[Peace-discuss] The Rand and Rachel Show

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Weekend Edition
	May 21 - 23, 2010
	CounterPunch Diary
	The Rand and Rachel Show
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

American politics continue their plunge into ritual farce. Last week we had the 
spectacle of progressives rallying to the right-wing Elena Kagan, largely on the 
grounds that it’s improper of dirty minded Republicans, not to mention Glenn 
Greenwald, to suggest that sexual identity might be a relevant element in 
assessing a candidate for the US Supreme Court. In other words, 41 years after 
Stonewall, long live the closet!

Now we have the uproar over Rand Paul, the libertarian Tea Bagger who just won 
the Republican primary in Kentucky. His grilling by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC on 
his lack of commitment to every Title of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is being 
cast as a political encounter as momentous as that between Clarence Darrow and 
William Jennings Bryan in the Monkey Trial. Turn on the radio and you’ll hear 
howls about Rand on every liberal and leftist frequency iin execration of the 
Slouching Beast that is Rand. David Corn herded him into the 9/11 nutball 
corral, because Paul had gone on the Alex Jones Show (though he’s never endorsed 
9/11 conspiracies). By the same token he’s a liberal for having gone on the 
Maddow Show.

That Maddow-Paul set-to on MSNBC was tragic-comic. As CounterPunch co-editor 
Jeffrey St Clair remarked, “Maddow and Paul agree on probably 90 per cent of the 
BIG issues confronting us, from ending the drug and Afghan war, to ending bail 
outs. But because of their own peculiar prejudices, his doctrinaire libertarian, 
hers PC progressive, neither of them can talk about anything other than a 
non-issue such as the Civil Rights Act of 19 -- SIXTY-FOUR. It's like a Dadaist 
play.”

Start with Rand. Like many libertarians he is never happier than in dashing back 
through the corridors of history to distant, sometimes obscure champions in the 
fight for liberty, as construed by libertarians. On the night of the MSNC 
face-off it was William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the New England Anti-Slavery 
Society in 1832. When Paul rolled out his name in response to one of her early 
questions about his posture on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Maddow blinked in 
astonishment as though he was mustering to his side the shade of the Venerable 
Bede. If she’d asked him about his posture on the rights of juries to nullify, 
to act according to the dictates of conscience and to set the law aside, he’d 
probably have brought up Edward Bushell and the landmark case against William 
Penn and William Mead in 1670.

Libertarians are like that. On some big and important things they’re admirable 
and staunch. Many of them, on some big and important things, are rancid. Half of 
Rand Paul’s positions are disgusting, like his end-of-week defense of BP. Other 
libertarians decry him from being evasive on O’Reilly’s Show about opposing war 
with Iran. Libertarians in the dust and heat of the political arena have no 
grasp of scale or priority. At heart many of them are nutty, martyrs to their 
truths, like fourth-century Christian schismatics. Ardent to refute charges that 
they favor the untrammeled sway of the market, the rejection of all federal 
intrusion, they dash to Von Mises and kindred heroes with all the childish 
enthusiasm of Gabriel Betteredge invoking Robinson Crusoe in The Moonstone. They 
have no sense of timing. Rand Paul, after five minutes of jabbing from Maddow, 
could have easily swerved the conversation towards issues more congenial to the 
MSNBC audience than his theoretical take on the Civil Rights Act. He could have 
denounced the farce of financial “reform”, of Bush’s and Obama’s wars, of 
constitutional abuses. These are all libertarian positions. But no. He couldn’t 
stop himself shoving his foot in his mouth. He seems dumb.

It’s the easiest thing in the world for a grandstanding liberal to push a 
libertarian into a corner. Then they’ll get praise for their unflinching 
courage, like Morris Dees’ South Poverty Law Center putting another “hate group” 
in the Index and waiting for the contributions to roll in.

Here’s Maddow, brandishing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as though this is the 
only matter worth considering in the forthcoming race between Rand Paul and the 
Democrat, an awful neo-liberal prosecutor, Kentucky’s current attorney general, 
Jack "I'm a Tough Son-of-a-Bitch" Conway. Between Conway and Paul, which one in 
the U.S. Senate would more likely be a wild card – which is the best we can hope 
for these days – likely to filibuster against a bankers’ bailout, against 
reaffirmation of the Patriot Act, against suppression of the CIA’s full torture 
history? Paul, one would have to bet, and these are the votes that count, where 
one uncompromising stand by an outsider can make a difference, unlike the 
gyrations and last-ditch sell-outs of Blowhard Bernie Sanders. Liberals love 
grandstanding about what are, in practice, distractions. You think the Civil 
Rights Act of 1964 is going to come up for review in the U.S. Senate?

If Rand Paul hadn’t been so preoccupied with winding up for what he plainly 
thought was his knock-out punch, concerning Maddow’s posture on the right to 
bear arms in every restaurant in America from Joe’s Diner to Le Cirque, he could 
have turned the tables easily enough, just by saying that this ritual 
flourishing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act doesn’t have too much to do with what 
has happened to blacks since that glorious day, from an appalling school system, 
to blighted housing, constricted employment possibilities, shriveled share of 
the national income and most recently the greatest transfer in US history of 
money and assets from African Americans to rich white people by the mortgage 
speculators, given free rein by Democrats and Republicans.

The truth this year is that liberalism is in awful crisis, symbolized by BP’s 
broken oil pipe spouting maybe 70,000 barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico, not 
on Rand Paul’s say-so but on that of Obama and Interior Secretary Salazar. Obama 
to Salazar: helluva a job, Kenny! (As a evidence of Rand Paul’s utter insanity 
he says Obama is being too tough on BP.) Forty–six years after the Civil Rights 
Act, with its noble liberal principles one can smell not just the nuttiness and 
often straight-up racism of the Teabaggers but the un-nutty, methodical 
corruption of liberalism in fifty thousand concrete instances, most of them well 
known to ordinary Americans.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05212010.html


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