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

Sat May 22 18:51:28 CDT 2010

I think that's right. Conason has always been a shill for the (worst) Democrats.

Any sort of left-right critique of the cozy Republican-Democrat playpen of 
American politics scares the American establishment to death - and they're 
willing to go to apparently any extreme to restore order and discipline to their 
charade of American political discussion.  Look what they did in the wake of the 
First and Second World Wars.

A correspondent who lives in Russia is visiting the US this week and writes, 
"Man, Americans are totally obsessed with race. I've seen like 15 references to 
it in the past 24 hours. They seem to talk about it a lot on TV."

I suggested to him that the reason it's all over the media is that it's the 
political establishment's principal propaganda campaign against outsiders - it's 
the desperate liberal defense of the indefensible Obama administration (and its 
filthy war) that all its critics are racists.

Obamaism cries "Racist!" where McCarthyism cried "Communist!" - and for the same 
purpose.  --CGE

On 5/22/10 10:10 AM, E.Wayne Johnson wrote:
> 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.
>>>
>>> _____________________________________________
>>>
>>> Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that
>>> will help them to interpret the world and to change it.
>>>
>>> Submit via email: moderator at portside.org Submit via the Web:
>>> portside.org/submit Frequently asked questions: portside.org/faq
>>> Subscribe: portside.org/subscribe Unsubscribe: portside.org/unsubscribe
>>> Account assistance: portside.org/contact Search the archives:
>>> portside.org/archive
>>
>>
>> -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by
>> MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
>>
>> _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list
>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>>
>
>

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.