Friday, December 28, 2007

CC rants about liberals.

(Admit it. You've missed this.)

So I'm just about to go home tonight when I get an email from a beloved Chalicesseur, who has breathlessly forwarded me that "Ron Paul met with White Supremacists" thing from a couple of weeks ago, declaring it "proof" that Ron Paul is NOT a good guy. (Emphasis hers. Ok, the scare quotes were mine. The capitalization was hers.)

Ok, first of all, here's the NY Times correction apologizing for relying on that peice of malarky.

If y'all have at any point forwarded the unverified smear, it would be good of you to forward the correction to the same people.

I'm pretty curious why "Oh, nobody's ever noticed that a Congressman who is running for President regularly meets with white supremacists" from one source, who happens to be a Nazi*, was so believeable in the first place, but several people I like and the NY Times believed it unverified, so I guess I'm missing something there.

If I sound crabby about this, it's because I'm really sick of the way liberals are treating the guy. No, he's not perfect. But I can't imagine why smearing Ron Paul is in liberalism's best interest given that IMHO he sucks least of all the Republican candidates, yet if he were the nominee lots of Republican voters would stay home on election day. I would say either one of those is reason enough to leave him alone, yet I'd say both are true and STILL liberals can't stop smearing him.

I mean, watch the man in action.

(No, seriously, do.)

Why are liberals so excited to tell lies about a guy who so obviously pisses off Mitt Romney?

Don't y'all have anyone better to attack than the only Republican who voted against the war? Hint.

CC
who dislikes Richardson least of all the Democratic candidates, FWIW.

*I do not toss the term around lightly as a random smear. The guy whose words the NYT and lots of other people took as fact is an actual national socialist.

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

I never heard of any of this before so this all comes as a surprise to me.

The LH is a liberal (probably more so than I in the true sense of the word), but has been talking a lot about Ron Paul recently. He perceives Paul as a bit of a nut, but so far we both like his ideas about taxes. I'm not sure about the whole get rid of the Dept of Education thing, as much as I rag on public education.

The problem with Paul - well, the problem with all of the candidates really - is that they wouldn't be running the country by themselves. I wish they were in the practice of disclosing more about who they would be hiring to work with them to run this country.

Anonymous said...

Hmm. I have to admit to be reserved when it comes to politics. I like to keep my thoughts to myself... But I have to say that if we have to have a Republican president, we really can't do any worse than Ron Paul as far as I can tell.

ON THE OTHER HAND - I'd still much rather a democrat in office. Die in the wool and all that...

Namaste,

John
www.thepagelessbook.com

Bill Baar said...

Liberals bash him because he's a real threat.

After years of bashing Bush on civil liberty issues, Liberals think voters are going to turn to Social Democracy. I've been arguing many will turn to Ron Paul instead.

I post on a Chicago area Progressive site and I've been posting on Paul for a while.

I think a lot of the ins-and-outs of Paul's positions are going to be irrelevant. He's going to get the angry vote and if he turns into a third party movement he'll hurt Democrats more than Republicans.

Anonymous said...

The reason liberals are against him is that there are a bunch of "liberals" who think he's the cat's pajamas just because of his stance on the occupation of Iraq, but haven't looked into his other ideas. Of course, you, CC, don't think he's so bad, because he's a Libertarian. but to someone who cares about liberal stuff, Libertarian is not a good position. It's too unrealistic. It doesn't deal with "the commons".
Doing away with our public education system entirely would be a disaster. Privatizing everything is a really bad idea: it puts the vampires in control.

Comrade Kevin said...

Behavior like this is never called for, particularly when reporting a few choice policy stances of Paul could easily raise some major question marks in the minds of many.

I was raised in a largely Libertarian household, so I see where his supporters are coming from. Libertarianism to me makes sense at first glance, but on closer examination, I find many of the precepts to be unsound. Paul draws a lot of support from the South, particularly from small government, fiscal conservatives who object to the excesses of the neo-cons but are equally as suspicious of Democrats.

Steve Caldwell said...

I'm not surprised about the "unverified smear" but there is a verified smear through video criticism about Ron Paul's scientific literacy with respect to evolution and intelligent design:

Ron Paul Rejects Evolution
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/12/ron_paul_rejects_evolution.php

Ron Paul's Evolution Denial (Andrew Sullivan's blog commentary on this video)
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/12/ron-pauls-evolu.html

I don't know if he really rejects evolution in complete disregard of evidence, just doesn't know of this evidence, or is pandering to the religious right faction of the GOP.

Bill Baar said...

Why is the theory of evolution such a political litmus test for religous Liberals?

Would we ban a Buddhist politican because their time is a circle, and not a directional line?

Ron Paul has many short comings, but is belief on the theory of evolution is the least of issues.

PG said...

"Oh, nobody's ever noticed that a Congressman who is running for President regularly meets with white supremacists"

CC, as a Virginian you should know better than to think it's totally wild that a prominent politician would meet with white supremacists. That said, I agree that the NYTimes made a huge mistake here, and one that they made only because Paul is a fairly marginal candidate -- this sort of thing would not happen with any of the top 8 or so candidates.

Anonymous said...

Bill Baar -- It should be obvious to you that not believing in evolution is not the issue itself, but is presumed to be indicative of a whole set of unrealistic beliefs. We tend to assume that it is quite unlikely that someone who believes in the scientific method in general, and thus in evidence-based decision-making, would also take an anti-evolution position.
You can argue that the assumption we make is unwarranted, but it is disingenuous to ignore the implications as if you are unaware of them.
I think a lot of us have gotten really tired and fed up with people who are not reality-based. While CC may think liberals aren't reality-based either, at least we are here listening to her. Bush and his cronies don't seem to listen to anyone who doesn't already agree with them. Is Ron Paul the same way? How does one get the answer to that question?

Bill Baar said...

Kim,

As a guy who spends plenty of time with Scientists and folks engaged in medical basic research, I --and I suspect Ron Paul-- are a little spooked by empowering the Feds to dictate reality.

Talk about overreach...

I'm convinced radical Evolutionists are folks who failed calculus and never made it to Physics.

PG said...

"radical Evolutionists"

What does that even mean? Insisting that evolution really does seem to have happened, and to be happening, and that people who say it isn't have to explain why they think so?

Bill Baar said...

"radical Evolutionists"

What does that even mean?


It means people wedded to pre 20th century Newtonian notion of liniar time; of time as flow.

If modern science right,

"Physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety - a timescape, analogous to a landscape - with all past and future events located there together ... Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into the present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist does not pass or flow." --Paul Davies, "That Mysterious Flow"

...then the notion of anything evolving over time doesn't make much sense.

Maybe I should have written reactionary evolutionists instead of radical evolutionists

But it does seem to me their theory is not holding up well...

...over time.

PG said...

bill,

So you just don't believe in a concept of linear time at all? Like not even that you wrote your comment *before* I wrote mine, and that mine is a response to yours?

Bill Baar said...

So you just don't believe in a concept of linear time at all?

Unlike Evolutionists, I listen to Physicists, as Einstein wrote the family of his friend Besso after Besso's death,

...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.

Creationists don't sound so odd when you get your mind around this.

English prepositions like before and after lock us into the illusion, while mathematics liberates us. (Perhapes just as Religous stories do.)

So after a brief on Intelligent Design in school, it's off to pre-Calc kids, which I suspect for many older UU's is a vision of the hell we like to deny.

I'm certainly not going to scream over creationism in favor of a theory so firmly locked into an illusion of time.

PG said...

bill,

Are the physicists you're quoting (such as Einstein) advocating Creationism? Because if you're just taking their theory and applying it to biology, when they have not advocated for it to be used in such a way, I am skeptical that that is a proper use.

Bill Baar said...

Are the physicists you're quoting (such as Einstein) advocating Creationism?

They're describing creation.

It sounds at like what the Creationists advoctate to me.

Science and Religion aren't the same, but Physics sounds awfully theoretical at times.

Liberals have gotten into this mode of knocking everyone who disagrees as unscientifc....

...it's a real bad habit they've gotten into.

They often seem ignorant of modern science themselves and stuck instead in the 19th century.

Bill Baar said...

...sounds theological I mean ...but really mystical is a better choice... Our Church has a lot of wonks from Fermi Lab as members. They're not mystical but their work sounds it.

PG said...

bill,

Quite, but are the physicists describing the creation of inorganic objects in the universe, or are they describing how life on the planet earth came to exist? And again, are the physicists you're quoting actually claiming that there is no such thing as evolution?

As for the idea that liberals are stuck in 19th century biology, that's pretty bizarre given their advocacy for stem cell research and other work that depends on understanding DNA, which was the 20th century paradigm shift in biology.

Time may not be a linear concept for physicists, but I'm pretty sure that if Ron Paul gets up and says that 9/11 cannot really be said to have happened BEFORE the invasion of Afghanistan, he'll have put the end to his campaign.