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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Tim Wise takes on the paulbrigade

This going to be short and sweet. It probably should be an open thread or a comment, but I hope this post will get  Moose attention.

Something you all should read.

Tim Wise is one of my favorite anti-racists.

In his essay Of Broken Clocks, Presidential Candidates, and the Confusion of Certain White Liberals, Wise not only addresses the current obsession with Paul among certain progressives, he also deals with people like Greenwald too.

Have no clue which paragraphs to quote – I’d wind up citing them all, so better you should just read the while thing.  


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/ 34 Comments

34 comments

  1. fogiv

    dead. solid. perfect.

    on greenwald:

    And please, Glenn Greenwald, spare me the tired shtick about how Paul “raises important issues” that no one on the left is raising, and so even though you’re not endorsing him, it is still helpful to a progressive narrative that his voice be heard. Bullshit. The stronger Paul gets the stronger Paul gets, period. And the stronger Paul gets, the stronger libertarianism gets, and thus, the Libertarian Party as a potential third party: not the Greens, mind you, but the Libertarians. And the stronger Paul gets, the stronger become those voices who worship the free market as though it were an invisible fairy godparent, capable of dispensing all good things to all comers – people like Paul Ryan, for instance, or Scott Walker. In a nation where the dominant narrative has long been anti-tax, anti-regulation, poor-people-bashing and God-bless-capitalism, it would be precisely those aspects of Paul’s ideological grab bag that would become more prominent. And if you don’t know that, you are a fool of such Herculean proportions as to suggest that Salon might wish to consider administering some kind of political-movement-related-cognitive skills test for its columnists, and the setting of a minimum cutoff score, below which you would, for this one stroke of asininity alone, most assuredly fall.

  3. bubbanomics

    is pretty amazing.  If we could power automobiles with cognitive dissonance, we’d be free of middle east oil

  5. HappyinVT

    (I hope I’m not in violation of copyright or etiquette or anything)

    How do you think that sounds to black people, without whom no remotely progressive candidate stands a chance of winning shit in this country at a national level? How does it sound to them – a group that has been more loyal to progressive and left politics than any group in this country – when you praise a man who opposes probably the single most important piece of legislation ever passed in this country, and whose position on the right of businesses to discriminate, places him on the side of the segregated lunchcounter owners? And how do you think they take it that you praise this man, or possibly even support him for president, all so as to teach the black guy currently in the office a lesson for failing to live up to your expectations?

    How do you think it sounds to them, right now, this week, as we prepare to mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, that you claim to be progressive, and yet you are praising or even encouraging support for a man who voted against that holiday, who opposes almost every aspect of King’s public policy agenda, and the crowning achievements of the movement he helped lead?

    My guess is that you don’t think about this at all. Because you don’t have to. One guess as to why not.

    It’s the same reason you don’t have to think about how it sounds to most women – and damned near all progressive women – when you praise Paul openly despite his views on reproductive freedom, and even sexual harassment, which Paul has said should not even be an issue for the courts. He thinks women who are harassed on the job should just quit. In other words, “Yeah, he might be a little bit sexist, but…”

    It’s the same reason you don’t have to really sweat the fact that he would love to cut important social programs for poor people. And you don’t have to worry about how it sounds to them that you would claim to be progressive, while encouraging support for a guy who would pull what minimal safety net still exists from under them, and leave it to private charities to fill the gap. And we all know why you don’t have to worry about it. Because you aren’t them. You aren’t the ones who would be affected. You’ll never be them. I doubt you even know anyone like that. People who are that poor don’t follow you on Twitter.

    Culminating in this:

    If a man believes there is a straight line of unbroken tyranny betwixt the torture and indefinite detention of suspected terrorists on the one hand, and anti-discrimination laws that seek to extend to all persons equal opportunity, on the other, that man is a lunatic.  … That one might believe in unicorns would still allow one to profess a level of sagacity and synaptic activity in one’s brain several measures beyond that of the man who thinks liberty is equally imperiled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as by the CIA.

    There’s a reason Ron Paul runs as a Republican and not a Democrat.

  7. HappyinVT

    (not that we ever need invitations).

    Eric Cantor (at least his website) has a bit of a problem:

    White House officials are shamelessly pushing GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s website today, and it’s not because they want to help him get more page views.

    Prominently displayed under “FLOOR UPDATES” on the site are the words, “The House is not in session” –  a pronouncement that would seem to undercut Republican assertions that Congress actually is in session, and therefore President Barack Obama’s recess appointments last week were illegal.

    Screen grab at the link.  As an aside, I hate that sanctimonious-looking prick.

  8. hubiestubert

    Not because I don’t think that it’s important, or that it’s a part of his support base, but because his other issues are even crazier.

    His economic plan is sheer madness.  His foreign policy is more isolationist than we’ve seen since before WWI.  He is a whole ball of crazy wrapped up in wacky, and then bound up with stoopid.

    That he is closet racist, that’s not news. That’s just a symptom of some larger issues. Ron Paul does raise some issues, but they’re sort of coincidental in the same way that Newt Gingrich sometimes misses the nail, but at least his swing and slamming a hole beside the damn thing illustrates how close he almost came.

    Paul has a plan. It is to devolve the nation. It is to head back to economic policies that will cripple us. It is to set us back a ways in social justice. It will pretty much put nails in our coffin with monetary policy that is so simplistic that even a 12 year old could see the flaws.

    And yet, folks keep putting him forward.  Worse, his brand of crazy now has a lineage with a son who is even crazier than he is.  

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