"Ron Paul distortions and smears" by Glenn Greenwald Salon Tuesday November 13, 2007
I'm not trying to be Ron Paul's advocate but, still, outright distortions and smears are distortions and smears. In an otherwise informative and legitimate (and widely-cited) post today about Paul's record in Congress, Dave Neiwert claims:
Even though he claims to be a "libertarian", he opposes people's freedom to burn or destroy their own copies of the design of the U.S. flag.
He then links to two bills which Paul introduced in Congress which would, in essence, amend the Constitution in order to allow prohibitions on flag burning.
But Neiwert's claim here is, in one respect, completely misleading and, in another respect, outright false (in both cases, I assume the error is unintentional). Unlike Hillary Clinton -- the Democratic Party front-runner who, "along with Sen. Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican, introduced a bill that would make flag burning illegal" -- Ron Paul was and is vehemently against any and all laws to criminalize flag burning, including the constitutional amendment he introduced. He introduced that amendment solely to make a point -- one he makes frequently -- that the legislation being offered to criminalize flag burning was plainly unconstitutional, and that the only legitimate way to ban flag burning was to amend the First Amendment.
Indeed, he only introduced those flag-burning amendments in order to dare his colleagues who wanted to pass a law banning flag burning to do it that way -- i.e., the constitutional way. When introducing his amendments, he delivered an eloquent and impassioned speech on the floor of the House explaining why he considered anti-flag-burning measures to be "very unnecessary and very dangerous." And he urged his colleagues to vote against them, including the ones he introduced:
As for my viewpoint, I see the amendment as very unnecessary and very dangerous. I want to make a few points along those lines.
It has been inferred too often by those who promote this amendment that those who oppose it are less patriotic, and I think that is unfair. . . .
It has also been said that if one does not support this amendment to the flag that they are disloyal to the military, and that cannot possibly be true. I have served 5 years in the military, and I do not feel less respectful of the military because I have a different interpretation on how we should handle the flag. But nevertheless, I think what we are doing here is very serious business because it deals with more than just the flag.
First off, I think what we are trying to achieve through an amendment to the Constitution is to impose values on people -- that is, teach people patriotism with our definition of what patriotism is. But we cannot force values on people; we cannot say there will be a law that a person will do such and such because it is disrespectful if they do not, and therefore, we are going to make sure that people have these values that we want to teach.
Values in a free society are accepted voluntarily, not through coercion, and certainly not by law, because the law implies that there are guns, and that means the federal government and others will have to enforce these laws.
Rep. Paul did exactly the same thing with the invasion of Iraq, which he opposed. He argued (accurately) that the only constitutional method for Congress to authorize the President to invade another country was to declare war on that country. The Constitution does not allow the Congress to "authorize" military force without a war declaration. Rep. Paul thus introduced a Declaration of War in the House on the ground that such a Declaration was constitutionally required to invade Iraq -- and he then proceeded to vote against the AUMF (because, unlike Hillary Clinton, he actually opposed the invasion). Thus, saying that Paul wants to outlaw flag burning (as Neiwert's post does) -- or that he supported the war in Iraq -- is just false.
* * * * *
This raises a broader point. It has become fashionable among certain commentators to hurl insults at Ron Paul such as "huge weirdo," "fruitcake," and the like. Interestingly, the same thing was done to another anti-war medical doctor/politician, Howard Dean, back in 2003, as Charles Krauthammer infamously pronounced with regard to Dean that "it's time to check on thorazine supplies." Krauthammer subsequently said that "[i]t looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again."
For a long time now, I've heard a lot of people ask: "where are the principled conservatives?" -- meaning those on the Right who are willing to oppose the constitutional transgressions and abuses of the Bush administration without regard to party loyalty. A "principled conservative" isn't someone who agrees with liberals on most issues; that would make them a "principled liberal." A "principled conservative" is someone who aggressively objects to the radicalism of the neocons and the Bush/Cheney assault on our constitution and embraces a conservative political ideology. That's what Ron Paul is, and it's hardly a surprise that he holds many views anathema to most liberals. That hardly makes him a "fruitcake."
Hillary Clinton supported the invasion of a sovereign country that had not attacked us and could not attack us -- as did some of the commentators now aggressively questioning Ron Paul's mental health or, at least, his "seriousness." She supported the occupation of that country for years -- until it became politically unpalatable. That war has killed hundreds of thousands of people at least and wreaked untold havoc on our country. Are those who supported that war extremist, or big weirdos, or fruitcakes?
Or how about her recent support for Joe Lieberman's Iran warmongering amendment, or her desire to criminalize flag burning, or her vow to strongly consider an attack on Iran if they obtain nuclear weapons? Is all of that sane, normal, and serious?
And I read every day that corporations and their lobbyists are the bane of our country, responsible for most of its ills. What does it say about her that her campaign is fueled in large part by support from exactly those factions? Are she and all of her supporters nonetheless squarely within the realm of the sane and normal? And none of this is to say anything of the Giulianis and Podhoretzs and Romneys and Krauthammers and Kristols with ideas so extreme and dangerous, yet still deemed "serious."
That isn't to say that nobody can ever be deemed extremist or even crazy. But I've heard Ron Paul speak many times now. There are a lot of views he espouses that I don't share. But he is a medical doctor and it shows; whatever else is true about him, he advocates his policies in a rational, substantive, and coherent way -- at least as thoughtful and critical as any other political figure on the national scene, if not more so. As the anti-Paul New York Sun noted today, Paul has been downright prescient for a long time in warning about the severe devaluation of the dollar.
And -- as the above-cited efforts to compel Congress to actually adhere to the Constitution demonstrate -- few people have been as vigorous in defense of Constitutional principles as those principles have been mangled and trampled upon by this administration while most of our establishment stood by meekly. That's just true.
Paul's efforts in that regard may be "odd" in the sense that virtually nobody else seemed to care all that much about systematic unconstitutional actions, but that hardly makes him a "weirdo." Sometimes -- as the debate over the Iraq War should have demonstrated once and for all -- the actual "fruitcake" positions are the ones that are held by the people who are welcome in our most respectable institutions and magazines, both conservative and liberal.
* * * * * *
This whole concept of singling out and labelling as "weirdos" and "fruitcakes" political figures because they espouse views that are held only by a small number of people is nothing more than an attempt to discredit someone without having to do the work to engage their arguments. It's actually a tactic right out of the seventh grade cafeteria. It's just a slothful mechanism for enforcing norms.
Under the right circumstances, enforcement of norms might have some utility. Where things are going relatively well, and the country has a healthy political dialogue, perhaps there isn't much of a need to expand the scope of ideas that we consider "normal." Having all the people whose views fit comfortably in the mainstream stigmatize as "fruitcakes" all those whose views are outside of the mainstream might, under those happy circumstances, bear little cost.
But our country isn't doing all that well right now. Our political dialogue isn't really vibrant or healthy. It seems rather self-evident that it is preferable to enlarge the scope of ideas that we consider and to expand the debates that we engage. The "norms" that have prevailed over the last six years have led the country quite astray and are in need of fundamental re-examination, at the very least. That a political figure (or pundit) clings loyally to prevailing norms isn't exactly evidence of their worth, let alone their mental health. The contrary proposition might actually be more plausible.
There is something disorienting about watching the same people who cheered much of this on, or who will enthusiastically support for President a candidate who enabled and cheered much of it on, trying to constrict debate by labeling as "weirdos" and "fruitcakes" those who have most aggressively opposed it all. As the debates of 2002 should have proved rather conclusively, the arguments that are deemed to be the province of the weirdos and losers may actually be the ideas that are right. They at least deserve an honest airing, especially in a presidential campaign with as much at stake as this one.
* * * * * *
For anyone with any questions about what this post means and, more importantly, what it does not mean, please see here (Update II).
UPDATE: Bruce Fein is an example of a conservative who -- by virtue of his outspoken opposition to Bush lawbreaking -- has generated substantial respect among Bush critics, including many liberals. Yet Fein hasn't changed his views at all. He is, for instance, emphatically pro-life, and rather recently urged that "President George W. Bush should pack the United States Supreme Court with philosophical clones of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and defeated nominee Judge Robert H. Bork." Fein is still a hard-core conservative, but a principled one. At least in that regard, I would compare Fein to Paul.
On another note, I wrote in my prior post concerning Paul that I found the efforts (by Neiwert and others) to smear him by linking him to some of his extremist and hate-mongering supporters to be unfair (for reasons I explained here). Neiwert responded and compiled what he thinks is the best evidence to justify this linkage here.
For reasons I'll detail at another time, I found virtually all of that to be unpersuasive, relying almost entirely on lame guilt-by-association arguments that could sink most if not all candidates (the only arguably disturbing evidence in this regard is this 1996 Houston Chronicle article, which Neiwert didn't mention, and the pro-Paul response is here). Everyone can review the evidence -- all of which is quite old and very little of which relies on any of Paul's own statements -- and make up their own minds.
UPDATE II: Interesting, and otherwise passed on without comment (h/t selise):
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And if we don't get the good doctor?
"In Ten Years Your Life Will Probably Be Terrible (Without Ron Paul, that is)" by Mark R. Crovelli Lew Rockwell.com Tuesday November 13, 2007
That’s right, you read the title of this article correctly, I am indeed predicting that your life ten years from now will be extremely awful. "How on Earth," you are probably wondering to yourself, "could Crovelli, whom I’ve never met or even heard of, know what my life will be like tomorrow, let alone ten years from now?" If you will indulge me for a few minutes, however, I think I will be able to furnish an argument that will convince you that your life ten years from now will indeed probably be miserable.
My argument about how awful your life will be in ten years takes as its starting point the fact that the American economy is in seriously dire straits right now, and will continue to deteriorate over the next few years. I hope I don’t need to convince you that the American economy is at present suffering from a serious credit malaise (which, I might add, I predicted a full eight months before the housing market began to deteriorate in earnest) but I probably do need to convince you that this serious economic problem will persist over the next few years. How, then, can we know that the American economy will continue to deteriorate?
We can confidently predict that the American economy will continue to deteriorate over the next few years because we know that this credit problem can only be addressed by the Federal Reserve in one of two ways: 1) continuing to lower interest rates to appease Wall Street and bail out ailing banks, or 2) leave interest rates where they are (or even increase them) and let banks and investors suffer the consequences of their malinvestments. The fact that there are only two options available to the Fed is important because both of these courses of action will result in continuing economic deterioration in the United States for at least the next few years. In other words, no matter what the Fed tries to do to combat this credit problem, the American economy will continue to deteriorate.
This last statement might surprise you, especially if you listen to economic commentators like Jim Cramer who view the first of these alternatives as a panacea for the current credit crisis. Just lower interest rates, according to this line of argument, and everything will reverse itself, sending the credit, equity and bond markets through the roof. This is not, however, what will happen if the Fed continues to lower interest rates in order to try to combat the credit crisis. On the contrary, if the Fed decides to lower interest rates (i.e., pump more paper money into the economy) this will only serve to temporarily bail out ailing investors and banks, and it will certainly decrease the value of the U.S. dollar vis-à-vis goods and services. In other words, since a decrease in interest rates by the Fed is simply another name for increasing the money supply by injecting newly created cash into the banking sector out of thin air, this new money will necessarily serve to decrease the value of the dollar. What is more, this decrease in the value of the dollar vis-à-vis goods and services (i.e., price inflation) will eventually force an increase in interest rates on its own, because banks and other lending institutions will be forced to add an inflation premium to their loans in order to make their credit transactions profitable as the dollar loses even more value as a result of the new money. (For example, if you were going to lend five dollars to your friend for one year, but you knew in advance that the dollar was going to lose 25% in value over the course of that year, you would tack on an additional 25% premium to the loan, in addition to interest, in order to recoup the value of the loaned money you originally lent out.)
What all this means, in other words, is that the Fed will ultimately be impotent to keep interest rates low over the next few years. If the Fed refuses to bow to Wall Street whining and bank pressure, then the credit crisis will continue to spread as the housing bubble continues to deflate (driving many people, like myself, out of work in the housing sectors), credit continues to dry up for businesses and consumers, and consumer spending (especially credit-financed consumer spending) consequently dwindles causing even more trouble for ailing businesses. If, on the other hand, the Fed tries to combat these serious credit woes by lowering interest rates (again, by pumping more money into the credit markets) this new money will eventually percolate through the economy, raising prices for goods and services in the U.S., decrease the purchasing power of the dollar abroad, and eventually make its way into the credit markets as an inflation premium on loans. In short, the unsustainable economic boom of the 1990’s will inexorably cause an economic bust that cannot be combated by the Federal Reserve – no matter what pundits like Jim Cramer say. The continuing credit crisis, however, is just one reason why your life in ten years will probably be extremely awful.
The next reason why your life will be awful in ten years stems from the fact that politicians and central bankers tend to respond in similar ways to economic crises like the one we are only beginning to pass through. Politicians and central bankers tend, quite simply, to try to spend their way out of credit crises. It is thus quite predictable that the Fed will indeed try to combat this credit crisis by lowering interest rates over the next few years in an attempt (albeit futile, as we’ve just seen) to "stimulate" the economy. This attempt to spur the economy with more cheap credit (rather like trying to heal a boil by injecting more pus into it) will only serve to make your life extremely miserable in ten years when you face a dollar that won’t purchase even a fraction of what it will purchase today. If you are a baby boomer on a fixed income, living off the savings you thought was sufficient to last for years, you will find your hard-won savings account buying less and less and less. If in ten years you are unfortunate enough to have to work for a living (while simultaneously trying to shoulder the enormous national debt, the debt from this war, Social Security for the baby boomers, Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera) you will find the need to renegotiate your wages or salary almost monthly in order to keep pace with inflation to afford your daily bread. You will also find it extremely difficult to save for your own retirement (and you can absolutely forget about ever getting any Social Security) because any cash you stash away in a savings account or under your mattress will rapidly lose value against the goods you want to buy, in addition to the momentous fact that taxes will need to be increased dramatically to fund Social Security and Medicare for the then-dwindling baby boomer generation.
If in ten years, moreover, you are a business owner trying to make a living, you will be in an equally unenviable position. You will be forced, on the one hand, to pay continuously increasing prices for the factors of production that go into your products as the dollar continuously falls in value against those factors, while at the same time you will find it difficult to obtain credit to finance these increasing costs, because banks will be forced to heap the previously discussed inflation premium on your business loans. At the same time, your workers will harass you continuously for wage and salary increases to keep pace with inflation. If your workers are like those of previous generations, moreover, they will probably ignorantly blame you alone for their miserable lot, variously calling you a "capitalist exploiter," and a "profiteer." These misdirected insults directed toward you simply for trying to make a living will undoubtedly provoke Congress, ever opportunistic to reap political rewards for "rescuing labor," into passing increasingly draconian economic restrictions, and price and wage controls. You will probably be forced to pay arbitrarily high legislatively-enacted minimum wages, while you are simultaneously prohibited from charging increasing prices to keep pace with inflation. The end result of this predictable farce will probably mean bankruptcy for you, unemployment for your workers, and credit being taken for the whole episode by the wretches in Congress who will proclaim that they succeeded in "protecting labor," but really they will only have succeeded in crippling the economy still further.
Enough about the economy for now, because there’s still more that that will make your life miserable ten years from now. While we know that the U.S. economy will continue to deteriorate over the next few years no matter how hard the Fed tries to avoid it, we can know with similar certainty that the world ten years from now will not be devoid of "terror." Consequently, we can predict with a great deal of confidence that between now and then our government will find no shortage of nations to invade and people to kill in its futile attempt to stamp out "terror." We can look forward to potential conflicts with Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Venezuela, and maybe even Russia and China over the next ten years if our government resolves to seriously tramp around the world stomping out "terror." You will not be surprised to learn that any and all military adventures between now and 2017 will have to be financed somehow, either by increasing the tax burden on you or by increasing the money supply with more freshly printed dollars (which, of course, will still further depress the economy and the value of the dollar ten years from now).
Have I succeeded in convincing you that your life will be absolutely awful in ten years? Your dollars will by then be increasingly worthless shreds of green paper, and your tax burden will probably have increased dramatically. Your wages will need to be renegotiated constantly in order to avoid constant pay cuts, and the economy will probably be stifled by more and more legislatively-enacted price and wage controls. Your savings accounts and cash reserves will get smaller and smaller as inflation increases, and credit will become increasingly expensive with inflation premiums tacked onto loans, and the supply of real loanable funds will have shrank dramatically by then as more people find it impossible and unprofitable to save and loan their money. You may, moreover, find yourself living under a government embroiled in costly and pointless wars with a score of other nations, passing the costs of those wars onto the future you. Is there no hope that this spiraling into economic backwardness and socialized barbarism can be averted?
There is indeed hope, and it lies with the political fortunes of Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul is virtually the only politician in the last half century to understand the two most important economic and moral truths for a political leader to grasp: 1) war is extremely costly in both blood and treasure, and thus ought to be undertaken only in self-defense against an imminent aggressor (and only against the aggressor himself), and 2) money is the lifeblood of human commerce, and thus must be backed by something more than green paper and government promises. If elected, Ron Paul would return this nation to the gold standard, thereby removing from the government the unrestrained capacity to depreciate the U.S. dollar through the printing of green paper, and the related insidious capacity to fund wars at our expense simply by printing billions in crisp new green paper. Ron Paul further understands that the ultimate source of our current economic woe lies precisely in this capacity to issue credit un-backed by any commodities whatsoever. There is thus hope for both you and the United States as a whole in 2017, and that hope depends upon you and I backing the only man and the only money that can reverse the tide of economic depression and war. These are, respectively, Dr. Ron Paul, and gold.
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