[...] The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the
central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul”
is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will
reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to
liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position?
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.
The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by
progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew
of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he
has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought
to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the
power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American
citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged
an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which
was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the
War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal
accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war
even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
He has entrenched
for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism
powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege
as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has
shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He
has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including
those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which
devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons
huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered
thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance
State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before.
The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a
vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of
secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to
what Dana Priest and William Arkin called
“Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well,
building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create
the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.
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