My Upcoming Decision

I wanted to highlight an extended comment made recently by commenter Art Deco.

The American Conservative and the dispositions and remarks of its editor, Daniel McCarthy, are the purest source of all that renders the 'alt-right' project problematic. The ongoing conceit is that they represent something true and authentic and sublime in contrast to the vulgarities of 'movement conservatives'. Really? 

There's nothing that's published in Chronicles by anyone not named Fleming, Rockwell, or Francis that might not find a home in some other publication. (As for the stuff published by these men, do you really want recycled copy from the Radovan Karadzic press agency or the White Citizens' Council?). The v Mises Institute is a collecting pool for purveyors of fringe (read crank) social theory and research ("Austrian" economics and neo-confederate historiography). The Rockford Institute is a remnant, just a corporate shell for Chronicles, the "National Humanities Institute" has two salaried employees (Claes Ryn and one other) and issues an absolutely soporific annual. The Unz Review is issued by amateurs whose big idea is that social research is reducible to psychology and anthropology which is reducible in turn to biology and that Science demonstrates this but ideologically driven social researches are dedicated to Not Noticing things. They collect as their acolytes a mess of disagreeable people who are obsessed with blacks and Jews and despise both. (Who also seem to enjoy Steve Sailer's gig as volunteer press secretary for Vladimir Putin and his minions). Their idea of a popular movement is Ron Paul - a conceited goof who trades in historical fabulism (and goldbuggery).

And Daniel McCarthy is a fine example of a type that Samuel Francis and Stephen Tonsor took to task, the 'career conservative'. Except, in his case, he presides over a publication that's always been a cesspool of idiosyncracies: Philip Giraldi's hatred of Jews, Andrew Bacevich's resentments of his former employer and military officers more accomplished than he (Petraeus in particular), Steve Sailer's obsession with a tests-and-measurements psychology that he never studied in an academic setting, Conor Friedersdorf's Miss Manners campaign, and Scott McConnell's sundry aperçus (and contempt for Jews). The whole thing was a train wreck from the get go, and yet they persist in this illusion that they are the 'legitimate' heirs to Robert Taft (who manifested a dispensation in the Republican Party that was non-existent from 1959 to 1990 and has only Russell Kirk as a thin filament of genealogy between then and now).

Then Mr. Deco ends with "rant off". Which caught me by surprise. I think that it's probably a feature of someone who is conservative but not an alt-conservative that they are sensitive to ranting. Antithetically, many alt-con pundits don't realize they are ranting as a normal course of their alt-con punditry. That can be problematic for your argument and your readership numbers. I mused long ago that Dan Larison was king of the exclamation point, and although he has settled down over the years, he still blurts multiple invectives (insane, deranged, ridiculous, absurd, etc.) whenever dealing with mainstream conservatives in his writing when they espouse the slightest hints of hawkishness. And, of course, the Ted Cruz kerfuffle is a great recent example of an alt-con hive-mind rant.

I rather thought the characterizations in his comment were commonsensical and to the point. They were meant to be summaries, obviously. Ron Paul is a historical fabulist; the lily needs no more paint. The von Mises institute is fringy and cranky, and related to that, the word "Austrian" belongs in scare-quotes when modifying economics. Steve Sailer is so obsessed with, well, what he is obsessed with that they should change the saying to "one-note Stevie". (No doubt he would then immediately respond with a long article about why George Shearing wasn't as famous as this blind guy since he had a higher IQ.)

I like summaries when they save me time. I've got a lot of stuff to get done. They might also save me money. Explanation: I was toying with the idea of subscribing to Chronicles Magazine which, as far as I can tell, is much more sensible than TAC and is $45 for a year, 75% of TAC's subscription price. This idea came to me while talking to one of the editors at the Chesterton event I went to last Sunday. He is a pretty good friend of a pretty good friend, and I've appreciated his blog posts in the past.

So maybe Mr. Deco can further weigh in on the proposed decision. It seems that he respects the publication more than TAC from the comments in his "rant". Someone recently reminded me that Aristotle said "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." So although I'm more of a Weekly Standard type of conservative, I think it might be good to imbibe some sensible material from other perspectives. Thomas Meehan is welcome to weigh in also, or any of the regular commenters.

Rand Paul: "We have to start cutting back."

I'm really starting to like Senator Rand Paul. Here's his take on the sequester. Excerpt:

President Obama has dramatically expanded our federal government, and the American taxpayers should not have to endure more tax increases to fund it.

We have to start cutting back.

The forced sequester is not the most ideal scenario, which is why I have an alternative plan that invokes targeted spending to eliminate any threat of layoffs.

President Obama has provoked a sense of unrest within our nation by using outlandish rhetoric and making false claims about the effects of sequestration.

As opposed to stirring the pot, he should attempt to solve the problem.

What President Obama needs to realize is his fiscal cliffs, ceilings and sequesters ruin American confidence and make people wonder if we are working in their best interests.

As Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal pointed out, "Government freakout carries a price. It wears people down. It doesn't inject a sense of energy, purpose or confidence in those who do business in America. It does the opposite."

I trust that the high information reader here already know that Rand Paul gave back $600,000.00 to the treasury because his office said they could get by without it. That is leading by example. I believe this is the second time he's done it--the first time the amount was around $500,000.00. I heard that on Dennis Miller last year.

That's another thing I like. Senator Paul goes on all the conservative talk shows I listen to. Michael Medved, Dennis Miller, Hugh Hewitt, etc. Yes, he has been on Alex Jones's show, also, but I'll give him bug kudos if he can bring some troglodytes into the political mainstream world in which the good Senator seems to live and work.

Good article about Ron Paul

This article really makes a case against Ron Paul as a nominee and president. Excerpt:

Many Americans believed in isolationism during the 1920s and '30s, seeing it as a remedy for America's ills and entanglements abroad and as an antidote to U.S. involvement in WWI. Paul is a throwback to those times. Opposing global entanglements and what he sees as an American Empire, Paul offers a foreign policy which amounts to complete retreat from America's moral responsibilities to the world. He is non-interventionist to the nth degree. When asked by reporter Jeffrey Scott Shapiro about America's entrance into WWII and the need to save Jews from the Holocaust, Paul said:

No, I wouldn't. I wouldn't risk American lives to do that. If someone wants to do that on their own because they want to do that, well, that's fine, but I wouldn't do that.

Think about that statement for a moment, for the implication is that America has absolutely no ethical responsibility for any people anywhere at any time -- except its own citizens. Self-interest, even if six million were to perish, is to reign supreme.

I really wish the Ron Paul candidacy didn't represent such horrible ideas and associations. I want to like him because he has a few good ideas. But alas, we live in reality and not the world of wishes.

Thoughtful Piece on Libertarian Naiveté WRT Islamification

Joe Hargrave is fast becoming one of my favorite Catholic bloggers on political issues. He is libertarian by temperament and is a fan of Ron Paul, agreeing with him most of the time. But his opinion has diverged recently over Paul's comments on the Ground Zero Mosque. He first mentioned it here on TAC where he blogs, and he put up a longer post at his personal blog on Tuesday. Here's an excerpt:

Though I agree with Ron Paul and other prominent libertarians on a number of issues, and even take their side on issues over which they typically disagree with conservatives, such as the war on drugs or even the “war on terror” – if by that is meant the occupation of foreign countries by American troops and the formation of an domestic police state – when it comes to the challenges posed to the West by radical Islam, many of them are, to use the most accurate and charitable word possible, naive.

I have heard Ron Paul, for instance, actually argue once that if Islamic terrorists hated the West for its values, as opposed to US foreign policy, they would be attacking countries besides the United States – as if they hadn’t carried out bombings in Madrid, London, Bali, Jakarta, or other places. Paul and other libertarians routinely deny that Islamic radicals hate the West for any reason other than foreign policy, or at the very least, imply that all hatred of the West can be reduced to that factor.

While I don’t doubt at all that US foreign policy has inflamed jihadism around the world, this reduction simply cannot explain what has been taking place in Europe for the past decades. The radicalization of Europe’s Muslim immigrant populations, growing sections of which declare their open hatred on a regular basis for democracy, free speech, and other Western political ideas, agitate for Sharia law, use the courts to try and silence critics, and even declare fatwas on them, cannot be explained by this analysis.

I think naiveté is certainly an accurate term, but I would also like to point out that stubbornness and willful ignoring of facts can be detected in Paul's remarks. I myself believe that there are other underlying reasons for his remarks, viz., contrarianism and desire for camera time, but these are not obvious, and everyone here knows that I don't like Ron Paul very much, so I'll just point out that no prominent conservative has been been using legal arguments against building the mosque contrary to personal property rights.

Hargrave does an absolutely incredible job of showing how libertarians are only only offering "simplistic reductions of complex geopolitical problems" when they blame everything Jihadists do on US Foreign Policy. It reminds my of what Chesterton said in his book Orthodoxy about the madman being simplistic and lacking "healthy complexity", residing "in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point." (Source) A pure libertarian really does believe that freedom solves everything, and many conservatives lean libertarian because we do see a need in the modern climate to give back freedoms which the state has taken away, especially economic freedom. However we can't be tempted to reside in this "prison of one idea". Bill Bennett has a short sentence he uses to explain why he is a conservative rather than a libertarian: "Culture matters."

I'll close by excerpting another instructive passage from Hargrave's piece:

Finally, it demonstrates the contradiction at the heart of libertarianism; in order to preserve certain liberties, you must begin to take a hard line against those who would uproot and destroy them. Yet another Dutchman, Oscar van den Boogaard, a “Dutch gay humanist” is now famously quoted as having said, reflecting upon the Islamification of his society:

“I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Fortuyn and van Gogh, like most Dutch libertines I imagine, would have rather enjoyed their liberties in peace instead of dying in their defense.

Why can't Ron Paul scrape this stuff off his shoes?

A hat-tip to LGF for this Ron Paul update.

The Ron Paul presidential campaign organization has changed its name to the Campaign for Liberty. They seem to be campaigning for the liberty to demonstrate their insanity. Here are some examples of what you can learn on the Campaign for Liberty website.

Here's a page called The History of Satanic World Banking. It says

"The following history of Satanic World Banking leaves out the current Tax Free Trust Fund Contributers of the Lucis Trust aka The Lucifer Trust that
educates worldwide on how to be the best Luciferian one can be . . . if by best,
we mean worst, that is . . .

"The Lucifer Trust is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and recognized
by the Tri-Lateral Commission as well as the United Nations . . .

The LGF piece also mentions that the nut doctor who posted a photoshop of Obama as an African witch doctor, Dr. David McKalip, is connected to Ron Paul.

These folks are bat shit crazy and they just seem to gravitate to Paul. It seems to me like he allows it go on and possibly even encourages it. I wish he'd be bigger than that and pull down the flusher. At least he should hire someone to police the website of his organization.

Bush tried

Lew Rockwell points out that Ron Paul predicted the Fannie/Freddie crash.

Wow, 2003. What a prophet! Ron Paul is usually right on financial issues and that's why I'm glad he's in congress.

But predictably, Mr. Rockwell doesn't mention that the Bush Administration foresaw what was coming an tried to stop it also. In 2003.

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

...but was thwarted by Dems such as Barney and Melvin who threw out the timeless and well-beloved canard, "Bush is just twying to huwt to poow people!!"

"These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

"I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing," Mr. Watt said.

Kentuckabee

Thought it was interesting that Hucakabee, who's out of the race, beat Ron Paul, who's still running, in the Kentucky GOP primary. Not surprising, though, because Huckabee sounds like Kentucky, plus he's got that whole blue grass preacher mojo thing workin'.

Ironic Juxtaposition

Over at a site called Libertarianism is compassionate there is a post with the fraudulent headline "Ron Paul Supports Mary Ruwart for President". For the 99.9% of you who are clueless as to who Mary Ruwart is, she is a published writer seeking the chance to be the latest Libertarian candidate to not be elected President in November.

If I were on the Ron Paul campaign, I'd be a little miffed at this projected endorsement even though Paul knows her and has endorsed her book. Ron Paul has served in congress for years and has long since left the Mickey Mouse Club. He has spurred serious interest, raised serious cash and is currently running as a major Presidential candidate in a major party.

However, the author of this post, "Fred", then states something even worse about the supporters of Ron Paul when he writes the following:

I know many Paul supporters are hoping John McCain chokes (literally or metaphorically) before the Republican convention and Paul ends up with the nomination.

Literally? Really? Immediately after reading this I looked up at the title assertion again, Libertarianism is compassionate. Yeah, OK, sure. But we'll obviously have to take your word for it, Fred. Actually I don't know any Ron Paul-ers who wish ill on John McCain. I'm sure there are probably some. If he "knows many", that reality no doubt goes along with the territory of the small circles in which he travels.

But I think it's more likely that this is pure projection on his part. One of the positive results of the Ron Paul campaign's successes will hopefully be to mainstream Dr. Paul's good ideas while pushing out the more angry parts of what Mr. Compassion calls the "liberty movement" off the Bircher cliff. Metaphorically, of course.

Disputations Tom will have to let us know whether this is ironic or funny or both.

Hitchcock on the Unhinged "Catholic Right"

Via Christopher at Catholics in the Public Square comes this scathing article by James Hitchcock about the neglect of the pro-life movement on the part of fanatical Catholic paleo-cons like Joe Sobran and Paul Likoudis.

I guess I should warn you that you aren't going to like this piece if you hate Bush, idolize Pat Buchanan or think Rick Santorum is a puppet of the insidious Masonic/Neocon conspiracy.

Hitchcock penned the very readable Recovery of the Sacred which I found to be one of the most balanced accounts of the introduction of goofiness into the Catholic liturgy during the sixties and seventies. Needless to say I read the whole thing in one sitting, and I enjoin upon you to do likewise, nonetheless here are some of my favorite passages to serve as teasers.

After a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court upheld a federal law regulating partial-birth abortions, Sobran (May 3) acknowledged that a Republican defeat in 2008 would be bad for the pro-life movement, but he blamed that likely outcome primarily on the President himself. A week later he praised the pro-abortion Democratic Senator Joseph Biden as "someone who takes his faith very seriously" and announced that, although the office of the presidency "ought not to exist," he found Biden to be a trustworthy candidate.

By the way, these people are mostly big secessionists. Anyway, Sobran advocated voting Democratic in 2006 with an Obama-like "change is good" justification since he didn't like the invisible neo-conservatives who were running congress. Then, lo and behold....

A month after the [2006] election (December 7), Sobran lamented that "just when many were hoping for relief as the Age of Bush begins to wind down," Democrats were talking about reintroducing the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress. After having said practically nothing on the subject during the campaign, Sobran at last acknowledged that "the Democrats will now have more to say about the direction of the federal judiciary," as though that had not occurred to him before.

What, did he think that the Democrats were going to give obeisance to the combined subscriber lists of the Remnant and the Wanderer who helped them beat the Republicans? Yeaaaaaaaah! Meet the new boss, Joe!

The economist Rupert Ederer has asserted (December 7) that there is an authentically "Catholic" position on such issues as trade, tax, and monetary policies: "We need to recognize that there are Ten Commandments, not one or two. Along with the Fifth Commandment (murder of the innocent) and the Sixth Commandment (against sodomy) there is also the Seventh, about stealing (depriving the working man of his just wages), and the Eighth, about lying (a devastating war based on lying)." His exhortation repeated the familiar liberal accusation that pro-lifers care only about the unborn and are preoccupied with sexual behavior rather than with justice, and it also used the common liberal Catholic ploy of equating absolute moral principles with prudential judgments about particular situations, a ploy that is the basis of the "seamless garment" by which some Catholics justify support for abortion by weighing it against the policies of the welfare state.

(digressive point: isn't the 6th commandment about more than sodomy? not the first thing my mind jumps to, but YMMV....)

And not just equating prudential judgements with formal doctrine but reversing the order to make them more important...

There is an obvious but unacknowledged internal conflict here, in that Sobran espouses a minimalist view of the state, according to which almost every project that government undertakes does nothing but harm, yet at the same time seems to justify voting Democratic, in order to punish Republicans who have betrayed authentic conservatism. Rao (The Remnant, September 15) has used the same ploys, accusing pro-lifers of being indifferent to the death of "live innocent babies" in the Near East, and, in a breathtaking slight-of-hand, reversing the traditional relationship between formal doctrine and prudential judgments, treating the decrees of Vatican II as highly debatable but any kind of statement by the Holy See about the Near East (although not necessarily about other issues) as infallible. He charged that conservative Catholics "seem eager to hop on board any aircraft available to aid Israel that can be guilty of no wrong, no matter who it bombs and how it does so" and, despite positing the existence of a "Catholic teaching" about the Near East, accused the Vatican of failing to condemn "imperialist warmongering" out of cowardice and a fear of losing American money.

Falling back on the old standby of "it's all Israel's fault." Lastly...

Hard-core conservatives tend now to hearken back nostalgically to the days of Barry Goldwater, ignoring the fact the Goldwater turned out to be fanatically pro-abortion, as well as very liberal on most other social issues, something that gives pro-lifers little reason to want to be "true" conservatives. Sobran's way of dealing with the life issues can then be seen as the conservative counterpart to the liberals' "seamless garment"-an attempt to persuade pro-lifers to transcend their "narrow" outlook and support a wider agenda.

To be fair, Goldwater set the stage for Ronald Reagan who famously endorsed him and who converted to the pro-life cause as many other Republicans did at the time. But this is an example of why I'm not a "hard-code conservative" or, according to some of my readers, a "true" conservative at all. (Maybe I'm a... Konservative?) I would still rather see George Allen and Rick Santorum in the Senate. And Link Chafee for that matter... here's a quiz: Is Sheldon Whitehouse pro-life or pro-choice? Clue: he's a Democrat Senator from Rhode Island.

Brookhiser on the Ron Paul Revelations and "Further Right World"

I found this piece to be insightful, charitable and concise.

If you live in Further Right World, you may well believe that the Constitution was a kind of NATO between the states. I think that is demonstrably wrong, but it is an honorable view (Jefferson, in some moods, professed it).

Close by that view is the view that the slave power was the historic defender of liberty, which I think is both wrong and wicked (Jefferson, in his old age, found himself driven to it).

Many inhabitants of Further Right World are also gold bugs. That may be a mistaken belief, but again it is honorable. Gold buggery goes off the rails when it breeds an unhealthy suspicion of central banks. ("The necessary secrecy of [bankers'] transactions gives unlimited scope to imagination to infer that something is, or may be wrong"—Alexander Hamilton, "Report on a National Bank," 1790). I was startled, the first time I read Lysander Spooner—and if you have spent any time in Further Right World, you will know exactly who that is—to find a little blast at the Rothschilds.

Ron Paul clearly holds the honorable views mentioned above, and everyone who knows him testifies that he does not hold the wicked ones. But it requires eternal vigilance in Further Right World to keep the two apart, and he has not exercised it.

Hat tip Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan, a Paul supporter, admits embarrassment for not knowing about the newsletters and of course was offended by all the anti-gay stuff which I'll admit I found funny and sounded like it was ripped off from Ann Coulter. But then again, maybe I'm a citizen of "Further Guy World".

Ron Paul: Unearthed Newsletters Reveal Racism

Well, it's all over the web, but maybe I'll get some hits too. Ron Paul, Ron Paul, Ron Paul, Dr. Ron Paul, Libertarian Ron Paul.... hit me, hit me, hit me, hit me....

Here' the Kirchick piece. 847 comments and counting. Excerpt:

Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently, often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after him. ("What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!" one newsletter complained in 1990. "We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.") In the early 1990s, a newsletter attacked the "X-Rated Martin Luther King" as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" were better alternatives. The same year, King was described as "a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration."

While bashing King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a passage titled "The Duke's Victory," a newsletter celebrated Duke's 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Senate primary. "Duke lost the election," it said, "but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment." In 1991, a newsletter asked, "Is David Duke's new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?" The conclusion was that "our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom." Duke is now returning the favor, telling me that, while he will not formally endorse any candidate, he has made information about Ron Paul available on his website.

Anyway, none of this is surprising. As Stephen Bainbridge wrote back in December, "It may not be a case of birds of a feather, but it’s at least a case of lying down with dogs and getting up with fleas."

Susan, please feel free to chime in with your very own toldja-so.

Here's a good report from the PJ Media folks, excerpt from their list of racist pull quotes:

Ron Paul: “But this is normal, and in fact benign, compared to much of the anti-white ideology in the thoroughly racist black community. The black leadership indoctrinates its followers with phony history and phony theory to bolster its claims of victimology.”

Syntactically embarrassing; I imagine the "phony history" to which he is referring is that of hardworking plantation-owners using blacks as slaves. The "phony theory" undoubtedly refers to theoretical lynch mobs.

I feel bad for the well-meaning people who fell for this guy.

Ron Paul Analysis and Fun Reading

A little stale, but a couple good, sane posts on Ron Paul with the obligatory crazy comments.

Jason Steck on the "Ron Paul Disappointment".

Professor Stephen Bainbridge on the "Case Against Ron Paul".

I have to admit that I love reading this stuff. The first one had comments that were so inflammatory that they had to be deleted, and commenter on that one says something like "Ron Paul is going to get rid of the Jews" -- and that's a comment which wasn't deleted, so I can't imagine what the other ones said.