http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/06/12/paul-suspends-presidential-campaign-forms-new-organization/
A GREAT BLOW HAS BEEN STRUCK TO DEMOCRACY TODAY. ALTHOUGH DR. PAUL MADE GREAT STRIDES IN MAKING HIS VOICE HEARD THE CORPORATE MSM (THAT'S MAINSTREAM MEDIA) ULTIMATELY HAD TO KILL HIS CAMPAIGN BECAUSE GOD FORBID A MAN WHO MAKE SENSE BE THE PRESIDENT OF AMERICA. CORPORATIONS ARE KILLING OUR RIGHTS, NO BLOOD FOR OIL, DOWN WITH THE IRS, END THE ILLEGAL CENSORSHIP THAT IS THE FDA.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
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7 comments:
youre a douche Steve.
It's so charming that Ron Paul thinks he ended his campaign on his own terms.
I dont understand why you two hate libertarians so much. I do love the Weishampel argumentation style though:
Ron Paul is old! And he looks funny! What is this nonsense about fiscal and monetary policy? Dudes crazy to think people are smart enough to know how to spend their own money!
I'm sure the two D'bags that are left are going to do a fucking fantastic job of saying/changing absolutely nothing at all. Because thats what I want from my leaders: feel-good soundbites about how swell everything is and how the government can protect me from myself.
Maybe if we pretend like the nation isnt going down the shitter it wont continue to happen?
Not with a can-don't attitude like that!
The interesting way to look at the Ron Paul campaign is NOT to look at all the extreme measures he supports, but rather to consider what would really happen were he somehow elected. As we all know from elementary school, Congress makes laws, and it isn't like we're going to elect 51 libertarians into the Senate all at once. The President has veto power, a lot of face time on TV and some influence on policy.
Dictator Paul would probably be trouble, but what could President Paul actually do? Feel free to add to/correct the list, but I think he would be likely to be able to:
(1) Kill federal funding to programs that had only marginally passing support.
(2) Limit the total amount of federal legislation passed, causing state-by-state votes on policies that add regional heterogeneity to the law, which was the original point of having states.
(3) Not start pseudo-official wars.
(4) Generally terrorize Congress, thus
(4a) Forcing Democrats and Republicans to work together on things outside the Constitution but obviously worthwhile, in order to beat vetoes.
I think none of these things are inherently worse than the way things work now.
Alright I am finally bored enough to do this.
I don't want to seem confrontational, Pat, but your numbered points provide a good jumping off-point for discussion. I will try to reply to them to aid in discussing these issues, plus I will make some points of my own.
1) Federally-funded programs are already having their funding killed and it is already having disastrous results. Bush has been unlucky to preside over two very preventable disasters - Katrina and the Minnesota bridge collapse - that were the result of a systematic, long-term lack of federal funding. Cities are starved for cash because federal grants to cities have been in decline since the 70s. Gentrification has revitalized some cities, but it has pushed poverty, crime, and inequality into the suburbs. Polls have consistently shown that these programs generally have the support of voters when their benefits and costs are described in a propaganda-free atmosphere (i.e., would you support hypothetical program X that gave grants to Y and was supported by Z).
Unfortunately, we don't live in a propaganda-free atmosphere. We live in the day of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Shepard Smith, Brit Hume, and the rest of the Fox News crew. They tell you every day that people are living large off welfare! ($14,000/year, less than minimum wage in Chicago.) They tell you that there exists a welfare queen who used multiple names to amass a fortune off the system! (Research revealed one woman who collected welfare under two different names.) They won't tell you about the most gigantic waste of money in modern history - the American military, which spends $.50 of every global military dollar.
I won't estimate whether or not the public would approve of a cut in military spending; much would depend on how such a question was phrased. And since a nation's military deals with matters of life and death, about which people are justifiably paranoid, it probably depends on what was on the evening news the night before. I do think Ron Paul would probably cut military spending; more on that in item 3.
So, in short, killing federal funding for marginally passing programs would be an awful consequence of a Ron Paul presidency, unless he would cut the military budget.
2) This is another philosophical shift that looks good on paper but would have disastrous results. The tyranny of a state government can be just as complete - or often moreso - than that of the federal government. Consider Louisiana. In 1990, ex-Klansmen David Duke ran for governor there. He lost, but he managed to win a majority of the white vote. Now imagine there was no federal oversight for the voter registration process in Louisiana, no FEC (Federal Elections Commission) that could hear complaints. Would you put it past the Republican party, a white supremacist group, whomever, to throw, cheat, or alter the results of an election? And then once the state is in Republican hands, with a Republican secretary of state, with Republicans in charge of elections, and with a Republican-designed ballot - what recourse would voters have?
Greater state power would also leave the states more free to discriminate in labor laws, hiring practices, abortion policy, minimum wage laws, etc. Also you may have notice that the national dialogue has not been so friendly to certain groups such as Arab-Americans, Hispanics, and gays recently. Do you think district attorneys in Wyoming would prosecute hate crime perpetrators if they only faced pressure from a conservative government in Cheyenne?
So I guess I think that regional heterogeneity is a bad thing sometimes.
3) Ron Paul would not start pseudo-official wars, that much is true. He would almost undoubtedly slash the military budget and pass the savings along to happy little American consumers. But how would he react to conflicts that we already have our hands in? I'm not naive; there are some people out there who need watching. Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmenadijad come to mind. Also Osama.
I guess I can't count this as a weakness of Ron Paul's policy but he needs to fill in the gaps here. In what direction would he lead the world - whether by engaging other nations, or by refraining from engaging them? This is why I like the idea of Kucinich's "Department of Peace". It's a cabinet-level organization that would seek peaceful solutions to world conflicts. Kucinich would pay for his Department of Peace by slashing the military budget.
4) I've never been much of one for bipartisanship. The quality of a law is not related to the number of House or Senate members who supported it. One of the most bipartisan bills in recent memory was the Patriot Act. Russ Feingold was the lone Senator to oppose it; Kucinich and a few others voted "no" in the House. On the other hand, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed only after a bitter partisan struggle that saw the longest filibuster in Congressional history (Strom Thurmond read from the telephone book for over twenty-four hours.) In fact, it is rumored that LBJ threatened to blackmail some Democrats into voting for the bill using nasty personal information that he possessed. Yay democracy!
The fact is, almost every Republican and many Democrats have inappropriate priorities. They cling to their wealthiest donors. The bills they pass together are rarely commendable, and if Ron Paul were to sign such a bill, it would probably be moronic.
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My main problem with Ron Paul is this: the extent to which a country clings to a very rigid interpretation of the way things should be done has nothing to do with the quality of that country. When you judge Japan's government, do you look at the levels of wealth, equality, and human rights? Or do you scrutinize their constitution and laws in an attempt to find the slightest deviation? What sticks out about 19th century Britain to you: the Industrial Revolution, the overseas colonization, or the relationship between the proscribed and exercised powers of Parliament?
Neither history nor a reasonable person doubts that the results of government are far more important than the process. And any leadership cabal involving Ron Paul would produce horrible, horrible results.
To think of this metaphorically: imagine you get on a plane, and Ron Paul is the pilot. You expect to fly to L.A. because you are on vacation or something, I don't know. You fall asleep and when you wake up, the plane has landed in Boston. "We were supposed to fly west!" you say. "You are a bad pilot!"
And Ron Paul the pilot responds -
"I cannot possibly be a bad pilot! I obeyed every tarmac signal, took off on time from the correct runway, and maintained all appropriate radio contact! I conformed to all the regulations which governed my behavior! It is not my fault that I went in completely the wrong direction! I adhered to rules! Rules!"
That's what a Ron Paul presidency would be like: four years of following the rules while flying in the wrong direction.
Thanks, Joe. I'd like to clarify my position and earlier post here.
As far as confrontation, I'm offended only because you called me Pat. It's Patrick. Please.
I do genuinely like Ron Paul for several reasons. In no particular order:
All else equal, I think less government is preferable to more.
I like outsider opinions getting a platform.
I believe the man is honestly trying to make the world a better place.
He is an easy avenue to lash out at the political system as is.
If he were to run as a Libertarian in the fall, I might well vote for him. This is because my idealism that someday, a truly messianic third party candidate might want to know how many people would be willing vote outside the Parties outweighs my hopes for either major candidate. If I believed North Carolina had a chance to be tied except for me, I would not do this. If my vote could possibly be randomly drawn to solely determine the President, I would also not write his name down. Of course, in the latter case I would probably vote for my mom.
To think of this metaphorically, thinking of President Ron Paul is like daring your friends to touch an electric fence. You know they won't, and if they would you probably would feel obligated to try and stop them, but secretly, you kinda want to see what would happen. That was the main point of my post. Thinking about what would happen, and why, is interesting.
I know that doesn't sound much like my "not inherently worse than things are now," but of course that comment is mostly related to the lashing out. You made two comments whose veracity I don't question and which sadden me:
The quality of a law is not related to the number of House or Senate members who supported it.
and
The fact is, almost every Republican and many Democrats have inappropriate priorities.
The democratic ideal is not working here.
Systems don't usually change without a major crisis, and Pres. RP would certainly qualify, from the perspective of current policymakers. Even if the end of some of Ron Paul's roads really do have broken bridges in the North and Klansman dictators in the South, this isn't going to happen in four years.
At the start, it would at least promote interest in local government and cause areas with lesser funding to identify and focus on their most effective programs. It would certainly cut valuable programs too, and without knowing how many or which my flippant can't make things worse might easily fail to be true. But there exists the possibility that it would cause long-run improvement in government sensitivity to the direct wishes of the population. I have to imagine a four year flight to Boston would induce some positive change in the how the airlines run in the future. And if that's not true, I don't want to know.
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