Progressives who are considering a move from the Democratic Party in order to support Ron Paul are out of their blessed gourds. Ron Paul is not your friend, progressives, no matter how non-interventionist, plaintive and wide-eyed he appears to be.

For the next several months, Ron Paul will continue to be a spoiler in the Republican primary campaign, lobbing crazy bombs from the fringes of the far right wing of the party without any chance whatsoever of actually winning the nomination, and even less of a shot at winning the White House in November.

But it doesn’t matter because winning isn’t his goal, regardless of the idealistic daydreaming of his most vocal supporters. He has no intention of becoming president, and he never has. His mission, beyond political masturbation, is to continue his sermon about the viability of a completely non-functioning ideology, libertarianism, while paying homage to the L. Ron Hubbard of politics, Ayn Rand.

Along the way, progressives have taken notice of Ron Paul’s positions on civil liberties and foreign policy. He’s a non-interventionist, he’s opposed to indefinite detention, he’s opposed to the use of predator drones, he voted against the PATRIOT Act, he’s against the war in Afghanistan, he’s opposed to wiretaps without warrants, and so forth. All are positions that progressives rightfully hold dear, including me. Therefore, Paul appears to be “to the left” of President Obama in these specific areas, and so, consequently, progressives have been abandoning support for the president (many of them were never supporters in the first place, going back to the chaotic 2008 primaries) and shifting their support to Ron Paul.

Unfortunately, Paul’s progressive supporters might not grasp that Paul’s libertarianism, while informing some of his seemingly progressive views on foreign policy and the like, carries with it a significant load of horrendous and unacceptable baggage. Before I proceed further, let me be clear: I’m not pushing for some kind of ideological purity test, but Paul’s views on a spectrum of other issues are so completely off the rails, especially relative to progressivism, that any progressive who’s supporting Paul is basically forsaking his or her values in lieu of a sliver of overlap on a liberal/libertarian Venn diagram. Paul is a physician, so I’ll employ a medical metaphor to explain. Imagine a surgeon attacking a cancerous tumor by firing a bazooka point-blank at the tumor. The surgeon might nail the tumor, but he’s going to blast away everything around it, killing the patient.

Not to be overly hyperbolic, but, if implemented at the presidential level, Ron Paul’s agenda on everything else besides the war and matters surrounding the treatment of accused terrorists are utterly destructive to progressive values, not to mention the well-being of the nation.

Based on statistics culled from the American Journal of Political Science and Common Space Score calculations from 1937 to 2002, Ron Paul has the most conservative record out of the entire roster of more than 3,000 Congress members from both chambers during that considerably long span of time. Put another way, Ron Paul is the most conservative member of Congress in modern history. Think of the most right-wing legislator you can come up with. Ron Paul is to that person’s right. Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Rick Santorum, Louie Gohmert — Ron Paul has them beat by miles. And it’s really no wonder. So, on that note, what about all of that aforementioned “horrendous libertarian baggage?”

Paul’s libertarianism is manifested in his desire to essentially subvert the functionality of the federal government. He wants to eliminate many cabinet level departments including the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.

This alone should be a deal breaker for progressives. But there are many, many more.

Paul is opposed to tax increases and government spending. In fact, he wants to roll back federal spending levels to 2000 levels. This would practically destroy the slow economic recovery and slide us into another depression.

Paul, in lockstep with other Republican presidential candidates, “supports new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, supports new tax cuts for corporations, supports ending Medicare as we know it, supports cuts to Social Security, supports the repeal of Dodd-Frank, opposes the Buffett rule, opposes ending tax breaks for Big Oil, and opposes ending tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas,” according to ThinkProgress.

Regarding his posture on foreign policy, while he appears to be sincere in his non-interventionism, it’s important to mention that Paul voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) just after September 11. This is the law that was often referenced by the Bush administration in defense of their most egregious trespasses. While not explicitly authorizing indefinite detention and eavesdropping without a warrant, the AUMF is cited by name in the controversial National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as the basis for codifying indefinite detention and so forth. Ron Paul voted for this Pandora’s Box.

He also introduced a bill, HR 3076, which would have allowed President Bush to issue letters of marque and reprisal — to hire private bounty hunters tasked with apprehending members of al Qaeda “alive or dead.” We can only presume this would have included American-born al Qaeda member Anwar al-Awlaki.

The President of the United States is authorized to place a money bounty, drawn in his discretion from the $40,000,000,000 appropriated on September 14, 2001, in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Recovery from and Response to Terrorists Attacks on the United States or from private sources, for the capture, alive or dead, of Osama bin Laden or any other al Qaeda conspirator responsible for the act of air piracy upon the United States on September 11, 2001, under the authority of any letter of marque or reprisal issued under this Act.

The language is pretty clear. But feel free to take him at his word that he’s against this sort of thing — unaccountable private assassinations — even though he introduced legislation that would have done exactly that. Also notice how Paul used the very specific “act of war” language in the bill, putting him clearly on the record acknowledging the war on terrorism as a legitimate war.

In the domestic arena, all of his talk about personal liberty comes to an abrupt halt on the issue of abortion. Paul is staunchly pro-life and supports the criminalization of abortion — calling for the arrest of abortion doctors, presumably for murder.

Paul is quoted on his website: “There has to be a criminal penalty for the person that’s committing that crime. And I think that is the abortionist.”

For a self-proclaimed constitutionalist, Paul obviously doesn’t support privacy rights as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. And Paul would leave abortion laws and penalties up to the states. We all know how fair state-level crime and punishment can be, especially in death penalty states. Paraphrasing Barney Frank, Ron Paul wants to shrink government small enough to fit into your uterus. And this business of painting all doctors who perform legal and constitutionally-protected abortions as murderers and baby killers unintentionally serves to motivate militant wackaloons like Shelley Shannon and Scott Roeder.

Speaking of which, Ron Paul also interprets the 2nd Amendment to mean an unfettered right to bear arms.

Despite being lauded as a civil liberties hero, he supported the Defense of Marriage Act. He also co-sponsored the Marriage Protection Act, which beefed up DOMA and stopped judges from overturning the rule.

He’s against universal healthcare, which includes such progressive touchstones as single-payer health insurance and the public option.

Like so many other crackpots on the far-right, Ron Paul thinks global warming is a hoax and doesn’t support any regulation of industry to prevent pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

And finally, he has a long record of obvious racism. He voted against affirmative action, opposed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and distributed racist newsletters. What about his position against the Civil Rights Act? Again, libertarianism, like some extremist factions of Christianity and Islam, serves as a convenient excuse for bigotry. And that’s exactly what it is: bigotry. According to an item in the Huffington Post:

The Civil Rights Act repealed the notorious Jim Crow laws; forced schools, bathrooms and buses to desegregate; and banned employment discrimination. Although Paul was not around to weigh in on the landmark legislation at the time, he had the chance to cast a symbolic vote against it in 2004, when the House of Representatives took up a resolution “recognizing and honoring the 40th anniversary of congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Paul was the only member who voted “no.”

If this is the price tag for ending indefinite detention and decriminalizing narcotics, I don’t want any part of it.

In the final analysis, not every issue is weighted and prioritized equally. While I strongly disagree with the policy, ending drone strikes is not at the top of my priority list, and neither is indefinite detention or drug policy. Illegal wiretaps are higher, as is the influence of corporate money in politics. (By the way, Ron Paul accepts donations from corporations like all the rest, and many of his top contributors are defense contractors. Odd, since he’s a non-interventionist.) Yet none of these issues are as important to me as women’s rights, civil rights, campaign finance reform, the environment, financial reform, the economy, healthcare and ending the occupation of Iraq.

Therefore, I support the candidate who is most likely to achieve those priorities, move the nation, in general, in a more liberal direction, and I will continue to do so despite the areas where I disagree with President Obama.

To that point, I also understand the reality that no president has ever had a spotless record. How many civilians did FDR kill when firebombing Tokyo, or Truman when nuking Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Why did FDR indefinitely detain Japanese-Americans without charges? Why did Teddy Roosevelt write about the evolutionary superiority of white people? Why did Lincoln suspend habeas corpus when the Constitution explicitly enumerates the suspension of the writ as a congressional power under Article I? Etc, etc, etc.

American politics is about negotiation, compromise and the big picture. If we get too caught up in the sausage-making, everything seems ugly and no one is on our side. But when you’re thinking about which candidate you’d like to support, it’s important to look at the big picture in an almost historical sense, and ask yourself: 1) Who will move the nation closer, in general, to my values? And, 2) Who can actually achieve question #1?

Unlike President Obama, who is, in fact, slowly moving the nation to the left while rolling back Reaganomics despite deeply entrenched partisan attacks against his very American-ness, Ron Paul, if he’s ever elected president, would move the nation in a vastly more paleoconservative direction. His historically right-wing congressional record proves this. He might have a more non-interventionist foreign policy, sure — that is if he’s sincere about his intentions — but will he be able to actually achieve anything without a strong party coalition? Progressives might applaud Paul’s foreign policy, but the clapping would be brief and muted as Paul’s libertarian agenda would be totally indigestible.

In other words, and in the big picture, President Ron Paul would be a far-right conservative nightmare, leaving in his wake irreparable harm and a grotesque Brundlefly hellscape.

President Obama, on the other hand, is a politician who, while flawed like all the rest, has shown an aptitude to at least listen to and understand his opponents on the left. I’m convinced that if we make a strong enough case against administration policies we disagree with, there’s a solid shot at convincing the president to make a change. Ron Paul is completely immovable as evidenced by his continued opposition to the Civil Rights Act decades later. And no one on the left has a shot in hell at convincing him otherwise.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/ron-paul-is-no-friend-to-progressives_b_1185055.html?ref=tw

http://my.firedoglake.com/thingscomeundone/2011/12/22/ron-paul-a-racist-for-15-20-year-old-newsletter-stories-try-5-minutes-ago/

If Lew Rockwell was the ghostwriter:

• “Tell me if someone smears you by writing a bunch of racist articles in your name and your running for President do you let that guy continue to sell your books and t-shirts?”
• “Do you let them continue to have a connection to you knowing it damages your reputation? (Unless of course you really want racist votes)”

If you claim Ron Paul’s racist newsletters happened years ago and the story is over or that Ron never wrote those articles:

•  ”Fine then please tell me why is Ron letting his racist ghostwriter still make a living off of Ron?”
• “Ron Paul spent years collecting checks with his racist writing and establishing cred with racists now with a wink to the racists who know that an openly racist person can’t win the Presidency Ron is saying it wasn’t me! I just cashed the checks! It it was years ago the story is old it doesn’t matter!”

Ron still allows this person who supposedly wrote the racist articles to make money for them both by selling Ron Paul books and t-shirts and propaganda:

• “That’s Ron’s way of winking at the racists and saying see I’m still with you I’m just saying this stuff to get elected.”

«Yet a subsequent report by Reason found that Ron Paul & Associates, the defunct company that published the newsletters and which counted Paul and his wife as officers, reported an income of nearly $1 million in 1993 alone. If this figure is reliable, Paul must have earned multiple millions of dollars over the two decades plus of the newsletters’ existence. It is incredible that he had less than an active interest in what was being printed as part of a subscription newsletter enterprise that earned him and his family millions of dollars. Ed Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, said Paul told him that “his best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for the Spotlight, the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust denier Willis Carto.”

• “Nobody does not know where they got close to a million dollars in a year!”
• “Since the newsletter was around for years lets say it only made a 1/4 of a million on average for 5 years before 1993 thats 1 and a 1/4 million for those 5 years and nearly a million in 1993.”
• “Nobody ignores that kind of money.”

If Ron Paul is not a racist he should give back all that money he made off of racism with interest and then we can talk about him not being a racist.

Ron Paul Signed Letter: People With AIDS “Enjoy The Attention” Just One Ugly Attack Of Many.

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/ron-paul-signed-letter-people-with-aids-enjoy-the-attention-just-one-ugly-attack-of-many/politics/2011/12/23/32412

An eight-​page letter that bears the signature of “Congressman Ron Paul” claims people with AIDS, “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick,” warns of IRS agents showing up at the door of U.S. citizens “armed with an AK-​47,” offers racist comments about Martin Luther King, Jr., and inflict an overall paranoid tone that include warning of a coming nuclear war inflicted upon American citizens by their own government.

READ: Ron Paul Scrutinized For Anti-​Gay, Anti-​Israel, Racist Newsletters

This letter was a mailing created to sell subscriptions to Ron Paul’s newsletters, a business that reportedly earned Paul one million dollars in a single year. Ron Paul has repeatedly claimed he did not write the letters, though he refuses to say who did. Media reports point the finger at libertarian activist Lew Rockwell, but there has been no proof of that claim.

Reuters, which offers a PDF of the letter, notes the it appears to have been written around 1993, and “warns that the U.S. government’s redesign of currency to include different colors — a move aimed at thwarting counterfeiters — actually was part of a plot to allow the government to track Americans using the ‘new money’.”

The letter promoting Paul’s newsletters claims that Paul — through what he describes as a network of “extraordinary sources” in Congress, the White House, the Treasury and Justice departments, the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service — had acquired unique insider information that would his subscribers to “neutralize” the plans of “powerbrokers.”

Paul’s letter went on to describe various plots and schemes that he had “unmasked,” including a “plot for world government, world money and world central banking.” He also claimed to have exposed a plan by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to “suspend the Constitution” in a falsely declared national emergency.

Despite being “told not to talk,” Paul wrote that his newsletters also “laid bare” the “Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica,” and a “federal-​homosexual cover-​up on AIDS.”

Paul claimed that his “training as a physician” helped him “see through” this alleged cover-​up.

Paul also suggested that a planned U.S. currency with new notes designed to curb counterfeiting and money laundering would result in the distribution of “totalitarian bills” that “were tinted pink and blue and brown, and blighted with holograms, diffraction gratings, metal and plastic threads and chemical alarms.”

Paul said the money was designed to allow authorities to “keep track of American cash and American citizens.”

Ron Paul is back in the hunt for the Presidency. Many see him as an appealing candidate, one who opposes the wars, wants drugs legalized and supports fiscal responsibility. What they don’t know, is his long history of racism and connection to white supremacists. He has dodged questions on his connections to white supremacists and the newsletters, full of abhorrent racism that he put out in his name and he made millions from, spreading racism.

There has been controversy over Ron Paul’s ties to racism for some time now. Many people have pointed to Ron Paul’s Newsletters as proof of his racism. Paul has previously admitted to writing the newsletters and defended the statements in 1996, then blamed them on an unnamed ghostwriter in 2001 and then denied any knowledge of them in 2008. He has given no explanation, for how the racism entered his newsletter and has dodged questions about them without casting blame on anyone. If we are to take Paul at his word, he is guilty of at least promoting racism on a large scale. Paul earned almost a million dollars a year from the racist, conspiracy theorist newsletters. Here are some excerpts that I’ve found.

In this story Ron Paul writes about “needlin” and blames packs of young black girls for spreading AIDS to white women. I could find no evidence of this “epidemic” and the article seems to have no point other than to make white people scared of Black people.

In this piece he criticizes Martin Luther King as a pro-communist philanderer and says the MLK holiday is “Hate Whitey Day.” This is in great contrast to 2008 when he told Wolf Blitzer that Martin Luther King was one of his heroes. When activists suggested naming a city after Martin Luther King Paul suggested other names such as “Welfaria,” “Zooville,” “Rapetown,” “Dirtburg,” and “Lazyopolis” He would continue:

In another piece he blamed Black people for the riots that happened in Chicago in 1992 after the Bulls won the NBA Championship

Paul here is using false information to attack African Americans. The Washington Post reported that 1000 people were arrested but did not indicate their race. The riot, like most sports riots was multi-racial, including Blacks, white and Latinos, yet Paul used the incident to demonize African Americans. The Washington Post also reported that two officers suffered minor gunshot wounds and that 95 were injured in total, but the way Paul phrased it, it would seem most of the 95 officers injured were shot.

In this article Paul uses the “carjacking” epidemic to put fear into white people. He advises them to carry guns and shoot “carjackers” illegally and then dispose of their weapons. He also refers Black people as “animals” and directly refers to his home town of Lake Jackson, Texas.

The newsletters also contained the quotes:

opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions

if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be,

This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s

Here are some of the newsletters I could find. They also contain a good deal of homophobic and Black Helicopter, New World Order conspiracy theories and warnings of upcoming in “race wars.”

http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/why-ron-pauls-racist-newsletters-matter/

Ron Paul’s newsletters are found at both these sites:

http://ronpaulexposed.wordpress.com/

http://ronpaulnewsletters.blogspot.com/

Ron Paul: The Deep Dark Details, PART 1 (Definitive Proof He’s a Racist and Homophobe)

As much as it pains me to do this (ok, maybe it doesn’t) it is that time of the election cycle once again. It seems that every four years, Ron Paul shows up at a debate and says some things that are so good on domestic issues that some Republicans forget the insanity of his foreign policy and they start getting excited about his candidacy. Perhaps you are one of those people. If not, you may know one. If you are not one and you don’t know one, you can usually find one on an internet forum board typing in all caps with horrible spelling. If you recognize any of these traits in yourself, or someone you know, please read this and share it with the others. Ron Paul will never be President of the United States, and his candidacy is a complete non-starter to most Republicans because Ron Paul is a bigot. Now I know, that is strong language. And perhaps you don’t want it to be true so badly that you will convince yourself it is not. That is fine too, because you will see here that I can make such a convincing case that it doesn’t matter if it is true or not. He can never win CONTINUE: http://theaxisofstevilshow.com/politics/425-ron-paul-is-a-racist-and-a-homophobe.html

My Problem With Ron Paul