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purplechoe
02-20-2010, 05:58 AM
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/50995.html


Another Neocon Attack on Ron Paul
Posted by Lew Rockwell on February 19, 2010 11:53 AM

Religious rightist Michael Gerson, a Karl Rove disciple and Bush speechwriter, was rewarded with a perch at the once influential Washington Post. So his attempt at thought control, while despicable, is also predictable. Oh for the days of that fake Brit and real CIA agent Bill Buckley, when he could expel Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, John T. Flynn, Albert Jay Nock, and anyone else who refused to back the warfare state, from…from…the pages of his mag, I guess. Funny how establishment types still tell these fairy tales to warm themselves around the fires of burning books. It never worked outside the MSM. And now, thanks to the internet, Rand, Rothbard, and the rest are almost infinitely more influential than the excommunicating Bill, whose forgettable encyclicals have disappeared along with him.

Today, of course, the neocons mainly want to expel Ron Paul and his burgeoning freedom movement. But from what? The Council on Foreign Relations, which also employs Gerson? Oh, but the “acolytes of Ron Paul” chill his soul. Too many people “listen to Ron Paul attacking the Federal Reserve cabal, and suddenly their resentments become ordered into a theory.” Darn right: libertarianism and Austrian economics. No wonder the regimists are upset. This is a revolutionary moment. The state needs at least tacit public consent for its depredations, but the Fed’s depression and Bush-Obama bailouts have undermined that consent. The would-be censors of the Beltway can announce: Believe this, Don’t believe that, but libertarians are champions of free speech, free minds, free inquiry as well as free markets and non-intervention. No more “Your masters know best” announcements followed by knuckled forelocks. Freedom! For those we agree with, and for those we disagree with. And thanks to the internet, the thought controllers do not have a happy future. The Washington Post, Spiro Agnew once said, is good only for lining birdcages. But these days, how many people have birds? (Thanks to Norm for the link.)

UPDATE from Bill Scultz:

Well said, Lew! Your dismissal of Gerson as little more than a propagandist for the Straussian cabal is dead-on. I seriously tested my bladder control thanks to the fits of hysterical laughter induced by reading Gerson’s Op-Ed. If it doesn’t read exactly like a page out of 1984, then I don’t know what does. Gerson, a Straussian, dares to impugn libertarians with the label of Gnostic! My God, Eric Voegelin must be turning over in his grave. Straussianism is the epitome of Gnosticism with its promise of utopia and secret knowledge of the real truth reserved only to the initiated few. It is exactly the sort of fanatical political theory that drove Marxist-Leninist fools like Lysenko to deny the hard science accepted by practically every member of his profession. Straussians have no monopoly on truth – indeed, they openly strive to advance their agenda by the practice of lies and deception (Chomsky might call this “manufacture consent” or “necessary illusions”). One need only look at Strauss’ own work on Plato (“necessary illusions” again) to locate the source of all of this nonsense. Let us not forget that Marx was also an avid disciple of Plato and utopianism. Gerson also seems to have a serious problem understanding the many elements that make up the anti-elite revolution currently brewing – identifying Randians with Birchers and paleo-cons with Beckites is mind-bogglingly stupid and simply goes to show the real lack of interest that any of the neo-conmen have in a movement to genuinely reform American government. Thank you for continuing to expose the frauds, liars, and charlatans that make-up the Establishment media!

purplechoe
02-20-2010, 06:21 AM
this is the article they're talking about:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021803414.html?hpid=opinionsbox1


A primer on political reality

By Michael Gerson
Friday, February 19, 2010

The left has a political interest in defining the broad backlash against expanded government as identical to the worst elements of the Tea Party movement -- birthers and Birchers, militias and nativists, racists and conspiracy theorists, acolytes of Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and Lyndon LaRouche.

This characterization fits a predisposition of some on the left to dismiss many of their fellow citizens as dangerous rubes. It does not fit the 60 percent of New Jersey independents, the 66 percent of Virginia independents and the 73 percent of Massachusetts independents who voted for Republicans in recent elections. It does not fit Palinism, which, in spite of populist excesses, usually swims in the conservative mainstream. It does not even fit the polling of Tea Party activists and sympathizers, who report a fairly typical range of conservative views. The Tea Party movement, on the whole, seems to be an intensification of conservative activism, not the triumph of the paranoid style of politics.

But the birthers and Birchers, militias and nativists, racists and conspiracy theorists do exist. Some, having waited decades in deserved obscurity, hope to ride a populist movement like remoras. But there are others, new to political engagement, who have found paranoia and anger intoxicating. They watch Glenn Beck rail against the omnipresent threat of Saul Alinsky, read Ayn Rand's elevation of egotism and contempt for the weak, listen to Ron Paul attacking the Federal Reserve cabal, and suddenly their resentments become ordered into a theory. Such theories, in politics, can act like a drug, causing addiction, euphoria and psychedelic departures from reality.

At any time of social disorientation, conspiracy theories have an appeal. They provide a narrative for an apparently random world. They promise that one key can unlock every door.
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And these theories contribute to social division. Opponents are not just wrong; they are secretive, ruthless and demonic. They want to overturn the Constitution, establish a police state, cede American sovereignty to a new world order, fight wars for the sake of Israel, carve out a nation of Aztlan in the American Southwest.

The argument of "us against them" is a temptation across the ideological spectrum. But it is intensified by Gnostic insights that pit the children of light against the children of darkness.

Eventually, these theories require repudiation or else they can taint a political movement -- like a little red dye turns a container of water pink. This is precisely what William F. Buckley did in the 1950s and '60s, repudiating Rand and Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, thereby creating a legitimate conservatism that could elect candidates such as Ronald Reagan.

A similar effort will be required today of conservative political and intellectual leaders. It will not be easy. Sometimes it takes courage to stand before a large crowd and proclaim that two plus two equals four.

A short primer in political reality should cover several topics. The "revolution" we are seeing is a metaphor. This is not 1776, in which the avenues of representation were blocked by a distant power. Those who take the revolutionary metaphor too literally are not engaged in politics, they are engaged in sedition. The Obama administration proposes to expand government; it is not preparing to overthrow the government. At this point, it does not even seem competent enough to engage in conspiracy. The Federal Reserve, by the way, just helped to prevent a depression by increasing the money supply. It deserves a little thanks.

The reform of Social Security and Medicare is a fiscal necessity; the abolition of Social Security and Medicare would be an act of cruelty. Immigrants are not a bacillus; they are a source of values and vitality. And if they are not a source of future Republican votes, conservatives will be voted into obscurity.

Every political movement is threatened by the impatient and irresponsible. William Lloyd Garrison called for the secession of the North to avoid the contaminating evil of slavery, while Lincoln worked to preserve the union. Malcolm X initially found the American tradition fundamentally corrupt, while the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. found vast resources of reform within that tradition. The heroes of America are heroes of unity.

Our political system is designed for vigorous disagreement. It is not designed for irreconcilable contempt. Such contempt loosens the ties of citizenship and undermines the idea of patriotism. "How can we love our country," asked Ronald Reagan, "and not love our countrymen?"

purplechoe
02-20-2010, 06:24 AM
here's another:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315004575073411547358310.html


Travels With the Taliban

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Films that can offer a glimpse or more of behind-the-lines warfare are nowadays not a rarity, but there is, in those candid views of the particular war now raging in half the world, a uniquely chilling power—a kind immediately evident in "Behind Taliban Lines" ("Frontline," Tuesday, 9-10 p.m. EST, on PBS; check local listings). That has everything to do with the nature of that war, which involves the Taliban and al Qaeda and numerous like-minded organizations bent on suicide bombings and more ambitious terror assaults against their designated enemies, civilian or military.

No matter how often tapes emerge bringing the latest meditations from Osama bin Laden, he and the armies for which he speaks, the place they inhabit, remain barely graspable to the imagination—though Ron Paul, Texas congressman and devout Libertarian, who now declares that it was America itself that caused bin Laden to launch the 9/11 terror attack and others against this nation, appears to have absorbed bin Laden's message fully.

The "Frontline" film is the product of enterprising Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi, who arranged to get himself attached to a cell of radical militants in Northern Afghanistan. This organization, attached to al Qaeda and the Taliban, bears the imposing name The Central Group and draws fighters from all over Afghanistan, and beyond, including Yemen and Saudi Arabia, according to their commander. There is, it's soon clear, nothing imposing about their look, their power, their command control or, for that matter, their skills in bomb-making, drawn from a manual.

This film—which has nothing of the complexity or impact of the HBO documentary "Terror In Mumbai," which aired in November—can nevertheless lay claim to something of the same intimate look at the lives and passions of these armies of the devout, as they plot their destruction of the enemy. The enemy in this case: the coalition forces—American and, in this part of Afghanistan, German—and the Afghan police. The journalist, who has, remarkably enough, been allowed to follow The Central Group around for 10 days before falling under suspicion as a spy, records its efforts to plant bombs along a highway serving as a supply route for coalition troops.
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His film—there are English subtitles—captures the urgency of the squad's preparations, which include prayers for martyrdom. "We might be martyrs by tomorrow, God willing,'' one man declares. Which yearning doesn't diminish their resentment of their physical discomfort—the weather is cold—and of the leaders, safely ensconced elsewhere, who fail to appreciate their plight. "You're killing us with cold. . . . You're sitting in the cotton and we're in open fields," a member of the bomb-planting squad informs one of his commanders in a phone exchange.

Nothing has gone right. The American tank that was supposed to be on the way, according to the spotters relaying intelligence on the traffic so that the bombs can be placed, went past too soon.

"What kind of spotters are they?" a furious squad member asks. Bitter exchanges ensue, frustrations mounting. "Oh no, oh God," an anguished member of the group, charged with failure to deliver the right signal, responds.

"This is how you do everything," his accuser snaps.

There is more reason for frustration beside missed targets and bitter cold. The detonators don't work; the bomb-making process—which the filmmaker records in detail (no one in the busy squad seems to notice how close this visitor has come with his camera)—is an adventure that would be, by itself, reason to watch this film. One bomb maker reads from a guide, as others try to figure out which side of the remote control is which. Which one is side D? This is the question. A truck carrying an American armored personnel carrier, and also a jeep full of Afghan police, is due on the highway, but the conundrum stands, despite the instruction book. "D is on this side," one man finally concludes, "the five-digit one." He doesn't know about any five-digit one, another responds.

None of this will turn out well—the mines fail to explode, more recriminations follow.

"Why are you saying I broke the remote? You're the instructor. I pressed it. It didn't work."

And yet: Despite the stark display of confusion, the disorder in the ranks, the primitive explosive devices, the mission of the determined Central Group stands clear. No member fails to emphasize that this is a war against "the unbelievers." The term is on everyone's lips. And this struggle, as every pronouncement, every bombing attempt tells, is a war in defense of Islamic precepts. "Once the mujahideen conquer Afghanistan," one al Qaeda bomb maker declares, "we'll aim for the Middle East and Europe."

The journalist follows the group as it goes from town to town collecting money and weapons, and imposing strict Islamic law.

The weapons it gathers reflect a still-bitter history—guns and shells from the war with the Russians that had been buried in the ground for future use. The future has arrived for the Central Group and others like it, and their missions don't always go awry. Reports from the same area in which the bomb makers struggled and failed brought word, recently, that a cadre from the group had overrun a police outpost there and killed every one of the eight Afghan officers inside.

Anti Federalist
02-20-2010, 12:33 PM
Eventually, these theories require repudiation or else they can taint a political movement -- like a little red dye turns a container of water pink. This is precisely what William F. Buckley did in the 1950s and '60s, repudiating Rand and Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, thereby creating a legitimate conservatism that could elect candidates such as Ronald Reagan.

And here we are, 40 plus years later after Goldwater, Reagan and 1994 "revolutions": broke, 15 trillion in debt, never ending wars and an unquestionable movement toward global governance and police statism at home.

The system is a master at co-opting "movements".

charrob
02-20-2010, 01:04 PM
looks like Ms. Rabinowitz has written several articles attacking Dr. Paul:

h ttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703444804575071330757893248.html

What Sarah Palin Doesn't Know
.By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ


From the day she turned heads at the 2008 Republican Convention—becoming at once an object of fevered controversy—one truth about Sarah Palin stood clear: She was fortunate in her antagonists.

Those in the media, especially, would stoke a mighty sympathy backlash on her behalf. That resentment would feed nicely into the candidate's role as a voice for the aggrieved: those regular citizens under the heel of the "elites"—that immense, tentacled power whose depredations she has been describing to audiences since her star turn on the McCain ticket.

She showed resilience and not a little backbone throughout, bouncing back after a hapless on-air encounter with CBS's Katie Couric. And after a daunting encounter with ABC's Charles Gibson—a civilized presence and one of the most genial of men ever to occupy a news anchor's chair—now turned into an oaf unable to conceal disdain as he questioned his guest on her capacities for office. That was, to be sure, a pale echo of other spectacles. CNN's Campbell Brown rocketed, nightly, to impressive levels of semi-hysteria on the subject of Mrs. Palin and her incapacities.

Andrew Sullivan, blogger, would become disseminator-in-chief of the theory that Mrs. Palin could not have been the mother of her youngest child Trig, and was therefore the grandmother. This was, Mr. Sullivan let it be known, a matter of urgent journalistic endeavor.

In a noteworthy message directed to Mrs. Palin in December, Mr. Sullivan allowed that he would like "this line of inquiry to end as soon as possible for the sake of all of us but especially the innocent child"—a child, he explained, who had been caught up in all sorts of secrets he didn't deserve. A wonderful message indeed, considering that Mr. Sullivan himself was the chief architect of that inquisitory foray, which he pressed unrelentingly.

There's no underestimating all that Mrs. Palin owes Mr. Sullivan for lines of inquiry like this. That's not to slight David Letterman's gross sexual insult, directed at one of the Palin daughters, when she and her mother attended a Yankees baseball game. Political gifts like these, so potent in what they convey about a candidate's detractors—and to a vast national audience—don't come along every day.

Sarah Palin isn't a candidate for office currently but the buzz of expectation surrounds her, none of it exactly vague. She could hardly have been more emphatic, in the last week, about her openness to a presidential run. All the more reason for the intense scrutiny of both her keynote speech to the Tea Party convention a week ago and a subsequent interview with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday." Not that it required much scrutiny to see the obvious, and fast: that the Sarah Palin of election year fame has not been much transformed since last we met.

For many who look to her as a presidential hopeful, and a voice for their social views, this can't be encouraging news.

Mrs. Palin has, it's clear, enjoyed plenty of adulation, and displays even greater confidence than during that unexpected, bedazzling convention speech. Like Barack Obama, she is at home with adoring crowds.

There are, true, a few tonal changes: the jokes are jokier, the touches of malice heavier, and she revels more obviously than before in the playfulness she brings to her performances. It's hard to imagine a more assured, better-timed delivery than the one evident in that down-home thrust at Obama supporters—"How's that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?"—in her Tea Party address.

Mrs. Palin now has, she reports, a team of Washington policy advisers who provide her with daily briefings on domestic and foreign affairs. None of them have, it appears, provided her with intelligence on the impact of certain of her central themes.

On, for instance, the unsavory echoes of her regular references to "the real America" as opposed to those shadowy "elites," now charged with threats to the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of all real Americans. Neither does she seem to have any idea of how that low soap-box oratory—embracing one kind of American as the real kind, those builders in the towns and cities across America—rings in the ear today. It is not new.

So entrenched a place does this thinking occupy in Mrs. Palin's bag of references that it can pop up anytime on any subject. Challenged in Mr. Wallace's interview on alleged irregularities in her husband's direct contacts with Alaska state officials—on judicial appointments, labor issues, and the like—Mrs. Palin countered that he was her "soul mate," her "best friend." The one she could trust while she was off traveling—and he busy working on "issues that meant a lot to him and to people, yes, out there in the real world with steel-toed boots and hard hats trying to build this country."

Though it hasn't attracted wide attention, nothing Mrs. Palin has done recently has been worthier of notice than her endorsement of Rand Paul, now running in Kentucky's GOP senate primary. Dr. Paul, an opthamologist and radical libertarian, holds views on national security and defense that have much in common with those of the far left. Not to mention those of the considerable body of conspiracy theorists, antigovernment zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged who flocked to the presidential candidacy of his father Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas.
Rand Paul has indicated, in interviews on his policies—these so shrouded in ambiguity as to require expertise of the sort that cracked the Enigma code—that some of his views differ from that of his father. No surprise, that. Ron Paul, it will be remembered, has said repeatedly that the United States had given Osama bin Laden good cause to attack us, which bin Laden himself had explained. Bin Laden, Ron Paul opined, was no doubt "bad" but "he's not known to be a liar."

Rand Paul, who offers no opinion on his father's touching faith in bin Laden's devotion to truth, says only that his father's statements have been misunderstood. On one or two things his own views are clear: He stands opposed to the Patriot Act and he wants to cut defense spending.

Asked about her endorsement of this candidate, Mrs. Palin informed Mr. Wallace she was proud of her choice. She admired Rand Paul's domestic policies, not of course that she agreed with everything he stood for. It does not, apparently, occur to her that everything he stands for—and can vote on—is precisely what comes into play when, and if, he becomes a senator with her help.


Mrs. Palin regularly invokes the name of the most revered of her heroes, Ronald Reagan—among the sunniest stars ever to mount the political stage, and a leader who spoke to all of America. He did not appeal to the aggrieved. Nor did he see in the oratory of grievance, or talk of real Americans and those who were not, a political platform.

Mrs. Palin would do well to look to his model, between study of those daily policy briefings. Her supporters will have to wait a while. At a time when Republican hopes are in the ascendancy, as now (and even when they are not), it's impossible to imagine the Sarah Palin known to the world today as their leader. It would be well for her to begin pondering the reasons.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.