(This started off as a comment as a response to a friend who works for the Sierra Club who may have gotten a bit Paul-curious, or at least Greenwald-curious, but I figured I should flesh it out into a diary after some feedback.)
So there's been quite a bit of discussion online over the piece by Glenn Greenwald about Ron Paul, Obama, and civil liberties. And there's also been quite a few responses explaining how Greenwald is missing the point.
As Tom Hilton stated over at No More Mister Nice Blog, Paul's not even really a true civil libertarian. Why is he against drone attacks? Why does he care about the NDAA?
But (you might say) if the result is the same -- if, whatever the twisted origins of his position, Ron Paul takes is on the side of the angels on certain narrowly framed issues--does it really matter how he gets there?
Short answer: yes. Slightly less short answer: hell yes. Longer answer: of course, because his opposition to (Federal) government overreach is inseparable from his opposition to Roe v. Wade and equal protection enforcement and environmental regulation and... well, every single goddamn thing that matters to liberals except the tiny set of narrow issues on which, in stopped-clock fashion, Paul has arrived at the right position through the wrong process.
There's another point I think some people have missed because of the polarization Greenwald has been causing those on the left. My thoughts below the fold.
In the binary system we've got (OK, tertiary if you include a third party), when you repeatedly attack one candidate's views while praising the other's views, but almost never do the opposite, like it or not, you're implicitly endorsing that candidate. Maybe if he had also written a 1,000-word piece tearing apart Ron Paul over his stance on the Civil Rights Act while praising Obama, I'd come to a different conclusion. If it comes down to Obama and Paul, you can't pick and choose the good parts of each of them to craft your ideal President. You've gotta go with one of them, with all their good points, but also with all their flaws. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld (eep), you go with the candidate you have in the general election, not the candidate you wish you had.
Now I'd say some of those links do push it a bit, but I think Martin's response in that Balloon Juice link nails it about the key thing many people like Paul are not realizing about the reality of governance. Read this comment carefully, and let it sink in.
Well, in my first read, he’s wrong because he says that candidate Paul opposes things that President Obama supports. That’s bullshit false equivalency. Fuck, man, candidate Obama also opposes things that President Obama supports.
Seriously, people with jobs and kids and other responsibilities should understand well enough that hypothetically I’d never lay off one of my best staff, nor would I hypothetically ever give the doctor the okay to cut off one of my kids limbs, but those are things that as non-hypothetical people in those roles that you sometimes have to do because the alternatives are worse or because there are elements out of your control.
That’s great that Paul is opposed to preemptive war – so is Obama. What the fuck does that have to do with the actual war that is actually happening that neither one of them created but they have to deal with head-on? One of my biggest gripes with Greenwald is that he doesn’t recognize the disparity of choices that we are granted. We all get choices in life that are free, and are reversible. Can’t choose between fish and chicken at the restaurant? That’s okay, if you get it wrong, you can still order the other one, or just wait until tomorrow to have the thing you want.
But other choices aren’t like that – particularly Presidential choices. You’re told that there is actionable intelligence that OBL is in a house in Pakistan and may be protected by the Pakistanis. Do you tell them that you’re going in? Do you go in without telling them? Do you do nothing? Do you call in a drone strike instead? They all carry negative consequences. None have 100% positive outcomes. They all have the potential to backfire on you, and every single one of them is irreversible in the consequences they create. If you do nothing and OBL was there, and organizes another attack, you fucked up. If you tell Pakistan and they slip him out before you get there, or worse, they tip off that you’ve helicopters coming in, you have another Operation Eagle Claw. Presidents face countless decisions where the best outcome they can expect really is to do less damage than the other outcomes. Shit, no other US presidents killed more innocent civilians than FDR and Truman. Were they wrong? Yeah, probably with some of those decisions, but not collectively. There simply wasn’t any clear way to get it more right than they did. That’s life as President, and it was true for George Bush as well.
Paul doesn’t have those liberties, nor did candidate Obama, and comparing the positions of someone like Paul who is free of the burden of these decisions to someone who has the full burden placed upon them is bullshit without noting that distinction – or at least noting the relative position that candidate Obama took when he too was unburdened with that responsibility. And anyone who thinks that the Paul positions are in any way credible or realistic of what will actually happen in office are fucking delusional. Credit to candidate Obama for not ignoring the realities of office as Paul does. When he was candidate he said what he would do if the OBL decision came up, and he was pilloried from both sides for that position, and fuck if that isn’t exactly the scenario that came up and if that isn’t exactly what he did.
I think one of the biggest problems the GOP has is that they refuse to deal with the world as it exists and keep trying to fold and spindle it into the world they want, and then take positions as if that’s the reality. This shit is messy. Nobody wants it to be messy, but that’s what it is, and you have to deal with that. Paul can’t handle the messiness and waves it away, and Greenwald follows him down that path. Yeah, it’d be great if Yaweh would just get his ass down here and sort out all of the constitutional and extra-legal problems involved with persons who exist outside of nation states, but he won’t, so we get this terrible mishmash of laws that just don’t fit into a structure that was never designed to handle these problems. But the solution is to pretend there are no problems? That’s lunacy to expect of our leaders. Great lesson for your kids, though. And let’s not pretend that the situation has ever been any better than it is now – it’s always been fucked and it’s always been solved with this shitty patchwork of solutions. The only difference was that in the past it was out of view, so nobody had to be troubled with it, whereas now we all get to see it if we choose. That doesn’t mean we’re any worse at dealing with it, though.
I'll also note ironically that two of the people we now consider to be our greatest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were also known for some of the most horrible offenses against civil liberties in their time (Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, FDR interning Japanese-Americans).
The other thing is that Greenwald claims to know what's in the mind of a progressive that's rejected Ron Paul already. It's not about one issue with me, but the totality of it all, because frequently we're really choosing between the lesser of two evils, like it or not. He can't seem to understand that many of us have already played out that scenario in our minds, and come to the conclusion that Paul would be magnitudes worse than Obama as President. It's got nothing to do with holding up any sort of mirror or some battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.
He says liberals are afraid to "face" the unsavory civil liberties aspects of the Obama administration?? Yeah, that shows he has very little knowledge of just how much online ink was spilled writing about the NDAA the last couple weeks on liberal, progressive, Democratic blogs criticizing/questioning/blasting the administration for it. I mean, did he even glance at DailyKos in December at all??
Greenwald wrote:
The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.
See, he just committed a logical fallacy there. It does NOT mean you can't praise part of their candidacy in the least. I am just as free to criticize Obama on some issues as I am to praise Ron Paul on some other issues, even as I will freely admit I would be 100% for Obama in an election matchup against Ron Paul. Such as, in last night's debate, Ron Paul's talk of the racial disparity in the drug war was great to hear at a presidential debate. Though at the same time, he brought it up only in response to those racist newsletters in an effort to dodge the newsletters themselves. (See? I can't possibly be racist because I recognize the inherent racism in the drug war!)
But I'm tired of supposedly liberal people, mostly young people, who latched onto Ron Paul because of issues of war and civil liberties (and weed), and then IGNORE or even try to JUSTIFY his reprehensible behavior and views on all these other topics. Just look at my Facebook page for some intense debates with a former neighbor of mine who's a big supporter of his.
Greenwald would be better served to ask why Paul can be so prescient on certain civil liberty issues, and yet so dumbfuck stupid and blind on so many others. Though, again, Paul's not even that good on civil liberties, because you can't be a true libertarian and yet still want the government to monitor a woman's womb.
I would like to hear Greenwald explain how Paul would be good on civil liberties for women in the U.S. when he signed the Personhood USA pledge for a federal ban on abortion, not even letting "states rights" get in the way. Or how he feels about Ron Paul on civil liberties for undocumented immigrants, especially children brought here by their parents at a young age, when Paul not only is against the DREAM Act, but wants to get rid of the portion of the 14th Amendment that grants automatic citizenship to those born on U.S. soil. His civil liberties discussion seems to only focus on the sliver of civil liberties regarding detention, which, while important, is not all-encompassing.
Oh, there is one dealbreaker for me. My candidate cannot be a global warming denier. Because all this stuff about civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, civil liberties, the economy... none of it will matter for shit if we cannot physically live on our planet because we fucked it up beyond recognition.
Plus, as someone pointed out, Greenwald may have just gone off the deep end with his defense of Obama raping a nun scenario. Oy, that's ugly.
But I will say this. As I told my Ron Paul friend, I would like to see Ron Paul become the nominee. Partly for the Republican Party fallout if that were to happen, but also because it would, as you say, push Obama on civil liberties at the debates. Even more, though, it would also finally put libertarianism on trial for all to see, and we could show what the logical conclusion of libertarianism truly is, in terms of destroying any and every aspect of the social safety net that's kept us together as a society from falling into a Somalia-like Lord of the Rings Flies (whoops!) scenario. Because, frankly, libertarianism has for too long gotten a pass from real media scrutiny. It's just saying the words "freedom" and "liberty" a lot, and sounds so nice on the surface, that the American public at large doesn't really get to see under the hood what the actual consequences would be when you got rid of any and all regulations on corporations and banks. Free market, baby!