I'd like to thank Joy Freeman-Coulbary at the Washington Post for proving that, after all this time, I can still be surprised. I stand and give her a very sincere slow-clap for surviving to adulthood with whatever horrific brain lesions are required to, on top of having the most parodic serious law firm website on the internet, say the following with a straight face: Ron Paul / Dennis Kucinich 2012!:
As a progressive, a Ron Paul/Dennis Kucinich presidential ticket would stoke my fires. It might also attract Republicans who long for the party’s non-interventionist, fiscally conservative roots.I heard the horror stories from my mother, a long-time Cleveland resident who had the misfortune of living there during Kucinich's brief, petty tenure somehow bungling an office as relatively ceremonial as its mayor, long before I heard the Ron Paul platform, which was itself long before I learned that the Ron Paul platform wasn't a heavy-handed bit of parody from the Huffington Post or other such humorless bunch.
Paul and Kucinich are both congressmen, and it's good that their voting power is diluted to the point of relative insignificance on their own, both for us and for themselves. Good for us because it diminishes their ability to inflict their varying political psychoses on the rest of the country, and good for them because it seems that every time they've been any kind of singular role, they've nearly terminated their own careers. After coming within 250 votes of a recall after firing Cleveland's much more popular chief of police in a Soviet-style purge of the dangerously likeable underling, Kucinich had just enough time to make Cleveland "the first major American city to default on its financial obligations since the Great Depression" before being ejected from office by his own lieutenant governor.
Paul is a failure of equal proportions when he's allowed a share of power greater than 1/435th of the pie. During a brief vacation from the GOP before crawling back after his rather predictable defeat, Paul presided over the beginning of a serious decline for the Libertarian Party. Despite running in a go-go '80s Reaganaut's banner year (1988), he performed less than half as well by percentage than the doomed little party's doomed little 1980 candidate. That party's long decline phase is hardly over: Ron Paul, far from energizing the party, left the party in a state middling from 300,000 to 500,000 votes per election, down from the pre-Ron Paul glory days of 1980 when the party received almost a million votes. The non-profit he founded, the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, has proven such an embarrassment to him and his current campaign that it rivals Paul's first congressional bid and even his first presidential bid for Paul's greatest failures.
But such failures are piddling compared to the spectacular failures both men have achieved with the positions they have articulated, with the word "articulated" here being deployed charitably. From the standpoint of rational skepticism, Kucinich and Paul are the political equals with the Huffington Post's "science" writers and Alex Jones, respectively, and from the standpoint of a humanist, both men agree with Neville Chamberlain that evil in the world should be left alone, and if we can't leave it alone, we should at least treat it with dignity.
Kucinich, co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, never met a crank he wouldn't spend your tax dollars bringing to testify in front of Congress. When not pissing away your money to have an expert in Chinese folk superstitions tell Congress about his ineffective nonsense or warning his fellow Congresspeople about how vaccines cause Gulf War Syndrome, he's bragging about getting federal funding for "alternative" medicine (which would just be called "medicine" if it worked) slipped into the major healthcare reform legislation passed earlier in the term.
This is when Kucinich isn't out UFO-spotting, by the way.
Paul is crazy in the same kind of way. While not usually exculpatory by itself, you can sometimes tell a bit about a man, or men, by their biggest fans, and lets just say that there's a reason that David Icke (yes, that David Icke) names Paul and Kucinich as his fellow warriors in the Vaccine Liberation Army. Paul and Kucinich share the same bizarre paranoia about their precious bodily fluids, just like they share a disturbing fetishism for ineffective pseudoscience. But Paul's batshit insanity trends towards a different direction.
I used to like Alex Jones because I believed in what he was saying, then I liked Alex Jones because I thought he was laugh-out-loud uproariously hilarious, and let me tell you, Ron Paul has spent a lot longer in column A than I ever did. Paul's own Foundational for Rational Economics and Education (see above) has been informing on Paul's batty militia, gun-nut, Christian eschatologist, right-wing obsession with the Trilateral Commission (a global conspiracy network so secretive you have to click through their website almost six times before you get to the published minutes of every meeting they've ever had), the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, a childishly cookie-cutter racism, and the international banking conspiracy that rules the world, presumably with the help of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, the Jews (obviously), K.A.O.S., the Bilderbergers, and, lets say, Dr. Claw. They're all equally plausible, and their combination in a single mind all speaks to precisely the kind of hopelessly reality-challenged conspiracy-mongering that we don't want in the leader of the free world. The conspiracy milieu from which Paul hails is the kind that rejects evidence, that debases logic, that seeks irrational extravagance for fun and profit, and it's the kind that really loved Ron Paul when he was flirting with 9/11 Trutherism.
Paul's fanatics really hate to hear that the libertarian position is today enjoyed with varying levels of success in such economic powerhouses as Somalia; the last time we tried it here in the states we called it the "Gilded Age," and the second time we tried it, Herbert Hoover successfully inaugurated almost two decades of big-government liberalism to undo that second attempt. Of course, Paul's rhetoric about abolishing effective government does not extend to imposing draconian obstacles to abortions that American women haven't had to deal with since the last time we let conservatives show us just what "small government" means for women's rights.
Just as troubling, and more relevant here, is Paul's contempt for the secular principles of government established by the Founding Fathers, enshrined in the Constitution, and upheld by centuries of American jurisprudence. Claiming that the Constitution is "replete" with references to God (who is not mentioned a single time in the Constitution, which Paul will be swearing to uphold if he becomes president), Paul thinks he knows better than the Constitution's own author about whether or not that document creates a wall of separation between church and state. In addition to siding with Alabama legal joke Roy Moore (I'd call him a judge if I thought he'd ever had a jurisprudential thought in his life) about posting sectarian Christian versions of the Pentateuch on government property, Paul is a creationist, and sees no reason why your children shouldn't be taught as such in the public schools that he wants to abolish.
Perhaps the most troubling affront to humanism we find in this dunce-hatted duo is their shared desire for an appeasement approach to the overseas theocracy. Kucinich and Paul both leaped to Gadhafi's defense as soon as President Obama dared attempt to use American hard power for something good overseas (not one American soldier died in our interference with the last days of Gadhafi's petty little dictatorship, by the way) with almost as much zeal as they both to this day protect the brutal theocracy that is currently gunning down its own citizens in Syria. Kuninich thinks that Hamas, the half-baked mafia that responded to its first big electoral defeat by murdering the opposition and seizing power, is a legitimate negotiating partner with Israel and shame on Israel for not taking Hamas more seriously.
There isn't a brutal theocracy you can think of that Paul and Kucinich wouldn't proudly appease. Iran is no exception. They prefer to put their heroic Lindbergian isolationism ahead of the rising apocalyptic pretensions of Iran, whose imperial ambitions already see them becoming the pre-eminent arms dealer for every clandestine Islamic regime in the Middle East, many of which are the very ones Paul and Kucinich go out of their way to reassure- don't worry, dear theocrats, dear fascists, dear Islamic imperialists, American power is inappropriately used on anything but self-defense, so your aggression against your neighbors and your brutality to your own people is none of our concern. And if you exploit their oil wealth for your own personal gain while squashing the free press and trampling the rule of law but at least have the good sense to call yourself a "socialist," well, more power to you.
But it is our concern. So is their open contempt for science and reason, their conspiracy-mongering, the galling disregard for this part of the Constitution or that. The cringe-worthy facebook posts fawning over "Dr. Paul" have got to stop, and dragging Kucinich into it is just the cement the confederacy of dunces needs to become a horde. Can you imagine your pretentious Ron Paulite friends, the ones who took a single econ class in college and who know everything about why the Fed should be audited and why the gold standard is just sheer genius and those newsletters weren't really Dr. Paul and CNN cut off that interview with that soldier and the mainstream media ignores him and blah, blah, blah - mixed with the most airheaded, most self-absorbed, shamelessly anti-intellectual self-styled liberals you have ever met, the ones who think Arafat deserved every penny of that Nobel Peace Prize for fighting against Israeli imperialism, the ones who prefer Chris Hedges, you know the type. It's been suggested that they get together and have a party.
Fuck that party.
1 comments:
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