Iowa Primary

lanugo said:

I'm sorry to be so pedantic as to point out the NYT's own history of "dangerous conspiracy-mongering"; whatever the veracity of Paul's claims, surely they haven't cost as many innocent people's lives as the government lies that this particular newspaper was only too eager to propagate.

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I don't think you can write off someone's execrably bigoted views just because they've never given the order to invade another country.

lanugo said:

In all honesty, I have to admit that I didn't know about those ominous newsletters. However, having checked up on the story I'm not surprised to find that there is no conclusive evidence that Paul himself authored the racist and homophobic statements in question. Apparently, there were a bunch of ghostwriters contributing to the newsletter, one or several of whom seem to be responsible for these egregious ramblings. The whole issue was then blown up by the establishment media as part of a smear campaign. Granted, there are Paul supporters with an ideologically perverse background - then again, what is the ideological background of the bankers supporting Obama? Denouncing Paul as racist or homophobic because of some obscure decades-old newsletter clearly is an overly dismissive stance toward a politician whose merits have been largely ignored or disparaged by the mainstream media.

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If we're as generous as we possible can be to Paul, don't you think it's a bit odd that he never read any of the things being published in his name over the course of several decades and thought "Hey, that's a little strong"? In the very best possible case, he's still guilty of colossal negligence. And has he ever publicly retracted any of that inflammatory propaganda? On the contrary, he seems to spend a lot of his time in the company of people who hold views similar to those expressed in his newsletters.

lanugo said:

Are you in possession of the absolute truth?

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Nope, only you can make that heady claim, obviously.

I do find it interesting the way that people treat politicians on the other side of the partisan divide. Mention Obama's birth certificate / academic record / influence of Saul Alinsky / friendship with Ayers (at one time a communist terrorist) and your average NYT reader will roll his eyes. "Yeah... literally Hitler". But guilt by nudges and winks works just fine for the NYT crowd when Ron Paul is the subject. Doesn't he know people in the Birch Society? Doesn't he think the CFR rules the world?

vimothy said:

I do find it interesting the way that people treat politicians on the other side of the partisan divide. Mention Obama's birth certificate / academic record / influence of Saul Alinsky / friendship with Ayers (at one time a communist terrorist) and your average NYT reader will roll his eyes. "Yeah... literally Hitler". But guilt by nudges and winks works just fine for the NYT crowd when Ron Paul is the subject. Doesn't he know people in the Birch Society? Doesn't he think the CFR rules the world?

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Oh don't be such a dick Vim. The stories about Obama's academic record and birth certificate were complete fictions, as you know. Paul's office did issue far-right filth for years and he did keynote the John Birch shindig just 4 years ago. These aren't winks and nudges. They happened.

@vimothy

not really comparable things, are they?

edit: crackerjack said it much better

Oh don't be such a dick Vim.

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I'm not saying that the two are identical, just that it's interesting to compare them. At any rate, the comparison doesn't contradict what I already believe, which is that people believe what they want to believe where stuff like this is concerned.

Obama has murky ties to a communist terrorist--or at least, that doesn't seem like a particularly egregious reading of what I understand to be the facts. Imagine that Ron Paul had murky ties to a neo-Nazi terrorist. (Perhaps he does)! Hard to see that they would receive symmetrical treatment in the NYT.

vimothy said:

Obama has murky ties to a communist terrorist

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I'm sorry, but to suggest Obama has ties to a "communist terrorist" is patently ridiculous (+ frankly beneath you Vimothy, even if you're just trying to stir people up/make a rhetorical point). him (edit: "him" meaning Ayers, not Obama, in case that wasn't clear) + his wife have long, long since morphed into the kind of boring ex-60s radicals gone liberal whose entire raison d'etre is essentially to attend dreadfully boring faculty parties + fulfill right-wing fantasies about liberal academia. in Europe no one would bat an eyelash at them; Germany is probably full of the fuckers, I mean.

(on a personal note, I saw him speak a few years ago at a screening of a Weathermen documentary + he's one of the least threatening people I can imagine, very "trying to stay hip dad" (or grandad, more like) if you will. after the talk he went out for drinks w/some of the organizers + wound up flirting rather uncomfortably with some of the young, winsome female activists...)

padraig (u.s.) said:

I'm sorry, but to suggest Obama has ties to a "communist terrorist" is patently ridiculous (+ frankly beneath you Vimothy, even if you're just trying to stir people up/make a rhetorical point). him + his wife have long, long since morphed into the kind of boring ex-60s radicals gone liberal whose entire raison d'etre is essentially to attend dreadfully boring faculty parties + fulfill right-wing fantasies about liberal academia. in Europe no one would bat an eyelash at them; Germany is probably full of the fuckers, I mean.

(on a personal note, I saw him speak a few years ago at a screening of a Weathermen documentary + he's one of the least threatening people I can imagine, very "trying to stay hip dad" (or grandad, more like) if you will. after the talk he went out for drinks w/some of the organizers + wound up flirting rather uncomfortably with some of the young, winsome female activists...)

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LOL, didnt he just serve on some board with the guy or something? And didnt the NYT initially break the Ayers story in 2001, and then again reveal Obama's 'connections' with him in 2008?

Vimothy's in good company though:

Goldberg falsely attacks NY Times Obama coverage
January 25, 2009 8:05 pm ET
SUMMARY: In yet another instance of mangling the facts to show purported media favoritism toward then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, Bernard Goldberg writes in his new book: "Finally, in the last month of the campaign, the [New York] Times returned to the Obama-Ayers story, but only after McCain and (mostly) Palin began making it an issue on the campaign trail." In fact, in what was reported as the "first time" Gov. Sarah Palin raised Obama's connection to William Ayers, Palin actually cited the October 4, 2008, New York Times story to which Goldberg refers.

http://mediamatters.org/research/200901250009

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Obviously, he's no longer a communist terrorist. But why is the standard of evidence that he must still be a communist terrorist? Imagine, say, that Obama once wrote dubious radicalist screeds in his community newsletter. He's no longer the sort of person, it was the spirit of the age, etc, etc.

lanugo said:

Paul is 'honourable' in the sense that...radically rejects an imperialist US military agenda that mostly serves the enrichment of powerful interest groups from the security industry and the military-industrial complex.

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you know who else warned Americans about the dangers of the military-industrial complex? a guy named Dwight Eisenhower. he also, wisely, made a concerted effort to kept the U.S. out of Vietnam. but somehow I don't think he's on your list of honorable heroes (tho maybe he is I dunno).

as far as Paul, I reckon he's more personally honorable than most of the people he's running against, at least in his refusal to pander, tho the same could have been said of Huckabee or on the other side, Kucinich. not coincidentally, none of them were/are seen as serious contenders. not to completely deny personal conviction, but not having much at stake really frees you up to speak truth to power (whatever your personal version of that may be).

as far as specifics, the racist, or at least playing heavily on racial fears, thing is pretty concrete. a brief timeline. here's a link to 50+ scans of old newsletters for anyone who wants to muck through them. my impression is that at best he knew about it + let it slide, at worst encouraged it, + at a certain point decided it was a bad idea, probably for pragmatic reasons in making the transition from fringe character to national figure. homophobia is a bit trickier, I reckon he isn't a fan of homosexuality personally but is not in the virulent, hateful Santorum sense. he kind of walks a fine line - the one all Republicans have to walk sooner or later - between appeasing insanely homophobic evangelicals + making a kind of "dislike the sin, but sinner has personal freedoms" Libertarian-ish argument. here's a clip from 2008 where he artfully dances around the pointed questions of a full-on Bible-quoting homosexuality is evil interviewer (warning: the interviewer says some truly reviling shit, so be prepared).

the other, much bigger problem w/Paul is, of course, that most of his other ideas aside from all the M-I complex/anti-imperialism (tho he's really into Israel) stuff are totally fucking nuts, unless you're really into Ayn Rand + Ludwig Von Mises. oh + he's super against abortion.

vimothy said:

He's no longer the sort of person, it was the spirit of the age, etc, etc.

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for one, Paul's transgressions are much more recent - some of those newsletters were put out while he was actually in office as a Congressman - or in the case of his at best still dubious views on homosexuality, still ongoing. for another, for all that Paul/his people want to distance him, they're his own, under his auspice. whereas Obama never actually wrote anything (or had it ghostwritten for him). he knows a guy - not exactly well either - who wrote/did stuff that ended decades before Obama met him.

you know I'm hardly a champion of Obama, or the Democrats in general. I'm just saying you're making an absurd, untrue comparison in order to make a point that is already widely accepted in general terms. I do get a real kick out of you making "the NYT crowd" out to be some snide liberal cabal (which has a bit of truth in it I guess) tho.

padraig (u.s.) said:

I reckon he isn't a fan of homosexuality personally but is not in the virulent, hateful Santorum sense. he kind of walks a fine line

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http://www.anyclip.com/movies/bruno/ron-paul-interview/

I'm just saying you're making an absurd, untrue comparison in order to make a point that is already widely accepted in general terms.

Hahaha--fair enough, mate.

But isn't there an arbitrary quality to it? The world might have turned out very differently. The nudges and winks would be going in the opposite direction. And the New York Times would be writing about them.

It's ridiculous to compare Obama being on an education board with Will Ayers with Ron Paul putting racist newsletters out himself. It would only be a valid comparison if Obama was once a member of the Weathermen himself, as Paul appears to be a racist HIMSELF, not having once had meetings with one.

This guy satirised Rand Paul pretty well during his Senate campaign. NeanderPaul says, "Abolish all laws!"

IdleRich said:

But he beat Huntsman into third in New Hampshire (behind Romney) - so where are we now? Surely Perry and then Newt will be next to fall out (Santorum wasn't competing).
So Romney is red-hot favourite to get the nomination now and Paul looks like being his closest rival despite zero interest from the GOP and its media. What are the chances of him standing as an independent?

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I think at this point his official sprachregelung is that he doesn't have any plans to disassociate himself from the Republicans but that, generally, he has a disliking of stating things categorically.

In my opinion, it wouldn't be a smart move to go independent; he'd bring his base of staunch supporters and a reasonably substantial share of disillusioned GOP and maybe even Dem voters on his side, but in the end he'd be lacking vital establishment support which, who knows, he might have gained against all odds if he had remained a Republican candidate. So, by running independently he'd only split the Republican voter base which would ultimately play into the hands of Obama.

The prospect of either Obama or one of the GOP establishment candidates becoming president is truly dreadful. Given Obama's record though, I honestly don't know if US foreign policy would really become that much more hawkish under a Republican president - there's hardly any room for that.

For all I know, the social engineers behind the scenes may consider a "democratic" or "liberal" face to a continued US war agenda beneficial in terms of perception management of public opinion. People are still outraged about the war-mongering of the Bush years, but tend to ignore that the Obama administration has proven to be equally or even more belligerent.

lanugo said:

I think at this point his official sprachregelung is that he doesn't have any plans to disassociate himself from the Republicans but that, generally, he has a disliking of stating things categorically.

In my opinion, it wouldn't be a smart move to go independent; he'd bring his base of staunch supporters and a reasonably substantial share of disillusioned GOP and maybe even Dem voters on his side, but in the end he'd be lacking vital establishment support which, who knows, he might have gained against all odds if he had remained a Republican candidate. So, by running independently he'd only split the Republican voter base which would ultimately play into the hands of Obama.

The prospect of either Obama or one of the GOP establishment candidates becoming president is truly dreadful. Given Obama's record though, I honestly don't know if US foreign policy would really become that much more hawkish under a Republican president - there's hardly any room for that.

For all I know, the social engineers behind the scenes may consider a "democratic" or "liberal" face to a continued US war agenda beneficial in terms of perception management of public opinion. People are still outraged about the war-mongering of the Bush years, but tend to ignore that the Obama administration has proven to be equally or even more belligerent.

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umm, actually...oh never mind.