Some good times rolling on Twitter this morning. All springs from this.
Hacky Daily Caller hit job yields genuinely interesting political philosophy discussion. Twitter, sometimes you’re pretty alright.
— Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) March 22, 2013
Leading to this.
Well, the filibuster performed by Senator Rand Paul this past week has left the political world with no lack of opinion on the subject. Rarely have I seen a political maneuver leave not one person of note in D.C. (or elsewhere) with a sense of ambivalence. Everyone is either euphoric, red-faced or nonplussed.
Let’s begin with euphoria. I, with some qualifications, belong in this camp. Rand Paul’s filibuster along with the assistance of Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and others was a breath of fresh air for those of us looking for the Republican Party to finally start being a voice of opposition and not a milquetoast-y echo of the Obama Administration. For all the hubris and bluster we got from McCain, Graham over Benghazi and Hagel to only fold like deck chairs? The routine is getting old.
Now, this filibuster got the GOP hawks’ dander up. The wonder-twins of McCain and Graham were furious and resorted to name calling of Paul and his band of Tea Party senators. They are hawks (of sorts), especially McCain who, while he does whatever he can to make trouble for his own party and get media adoration as a result, always supports the War on Terror and any kind of military action. I appreciate that he doesn’t want the President’s hands tied in the defense of the nation, but Paul is talking about a larger constitutional issue regardless of who the president may be at any given time.
However, the hawks do have a rational concern. Rand Paul is the son of Ron Paul. Ron Paul is an isolationist who is generally against any and all military action by the United States…going so far as to the use the language of our enemies and call the U.S. Military “occupiers” in foreign lands. Since Rand Paul came to the Senate he has been what some describe as “Everything you like about Ron Paul, but without the crazy.” He is libertarian at heart but has seemed more broad-minded to American defense and even Israel (a country the PaulNuts are none too fond of). However, he has spoken out about the powers of the President to take military action and is a strong advocate of the War Powers Act. This got an airing out at SOS John Kerry’s confirmation hearings:
“I agree with candidate Barack Obama, who said in 2007 that the president doesn’t have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack,” explained Paul. “I’d like to know if you agree with candidate Barack Obama or President Barack Obama, who took us to war in Libya without congressional authority, unilaterally?”
Kerry responded, “Well, Senator Paul, one of the things this committee has spent a lot of time on is the War Powers Act, which I support, and I believe in congressional authority to go to war.” However, Kerry tried to give himself some latitude, explaining that “are occasions which I have supported which a President of the United States has to make a decision immediately and implement that decision, execute on it, immediately.” Kerry listed occasions where he has supported a president bypassing Congress, explaining that he though President Obama went with that tradition when he authorized military action in Libya.
“I would argue though that the Constitution really has no exceptions for when you’re having a tough time or when people disagree with you that you just go ahead and do it,” Paul retorted.
He then asked Kerry, who protested the Vietnam War after serving in it, about the bombing in Cambodia. “In the early 1970s, you know, after Vietnam, you were quite critical of the bombing in Cambodia because I think you felt that it wasn’t authorized by Congress,” noted Paul. “Has your opinion changed about the bombing in Cambodia — how’s Cambodia different then Libya?” Kerry responded, “Yeah, it is because it was an extension of a war that was being prosecuted without the involvement of Congress after a number of years.”
Unpersuaded, Paul explained that the circumstances were very similar, noting that it was a “bombing campaign unauthorized by Congress.” Paul took the opportunity to again explain constitutional ramifications, noting that there is no latitude to get around Congress when it comes to war.
It’s a good debate to have, in my mind, and I understand the trepidation the hawks have about Rand Paul. Is he a sort of Manchurian Isolationist, making us think he’s not as crazy as his old man until he ascends to the presidency and then becomes the Robert Taft of our age? It’s something to keep an eye on, but I think at this point in time it’s a huge leap to draw such a conclusion.
Granted, I’m one of those damn kids that was reading Ayn Rand in his dorm room in college, but I’ve always described myself as a pro-war libertarian. I loved what Ron Paul had to say economically, but I abhorred what he had to say from a foreign policy standpoint (not to mention the veiled antisemitism). Regardless, I think it is a stretch to say that Rand Paul’s demand that the president admit he does not have the “authority” to kill an American on American soil with a drone is a slippery slope to making the Executive Branch impotent in the defense of the nation.
McCain and Graham’s anger at Rand Paul is very transparent. If you have a legitimate philosophical opinion with a colleague in your own party, do you use words like: “political stunt,” “ridiculous,” and “impressionable libertarian kids?” Meanwhile, John Yoo of the Bush Administration called Rand Paul’s position “extreme.” What is going on here? Again, I understand their difference of opinion but even a Psych 101 student can tell you their reactions are not that of simple philosophical difference. They’re angry and they feel threatened. They’re the philosopher kings of the GOP and they don’t take kindly to being challenged.
In the realm of the nonplussed, we had some of the very ignorant “progressives” which were amalgamated by the socialist actor John Cusack:
For gods sake where are democrats ?? “@democracynow: Rand Paul: Obama Admin Response Drones “More Than Frightening” owl.li/itdHI”
— John Cusack (@johncusack) March 6, 2013
Oh Johnny, you still believe there are people on your side in D.C. there to “do the right thing.” I pity you. All the bluster and grand-standing in the Bush years…all the “no blood for oil,” “no police-state” bleating from the Left was all a bunch of palaver. Once they had the presidency, it no longer mattered. They’re happy to let Obama do whatever he wants because their ultimate goal is to move us to a post-constitutional America.
This brings us to the elephant in the room: President Obama. Rand Paul can say this issue of drone use is about the power of the president – any president – but let’s face it, some presidents and their lust for power are more worrisome than others. Barack Obama and the progressives John Cusack so admires, have made power grabs for the federal government at every opportunity. Want to add drones attacks on Americans to that equation?
Bottom line, the issue isn’t totally clear-cut, but for that reason it needs to be addressed and discussed. Rand Paul has upset the apple cart by doing just that. It’s this kind of leadership that so many Americans and “libertarian kids” have been craving the last 10 years. The GOP is the loyal opposition, but the scale has leaned too far into the loyal end with McCain and the old bull establishment. Rand Paul tipped the scales back toward the opposition side. A shift this country desperately needs.
So who wants to explain this roll call breakdown to me?
Well, it’s been no secret to readers of this blog and my Twitter timeline that since that foul day in November I have been more than a little cynical about politics in this country. The words, “Let it burn!” have crossed my lips a time or two. While I’m not exactly turning around on this, Senator Rand Paul and his band of renown give me a glimmer of hope.
Paul made clear last night the split within the Republican Party, especially in the Senate. You have an old guard that sees themselves as philosopher-kings and the role of government as merely a game to be played to keep the peasants in line. Then you have the new young turks, Paul, Cruz, Lee, et al. They see the government as representative of the people and see themselves as of the people.
The day after the filibuster, the contrast is stark. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been upstaged and they are not happy about it. All their bluster during the Hagel hearings was just that…all part of the game. In the end, they all “work together,” Republicans and Democrats and maintain the status quo.
I absolutely loathe this mentality. McCain and Graham need to be put out to pasture. McCain won’t leave the Senate until death, but the Tea Party in South Carolina has to at least try to get rid of Lindsey Graham. Primary him…even if it’s a losing battle, it’s still a battle worth fighting if for no other reason than pure harassment of this contemptible little man.
Sometimes the battle for its own sake is enough.
Thus Spat Zarathustra
So I read an article about First Amendment icon Larry Flynt, talking about how his empire is flourishing, how he’s a political junky, how he plans to out a closeted GOP Congressman, cottage cheese…you know, the usual stuff with Flynt. On the issue of politics is this little nugget:
Perhaps surprisingly for a man who uses such words, he favors “a decent equal-rights bill for women, along with the Violence Against Women Act.” Opposition to that, in fact, draws his ire. “How in the world can anybody vote against a bill that will protect women against violence? I can’t understand that, and I don’t understand how any woman would vote for a man who doesn’t want to protect them.”
VAWA gives grants to campus offices that promote an event during which male students walk around in high heels with their nails painted red. The idea is that by turning a campus into a replica of Bourbon Street on a bad night, men will be less likely to abuse women.
At the end of George Orwell’s famous novel Animal Farm, which was a metaphor for Stalinist Russia, the animals look through the window to see the pigs and the human playing cards and have a hard time telling the difference between the two. What was once a dream of an animal paradise had devolved into a despotic regime that closely resembled that of the humans they had ousted from power. Some great thinkers (though I can’t remember exactly who at this moment…might have been Orwell himself) took Orwell’s message a step further and predicted that this was the future of the USA and USSR. Someday, the two super powers would look at each other and see a mirror image. That was not to say that one idea, capitalism or communism, would triumph over the other, but rather each would move in the others direction until the similarities overshadowed the differences ten-fold.
I think this theory is sound and very close to becoming reality. The greatest trick history played on the United States was the fall of the Soviet Union. Foolishly (and I’m no different) we thought we had won. Freedom and liberty had triumphed over oppression, we stated with whimsy forgetting that while human beings still factored into the equation, ideas never die, they rise from the ashes like a phoenix wearing a cheap Mardi Gras mask. And we play the fools each and every time.
The one instance of such a prediction I can find was by a man named Dwayne O. Andreas, a crony-capitalist who headed Archer Daniels Midland Company for forever-and-a-day, who stated in 1989 that in about 30 years, the United States and the Soviet Union “won’t look that much different,” and both would look more like (then) West Germany: a semi-socialist state. (More details lie behind a Chicago Sun-Times pay-wall that I’m not jumping over unless someone starts paying me to write this crap.)
Whatever his reasoning, I think he’s spot on and despite the “fall of communism,” the theory is becoming reality and thanks to Obama and Putin might just meet his timeline.
In my mind, one of the most significant moves made by Putin during his never-ending presidency was the elimination of elected governors of the Russia’s federal districts. According to Wikipedia:
In July 2000, according to a law proposed by him and approved by the Federal Assembly of Russia, Putin gained the right to dismiss heads of the federal subjects. In 2004, the direct election of governors by popular vote was ended. This was seen by Putin as a necessary move to stop separatist tendencies and get rid of those governors who were connected with organised crime.
The last thing Putin wanted was a Russian federal districts taking a page out of Latvia’s playbook, but it also allowed Putin to tighten his control over the bureaucracy of the country and prevent any free-thinking governors from challenging his rule (Anybody remember Alexander Lebed?). Granted, this law was overturned in 2012 and while I’m no expert of Russian politics, I would wager a paycheck the “freely elected” governors aren’t much for making waves.
The reason I bring this is up is to draw parallels to the American situation. We now have a federal bureaucracy the likes of which Calvin Coolidge could have never imagined, but Americans do have some escape routes: they’re called Red States.
While we can never fully escape the hand of the Washington, D.C. and the federal taxes and regulations that come from it, it is still possible to live in well-run, prosperous regions of the United States. If you’ve had enough with high-taxes in California, you can move to Texas. If your business is being destroyed by state regulations in New York, you can move to Florida, or Idaho, or Nebraska. If you’re sick of crime in Chicago and not having the right to defend yourself there with firearms, you can move to Arizona.
Recently, Texas Governor Rick Perry has embraced the role of a shadow president in the shadow country of Texas. Everything the feds or blue states like Illinois and New York do wrong, Texas does right. Americans don’t have to leave their country for a change of domestic conditions the way someone in the UK or France must. Gerard Depardieu’s frustration with his taxes couldn’t be solved by leaving Paris and going to Lyon or Nice, he had to leave France altogether. And where did Depardieu chose to exile himself? Russia. (Someone left the irony on.)
So while Putin makes Russia attractive to rich actors, Obama makes Americans hate anyone who prospers. Thus, each super power steps a little closer to the other.
What may be America’s best hope is what I discussed earlier: States’ Rights. Now for liberals, this is a dog-whistle for slavery. The South fought in the name of states’ rights in the Civil War but their argument is forever tainted due to the fact that slavery was a part of that struggle. Those of us in reality know that when we talk about states’ rights we are not looking for a return to black slavery but a refuge from a (to put it mildly) heavy-handed central government.
This is the next step for the fifth columnists in the country. It probably won’t come to fruition in an Obama presidency or even Hillary Clinton’s inevitable presidency, but little by little, they will chip away at the 10th Amendment and eventually eliminate the possibility of places like Texas electing Rick Perry as their governor, or Indiana electing Mike Pence, and so on. It’ll happen slowly, subtly, so that people hardly notice.
This is why so many of us cry, “Let it burn!” As a close friend of mine said to me recently: “We want a FAST decline, not a new normal. The bums can’t endure a fast decline. Only winners can.”
It sounds harsh, but the alternative is the road to serfdom. Which path do you chose?
I don’t watch cable news channels anymore. They bore me and I rarely find anything enlightening, but I do catch up on it thanks to various blog news sites. Apparently, last night John Stossel of Fox News had a debate with Ann Coulter over conservatism vs. libertarianism. The Blaze has a mashup:
Their biggest point of contention? Social Conservatism versus the Libertarian “Individuals Should Be Left Alone” approach.
The evening began pleasantly enough, the two discussing whether the U.S. should’ve invaded Iraq following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Coulter believes military action was justified because Saddam Hussein was “definitely looking for uranium from Niger.”
But then things became a little more heated when Stossel decided to shift gears and brought up legalizing drugs.
“Libertarians and pot,” Coulter laughed. “This is why people think libertarians are pu**ies.”
The redacted word there being “pussies.”
Stossel went all in Libertarian versus Social Conservatism: “Why can’t gays get married?”
“Well, they can,” she answered. “They have to marry a member of the opposite sex.”
The 1,400+ Libertarian students, who were there as a part of Stossel’s annual taping at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C., became increasingly hostile, jeering and booing Coulter along the way.
“This is another one where you’re just sucking up to liberals when there are big fights,” Coulter continued.
“No, we believe the individual should be left alone,” Stossel responded.
“Marriage is the most important institution to civilize young people. I make divorce a lot more difficult,” she said. “Liberals want to destroy the family.”
She explained that the left wants to destroy the family so that people will become totally dependent on government.
More jeers and boos.
O
kay, there’s a lot right and wrong in all this on both sides. Indeed, liberals do want to destroy the family. This is known as the Gramsci Effect:
Antonio Gramsci asserted that the survival of a free market society was based on “cultural hegemony,” and that the communist vanguard had first of all to subvert that cultural hegemony in order to seize power. [...] The hard left understands that it must undermine, subvert, and liquidate traditional culture in order to replace all of the multitudinous relationships which form the dense network of family and community life with a univocal culture in which every nexus of human contact is mediated by the state.
However, despite the fact that homosexuals are pawns in this evil game, few of them are aware they play such a role and just want to be “married” and enjoy their lives like anyone else. What could be wrong with that?
Well, something, but not for the reasons that Stossel and his big-L Libertarians advocate. A very astute commenter (grimjack3791) on The Blaze article nails its:
Hey Libertarians: “I want the government to legalize gay marriage” = “I recognize that only the government has the authority to recognize my love and commitment for another individual and I recognize that only government say-so makes my commitment official.” Pretty short-sighted for the party of laissez faire, no?
The correct stance on gay marriage, or any marriage, is to dispense with government marriage licensing entirely.
First paragraph, gold. The second needs a little analysis. Back in a previous life, when I was living in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, I attended a dinner party with several law students, most of them socialists (though they prefered the tag “liberals”) and one a libertarian much as myself. The subject of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in St. Paul was broached and many lamented the fact that the Mayor of St. Paul would not recognize the Gay groups that were marching in the parade. They were allowed to march, you see, but the Mayor was against it and as such wouldn’t “recognize” their participation. My response was like a hand-grenade dropped into the tray of steamed asparagus: “So what?”
“So what?! It’s terrible that he won’t recognize them!”
“Why does that matter? Does that mean the gays can’t be gay? That we’re not actually seeing them in the parade? They’re invisible? Why does their happiness depend on the opinion of some government official?”
“THANK YOU!” said the other libertarian.
I don’t remember much after that, but I believe the subject petered out as most subjects do when liberals lose the argument.
As to the issue of gay marriage. I totally understand it from an economic level. If, for example, two men are partners in life and want to have the economic benefits that a married heterosexual couple have, I get that and I say they should have it. Added to that, you can run across a case where you have a same sex couple together for decades; one of them dies and his family, who had cut him from their life, is now able to seize his assets leaving the partner with nothing. That’s crap, and there should be recourse.
However, I’m less sympathetic with the argument that gays should be “married” and that a civil-union in the eyes of the law isn’t enough. This says to me that you aren’t entirely happy being gay and you want to be just like the heterosexuals. If you can’t get married in a church, then maybe you need to start your own church. Yes, that’s simplistic, but it all comes down to not feeling whole unless you’re recognized by people who don’t like you. That’s nonsense. That’s a “you” problem and something you have to get past if you want to live a fulfilling life. And it’s not just gays. Every walk of life falls into this trap, from teenagers and their popularity cliques to ethic minorities in foreign lands.
As for libertarianism…I have no patience for so-called “libertarians” who are without pragmatism. The big-L Libertarians don’t want us involved in any foreign entanglements: no army bases, no wars, no buts, no coconuts. It’s a very immature argument to say that foreign policy should only be reactive and that domestically we should play by the statists’ rules.
I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I can say that neither do Stossel or Coulter.
I knew a day would come when facts no longer mattered, I just thought I would be old when said day arrived. Alas, here I am in my 41st year and the era of full-on Orwellian Newspeak is here.
I mentioned on Twitter last week that the fact Chuck Hagel has even one Senate vote of support is inexcusable. The Ron Paul-ites, or “PaulNuts,” immediately called me an anti-American and behold to the Jews. Now we learn that along with the rest of Hagel’s anti-Israeli language, he said in 2010 that Netanyahu is a radical and Israel is becoming an apartheid state. It’s a bit like saying I’m a radical because I don’t invite people that want to kill me to live in my house.
But no matter, these words only act as resume enhancements for Hagel since he has been nominated by a President that feels the exact same way about the Israelis if not all Jews in general. I’m old enough to remember a time when someone like Hagel, regardless of party affiliation, would be career-dead before you could say James Watt. But those days are now past for half of the political populace.
So I’m in day 10 of one of the worst colds I’ve ever had. Funny thing is it’s all in my throat…my chest is completely clear. Thus laryngitis kicked in on Day 5 and what little voice I have sounds exactly – not kidding – exactly like this:
