His speech at CPAC has Andrew Sullivan gushing once again. Given Sullivan’s laudable and oft-stated contempt for the tea party right, it’s odd he should still be so taken with Paul, whose backers are at the very core of tea party lunacy, according to Tom Schaller and Dana Goldstein.
And let’s not forget that after dropping out of the 2008 race, Paul endorsed Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin for president. Baldwin, as Adam Holland notes, just expressed sympathy for Austin suicide terrorist and murderer Joe Stack, whose demented views are “shared by millions of Americans who are also fed up with Big Brother,” Baldwin claims. Baldwin has also argued that “Martin Luther King, Jr. brought havoc and unrest to America as few men have ever done.” And as founder and pastor of Florida’s Crossroad Baptist Church, Baldwin also believes that “homosexuality is moral perversion.” We are just scratching the surface of Baldwin’s extremism, which Ron Paul in effect endorsed in 2008.
Look, people are hungry for noble anti-establishment politicians, and for good reason. But the issue isn’t that “pundits keep dismissing” Ron Paul, as Sullivan claims. Quite the contrary, Paul has so successfully whitewashed his far-right profile that he’s got pundits giving him mainstream cred at every turn. Scary.
“Which is more egregious?” [McCain] asked reporters. “Reading a word from your hand or from a teleprompter?”
From this story on the increasingly odious John McCain and his bumbling, near-pitiable defense of Sarah Palin. (Hat tip Marc Cooper.)
I’m stating the obvious but I can’t help myself: President Obama, like his predecessors, and like Palin herself at the 2008 Republican Convention, uses a teleprompter when delivering lengthy prepared speeches. When Palin read crib notes from her hand, she was in an informal Q&A session — precisely the setting in which an informed candidate would not need crib notes. The equivalent situation would be for our current president to read notes scrawled on his hand during a White House press conference.
John McCain knows this to be so, and that makes his comment above all the more cynical, dishonest and disgraceful.
About 15 years ago, when the Clinton administration sent troops to Haiti to restore the democratically elected left-populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, I joined a small group of hard-left demonstrators in a number of pitiful marches against the intervention. For the life of me, today I cannot tell you why.
George Packer, writing in Dissent, supported the intervention, and soon after, the magazine published a letter from me in strong disagreement. Packer replied back and tore me to shreds. That’s not how I saw it at the time, but it’s true. Unfortunately I don’t have these materials handy to post online.
My stance wasn’t entirely crackers. The U.S. had a long and dismal recent record in Haiti, propping up dictators, backing the Revolutionary Front for Advancement and Progress in Haiti (FRAPH), a grotesquely named right-wing death squad, and so forth. My leftist allies and I figured that in light of all that, any U.S. military intervention could only do harm. In other words, the stance of Hugo Chavez right now. What we refused to acknowledge was that the White House was pursuing a noble policy, even as the CIA was pursuing ignoble policies through the back channel — a fact that ultimately gave FRAPH leader Emmanuel “Toto” Constant safe harbor in my own fair city, in nearby Queens. (Constant was found guilty of grand larceny and mortgage fraud in 2008 and was handed a stiff sentence, with his Haiti crimes taken into account.)
All this to say that Haiti has been on my mind for a long time, though my outlook has evolved. Today the same myths persist — Chavez and the dinosaur left blast U.S. “occupation” while the Bill O’Reilly right blasts all aid attempts as a waste and Haiti as hopeless. Nick Kristof demolishes the latter in an essential column. In short, Haiti is poor thanks to crippling debt, rampant deforestation, years of U.S.-backed dictatorship, on and on. Kristof writes:
…Haiti in recent years has been much better managed under President René Préval and has shown signs of being on the mend.
Far more than most other impoverished countries — particularly those in Africa — Haiti could plausibly turn itself around. It has an excellent geographic location, there are no regional wars, and it could boom if it could just export to the American market. [...] [L]et’s challenge the myth that because Haiti has been poor, it always will be. That kind of self-fulfilling fatalism may be the biggest threat of all to Haiti, the real pact with the devil.
Via Peter Hum and Patrick J. — John McCain has taken to the Senate floor to mock federal funding for jazz: “Next time you’re in New York, go to the Lincoln Center. You’ll see that we’re spending $800,000 of your money for jazz at the Lincoln Center. Jazz lovers rejoice.”
As Patrick notes, the federal sums going to jazz institutions represent a barely measurable cost per taxpayer. As for the cost of inflicting Sarah Palin on us all, I’ll let Andrew Sullivan handle that:
The only reason we even know about Sarah Palin is John McCain.
He picked her so carelessly, and his thought process was so cynical, that he should stand in the dock of public opinion before Palin does. Her vanity led her to say yes to his crazy offer. But he gave her that chance. And in the end, she is his responsibility.
… And what’s truly telling about Washington is that a man like McCain, who perpetrated this nonsense and even now refuses to take an ounce of responsibility for it, is nonetheless invited on countless talk shows and treated like the hero he always was. And no one demands he account for this train-wreck outside his tested cant about Palin “exciting the base.”
If he had any sense of responsibility, he would resign. And if the Washington media had any sense of responsibility, it would never invite him on TV again without demanding he take responsibility for what he nearly did to the national security of this country. No one who put this person near the nuclear button should have a future in public life.
For this and so many other reasons, Senator McCain, you’re a disgrace.
Andrew Sullivan on Dick Cheney, who has once again accused our president of giving aid and comfort to the enemy:
If you truly use a position of such authority to show contempt for the sitting president, to accuse him of treason, to attack him on the day he addresses the nation in a critical address, to divide him from the troops, to use sacred issues of war and peace which a president is solemnly engaging as a political weapon or as a vain and self-serving attempt to make your own record look better, then you have no core respect for the institutions and traditions and civility that make a constitutional democracy possible.
I didn’t vote for him on November 3, but Mike Bloomberg has done the country a service and I wanted to acknowledge it. In stark contrast to his predecessor, the insufferable demagogue Rudy Giuliani, Bloomberg has voiced support for Eric Holder’s decision to try KSM and other 9/11 defendants in a civilian court here in New York. One now sees why President Obama endorsed Bill Thompson only halfheartedly and campaigned for him not at all: because on the national stage, Bloomberg is not an Obama foe. (In some respects, Bloomberg is more liberal. In a yes-or-no lightning round during the first mayoral debate, he was asked whether Obama has done enough on gay rights. “No,” Bloomberg said.)
I can think of few things more nauseating than Giuliani, Dick Cheney and others lecturing the country on the proper way to deal with terrorists. One chief argument is that we shouldn’t grant these suspects the full constitutional protections enjoyed by U.S. citizens. But these same people support the denial of such protections even to defendants who are citizens, such as Jose Padilla. They also believe the Geneva Conventions are “quaint” and don’t apply to anyone detained in the war on terror, citizen or not. So Giuliani, Cheney, the especially ludicrous Sarah Palin — they’ve all made plain their contempt for due process and the rule of law across the board. Thankfully, they have no authority on these matters at present and we must work to keep it that way.
Furthermore, the Obama haters — these supposed authorities on national security — are the same people who plunged the U.S. into an occupation of Iraq with no planning whatsoever; who awarded key posts in Iraq to the inept sons and daughters of GOP cronies; who frittered away billions upon billions of dollars not just on the cost of the war itself, but on outrageous boondoggles, hopelessly mired in corruption. (And now we’re warned in apocalyptic terms about health care reform adding to the deficit.)
I can scarcely keep up with the avalanche of stupidity surrounding the impending trial, the Sarah Palin “book” tour, the ongoing campaign to derail health care reform and etc. But just as Palin is a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the right, I have to point once again to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as a symbol of everything wrong with the left.
Chavez has now taken the step of praising the hostage-taker and murderer Carlos the Jackal. He once again cites Robert Mugabe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “brothers” and even has positive words to say about Idi Amin.
I wouldn’t blink at this point if Chavez hailed Jeffrey Dahmer as a great anti-imperialist. It’s far more insidious that morons and frauds on the extreme left, people who have the nerve to call themselves “peace” advocates, continue to paint Chavez as a hero.
David Frum, one of America’s last sane conservatives, links to famous photographs that remind us of the sacrifice of Muslims who died as members of the U.S. military. And yet just yesterday, the very day of the Fort Hood massacre, GOP House members gave their imprimatur to a fanatical far-right rally, at which people held up posters of President Obama in a headwrap, with his name rendered in mock-Arabic script. Republican elected officials have picked a bad time to enable and encourage hate. But at this point there’s almost no daylight between them and the crackpot fringe.
Early reports have it that Nidal Malik Hasan was morally opposed to deploying to Afghanistan to fight fellow Muslims. Anyone inclined to view that sentiment with sympathy ought to consider that the militants arrayed against the U.S. in AfPak do not share Hasan’s view. They murder Muslims with calculated cruelty on a regular basis.
James Traficant, nine-term Democratic congressman from Ohio and convicted felon, has kicked off his post-prison career by blaming the Jews for his plight and signing on as a columnist for the neo-fascist American Free Press. Adam Holland has the story, and manyother stomach-churning stories as well. Make it a point to read his excellent blog.
Not the ones you’d think, but bedfellows just the same. Johann Hari demolishes Ayn Rand (nee Alisa Rosenbaum), who remains a right-wing saint despite her mediocrity (not to mention her forthright celebration of child rape and murder). And Alan Johnson rips into Slavoj Zizek, equally a star among the academic far left (subscriber link only). Zizek finds Hermann Goering’s view of power to be a useful model for progressives. Seriously.
As I’ve noted before, Zizek penned a glowing tribute to Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men, which is supposed to be a scathing indictment of authoritarianism. Cuaron believes “the tyranny of the 21st century is called ‘democracy,’” which is a steaming pile of trendy nonsense, perfectly in line with Zizek’s thought.
