[Peace-discuss] Fw: The Roots of Rand Paul's Civil Rights Resentment

[E.Wayne Johnson]

Sub-total fiction.

But some one is really worried about Rand Paul and the tea party, and 
actually it's the same bunch that hates the progressives too.  It's the 
people who brought us Clinton and Bush and Obama and Cheney, and they are 
trying
to stir up division between the progressives and the libertarians, who were 
getting way too cozy.

Democrats want us to forget that they were the party of racism, and that it 
was their party that had the holdouts on reform of cultural and 
institutional racism.  They dont want you to know that Cheney and Rove and 
the neocons and the regulars of the GOP hate the Tea Partiers as much as any 
of their other detractors.

I was thinking this evening about what Carl said about equality of income 
and wealth in the US 35 years ago and today.  It is a useful measure of "are 
we better off?"  The real problems in America and the world today have 
rather little to do with racism.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "unionyes" <unionyes at ameritech.net>
To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Saturday, May 22, 2010 9:31 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fw: The Roots of Rand Paul's Civil Rights 
Resentment


>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG>
> To: <PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG>
> Sent: Friday, May 21, 2010 9:14 PM
> Subject: The Roots of Rand Paul's Civil Rights Resentment
>
>
>> The Roots of Rand Paul's Civil Rights Resentment
>>
>>     Lurking beneath the Paul family's libertarian
>>     politics is a strategy of pandering to "populists"
>>     like Pat Buchanan
>>
>> By Joe Conason
>> May 21, 2010
>> http://www.salon.com/news/rand_paul_kentucky_senate_republican/index.html?story=/opinion/conason/2010/05/21/racial
>>
>> To understand Rand Paul's agonized contortions over
>> America's civil rights consensus, let's review the
>> tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him.
>> Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate
>> nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely
>> associated over the past two decades with a faction
>> that described itself as "paleolibertarian," led by
>> former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer
>> Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with
>> the "paleoconservatives" behind Patrick Buchanan, the
>> columnist and former presidential candidate whose
>> trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism.
>>
>> Repeatedly during Ron Paul's political career, his
>> associates used the same kinds of inflammatory rhetoric
>> used by Buchanan in order to attract support and raise
>> money, all while Paul himself pretended not to know
>> what they were doing and saying in his name. Paul could
>> always cover himself by saying, just as Rand Paul says
>> now, that his opposition to civil rights statutes is
>> purely constitutional and has nothing to do with
>> bigotry.
>>
>> The last time that anyone examined the details of the
>> Paul family's gamy history was back in 2008, when the
>> New Republic dug up copies of newsletters sent out
>> under Ron's name to raise money, and found that they
>> were replete with ugly references to blacks, Martin
>> Luther King, homosexuals and other targets of the
>> racist far right. At the time, Reason magazine, a
>> libertarian magazine that opposed the "paleo"
>> deviation, gave the most revealing account of its
>> movement's degenerate element in a long article by
>> Julian Sanchez and David Weigel.
>>
>> Following Ron Paul's dismal performance in the 1988
>> presidential campaign as the Libertarian Party
>> candidate, Rockwell and Rothbard "championed an open
>> strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to
>> build a coalition with populist 'paleoconservatives,'
>> producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose
>> racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored
>> the controversial Paul newsletters" uncovered by the
>> New Republic. Rothbard died in 1995, but in 2008
>> Rockwell was still at Paul's side as a top advisor,
>> "accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting
>> his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing
>> his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas
>> congressman's recent writings and audio recordings."
>>
>> According to Sanchez and Weigel, the tone of Paul's
>> newsletters shifted to reflect his political
>> circumstances. Between his first presidential campaign
>> and his return to Congress in 1996 as a Republican,
>> they were filled with slurs against blacks generally
>> and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular, including the
>> accusation that the civil rights leader "seduced
>> underage girls and boys." Rothbard hated King deeply,
>> describing him in November 1994 as "a socialist,
>> egalitarian, coercive integrationist, and vicious
>> opponent of private-property rights ... who was long
>> under close Communist Party control," and concluding
>> that "there is one excellent litmus test which can set
>> up a clear dividing line between genuine conservatives
>> and neoconservatives, and between paleolibertarians and
>> what we can now call 'left-libertarians.' And that test
>> is where one stands on 'Doctor' King." (Then again, he
>> hated Lincoln too, whom he disparaged in the same essay
>> as "one of the major despots of American history.")
>>
>> This offensive drivel was calculated to wring
>> contributions from a narrowly targeted segment of the
>> population. The Reason story quotes Ed Crane, longtime
>> president of the Cato Institute, recalling a discussion
>> with Ron Paul about the most fertile source of direct-
>> mail contributions to his campaign: the mailing list of
>> the Spotlight, the anti-Semitic national tabloid
>> published by the "populist" Nazi sympathizer Willis
>> Carto.
>>
>> Both Rothbard and Rockwell wrote of their strategy for
>> a "right-wing populism" that would bring "the rednecks"
>> into the libertarian movement. In an essay that
>> appeared in their own joint newsletter in January 1992,
>> Rothbard cited Joe McCarthy and David Duke, the openly
>> racist former Klan leader, as "models" for this
>> approach. (According to Sanchez and Weigel, a 1990
>> issue of the Ron Paul Political Report discussed Duke
>> and his movement "in strikingly similar terms.") This
>> new movement would seek to mobilize an alienated white
>> middle class against wealthy East Coast elitists and
>> the "parasitic Underclass" spawned by liberal policy --
>> identified clearly enough in a regular newsletter
>> feature called "PC Watch," which featured news items
>> about "interracial sex" and "thuggish black men
>> terrifying petite white and Asian women."
>>
>> As for policy, the paleolibertarians advocated lower
>> taxes, abolishing welfare, and "elimination of the
>> entire 'civil rights' structure, which tramples on the
>> property rights of every American" -- a sentiment that
>> Rand Paul echoes in alluding to the right of private
>> businesses to practice racial discrimination.
>>
>> In 1992, Ron Paul joined with Rothbard and Rockwell to
>> support Pat Buchanan's insurgent primary candidacy
>> against the incumbent Republican President George Bush.
>> (Buchanan returned the favor in 2008.) "We have a
>> dream," wrote Rockwell, "and perhaps someday it will
>> come to pass. (Hell, if 'Dr.' King can have a dream,
>> why can't we?) Our dream is that, one day, we
>> Buchananites can present Mr. and Mrs. America, and all
>> the liberal and conservative and centrist elites, with
>> a dramatic choice ... We can say: 'Look, gang: you have
>> a choice, it's either Pat Buchanan or David Duke.'"
>>
>> No wonder Sanchez and Weigel concluded with a
>> forthright condemnation of Ron Paul's dishonesty on
>> race. "Ron Paul may not be a racist," they wrote, "but
>> he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to
>> racists." The same polite formulation could be applied
>> to the hard-line activists behind the Goldwater
>> campaign in 1964, or the "Southern strategists" of the
>> Nixon White House, or the "populist conservatives" of
>> the George Wallace campaign, many of whom still remain
>> active on the right today.
>>
>> Despite the persistent efforts of Buchanan, Rockwell
>> and many others on the far right, their deranged
>> "dream" of political advancement through racial
>> conflict never developed into a full-scale national
>> nightmare. Instead, King's dream has since drawn closer
>> to fulfillment with the election of Barack Obama. But
>> the profound resentment of the first black president
>> symbolized by Rand Paul and his Tea Party supporters
>> arose from an old political fever swamp that has never
>> been drained.
>>
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