars and they," then they "depend on us. They say, `Well, you know, we don't like Iran. You go fight our battles. You bomb Iran for us.' And they become dependent on us."

Who in Israel is saying "Go bomb Iran for us"?

REP. PAUL: Well, I don't know the individuals, but we know that their leaderships--you read it in the papers on a daily--a daily, you know, about Israel, the government of Israel encourages Americans to go into Iran, and the people--I don't think that's a--I don't think that's top secret that the government of Israel...

MR. RUSSERT: That the government of Israel wants us to bomb Iran?

REP. PAUL: I, I don't think there's a doubt about that, that they've encouraged us to do that. And of course the neoconservatives have been anxious to do that for a long time.

He gave a stock leave-the-door-open response to Russert's question on whether he would consider a third party run this year. What a boost to the war supporters that would be! They could single out Paul's simplistic, Bircher-type comments on the Iraq War and foreign policy for ridicule and condemnation and try to create the impression that Paul's foreign policy ideas and those of the Democrats were essentially equivalent.

Tags: authoritarianism, neo-confederates, ron paul