Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

my snippets:

America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture — obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.

Because most of those policies are fully bipartisan in nature, the election season — in which only issues that bestow partisan advantage receive attention — places them even further outside the realm of mainstream debate and scrutiny. For that reason, America’s elections ironically serve to obsfuscate political reality even more than it usually is.

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I’m about to discuss the candidacies of Barack Obama and Ron Paul, and no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite.

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the point that she’s making is important, if not too subtle for the with-us-or-against-us ethos that dominates the protracted presidential campaign: even though I don’t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits.

…it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

… “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.” Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations withdrones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has wagedan unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened“Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

…The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul.   …  all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views.  …  Paul scrambles the comfortable ideological and partisan categories and forces progressives to confront and account for the policies they are working to protect. His nomination would mean that it is the Republican candidate — not the Democrat — who would be the anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate.

…progressives frequently ask: how can any progressive consider an anti-choice candidate but don’t ask themselves: how can any progressive support a child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior?

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There are very few political priorities, if there are any, more imperative than having an actual debate on issues of America’s imperialism; the suffocating secrecy of its government; the destruction of civil liberties which uniquely targets Muslims, including American Muslims; the corrupt role of the Fed; corporate control of government institutions by the nation’s oligarchs; its destructive blind support for Israel, and its failed and sadistic Drug War. More than anything, it’s crucial that choice be given to the electorate by subverting the two parties’ full-scale embrace of these hideous programs.

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Still, for better or worse, Paul — alone among the national figures in both parties — is able and willing to advocate views that Americans urgently need to hear.

Next time you step inside of the voting booth | Maybe you will think of the honest truth | Instead of raising a foolish man

How’s that hope and change working out for you? | Did it give you all that you want it to? | Did it lead you into the promised land?

Those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course | We’ve raised our debt, we haven’t balanced our budget | The assault on freedom carries on | The trouble with our liberal friends is not their ignorance | They know so much that isn’t so | Each year the need grows greater – the program grows greater | The more the plans fail the more the planners plan

In Obama’s telling, it’s the refusal of the rich to “pay their fair share” that jeopardizes Medicare. If millionaires don’t pony up, schools will crumble. Oil-drilling tax breaks are costing teachers their jobs. Corporate loopholes will gut medical research.

It’s crude. It’s Manichaean. And the left loves it. As a matter of math and logic, however, it’s ridiculous.

Judging from attitudes I’ve observed, this tactic might work, to a point. The same people who refuse to take personal responsibility for their own situation are more than happy to ‘go after’ the rich is some half-wit logic of why that is the right thing to do.

President Obama graciously offered to take questions submitted via Twitter today, courtesy the #AskObama hashtag. Being an inquisitive sort, I decided to submit a few that have been nagging me.

Below are my favorites:  (click on full article above for more)

• An $8 billion high speed train leaves Chicago for Iowa City at 8:15am at 40mph. Why?
• How come you haven’t made unemployment illegal? #duh
• Instead of making cars get 62 mpg, why not 62 million mpg? Also, do something about the gravitational constant.
• Have you ever had a menial job, changed your own oil, or fixed a toilet?
• Subtract Malia’s age from the number of states. Multiply the result by the number of jobs saved or created.
• Math wasn’t your strong suit, was it?
• I let my Mexican drug lord license expire. Am I still eligible for the free machine gun program?
• When you’re visiting his volcano lair, does George Soros let you feed the laser sharks?
• The staffer who suggested this Twitter Town Hall is fired, isn’t he?
• Are you smart enough to create a problem so big that even you could not solve it?
• Why isn’t your cabinet unionized?
• If Joe Biden has a massive stroke, (a) do you have a replacement in mind, and (b) how would you tell?
• Is there any job you’d be better at than president?
• I understand you finally quit smoking. Do they make a patch for spending addicts too?
• Is this question racist?
• Why do you need permission to be clear, and not need permission to bomb Libya?
• On behalf of the entire US population: dude, WTF?
• Let’s say instead of winning the future, we end up in a tie. Do we then go to sudden death overtime?
• I just voted to increase my sobriety ceiling. Why won’t the bartender give me another drink?
• I really need to start living within my means. Do you recommend I start holding up banks or convenience stores?
• If ATMs are so bad, why do you keep treating me like one?
• Whose spending created your job?
• When you create jobs, why do always create them for Texas?
• Are strawmen cheaper when you buy them by the gross?
• How much CO2 is created by a burning straw man?
• Who are these “those who say”?
• This whole Twitter Town Hall thing is turning out to be another amateur disaster, isn’t it?
• If Eric Holder gets indicted in Operation Fast & Furious, should he get a civilian trial?
• If we eat the rich, what do we get for dessert?
• if punishing employers results in more employment, can you also punish beer makers?
• Psst… got any spare tix for the 2016 Chicago Olympics?
• Since you’ve doubled the number of wars, shouldn’t you be getting another Nobel Peace Prize?

And now, a few words from our Vacationer-in-Chief…