ARTICLE:

Are you kidding me with this guy?

It amuses me to no end when white folks laud the Declaration of Independence — with all of its lofty rhetoric about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — all the while stoically ignoring that all that happy-happy-joy-joy talk didn’t apply to the Africans whites dragged to this country and enslaved.

So when I see the tiny wizened messiah talking about the Civil War and lamenting all the liberty that was lost as a result of the war, I laugh bitterly.  When I hear him talking about goooooold! and ending the Fed, I begin banging my head against the closest wall.

Dude is so out of touch with the 21st century, I’m starting to wonder if he’s some sort of time traveler who crawled through the Rift and has managed somehow to amass Paul-lovers and the Paul-curious from each end of the political spectrum, and everything in between.  Everyone from Katrina vanden Heuvel and Glenn Greenwald to David Duke and Stormfront are singing this guy’s praises, in some fashion or another (but not necessarily endorsing him. *wink wink*)

I find it fascinating and more than a little unsettling.

Here is Ron Paul giving a speech about how the South was right, and the Civil War was awful because it destroyed “individual choice.”  Never mind “individual choice” vis-à-vis the enslaved; they weren’t people and thus could lay no claim to “individuality” or “liberty.”  What Paul means by “individual choice,” is “white men’s (specifically white property-owning men) individual choice.” 

Just look at this silly little man, standing proudly in front of a Confederate flag talking about the enslavement of black people in transactional terms. In the Ron Paul Gospel, adherence to the quintessential American values of “individual choice and” “liberty” would have required the Yankees to buy the slaves’ freedom.  A detestable notion, to be sure, but also historically inaccurate since, as we all know, the South started it.

Ultimately, when it comes to black people, the world “liberty” seems to disappear from Paul’s vocabulary.  Funny, that.

MORE:

http://www.angryblacklady.com/2012/01/21/shorter-ron-paul-the-south-will-rise-again/