Something the Ron Paul goofballs still haven't gotten through their thick skulls -- the guy is his own worst enemy. He's still quibbling over the validity of the Civil War (completely incorrectly, as the post points out) and the Civil Rights Act.
I have extraordinarily little patience with "states' rights" or "originalism" advocates, because these phrases are simply code for excusing unreasonable localized measures to make the people who obsess over things like abortion and gay marriage feel like they have a voice (other than the ones in their heads). "States' rights" is always invoked to trample the rights of disfavored individuals, and "originalism", while nice in principle, does not adequately address everything that has transpired and innovated in, you know, the last couple centuries or so. This does not mean you change your founding document with popular whim, but you also cannot run things only from such a distant perspective, anymore than you can accurately view your place in the world through a collection of anonymously written Bronze Age legends.
Anyway, Ron Paul. This must be one of the all-time unforced errors in a campaign, though it's also the sort of barmy rhetoric that may serve to galvanize his more, um, ardent supporters, who are nothing if not committed, or should be. That Paul conflates fundamental rights such as voting and housing access with innocent homeowners being "forced" to welcome unwanted minorities into their humble abodes, literally -- I don't even know what to say to this. It's beyond bizarre, it's astonishing, especially forty-plus years in retrospect.
Now if Paul wants to talk about what's left of the Fourth Amendment, I'm willing to listen. But these are like crazy-coot answers to questions that should have been easy to handle, were Paul's body of work not so extensive and easy to track, even a Punkinhead could do it.
Update: I have finally gotten around to reading Under the Banner of Heaven (the wife has been on a Krakauer bender as of late, so I thought I'd jump in), and am struck by some unfortunate concurrences in the spheres of politics and religion. (I'm only about halfway through the book right now, so don't spoil it for me.)
Anyway, what's notable right off the bat, as Krakauer delves into some of the formative events and principles of Mormonism, is the similarities in how things are perceived and processed, let's say, rather selectively by certain people. Fundamentalism, as Krakauer notes in describing the schisms between the official LDS chruch and the literally hundreds of splinter cults, arises from individuals exercising a rigorously literal interpretation of their founding texts, which of course are sanctified to divine status to begin with. The primary FLDS cults Krakauer describes do not simply indulge in the nastier pursuits of marrying their cousins and stepdaughters, though you'd think that would be quite enough to motivate someone to do something about these loons.
No, the members -- mostly the men, since the women have to maintain some profile so as to grift the welfare system for their inbred litters -- refuse to pay property taxes and auto registration, obey speed limits, recognize the decisions passed down by "worldly" courts, etc., etc. Indeed, a scarily literal reading of the Constitution comes into play almost as much as their scarily literal readings of the Book of Mormon and the Doctrines & Covenants. That's why they call 'em fanatics, I suppose.
But this is the well-spring of political fundamentalism as well, the extremist fetishizing of sacred texts coupled with the insistence that only you are interpreting these documents correctly. Therefore, per Ron Paul, since the two million agrarian colonists did not foresee cabinet departments for education, transportation, and energy, those departments are by definition unconstitutional, and should be abolished. Okay, and then? Let the free market decide? What do you think has kept Hummers on the state-built roads all this time, the fuckin' SUV fairy?
People can agree that those departments and others -- indeed, much of big gubmint itself -- is frightfully dysfunctional, and should be reined in. But it has become big and intrusive because that's the way we wanted it, because everyone has their own private boondoggle, and the hell with the externalities. Well, this is what you wanted, this is what you got. But when you wake up and realize that things don't work as advertised, your first response should not be to just tear it all down in a petulant frenzy. The Rummy-Cheney doctrine has beat our armed forces capability onto the ground, and trashed our foreign policy for the next generation, but that doesn't mean you junk the DoD.
I don't think the system works either, but most of the blame lies with ourselves, for acting like government is some kind of holy combination of Santa Claus and a superhero Jesus. Frankly, while it's easy to write off much of the logical incoherency of intartubez surfers defending their beloved candidate (though, to be sure, it makes a lot more sense to have a hard-on for Paul than for Giuliani or Thompson), the curious consistency of their vehement message is not to be ignored.
That doesn't make Paul a great candidate, though he stands out from the miserable GOP roster; what it means is that he's tapped into and ventriloquized an undercurrent of isolationism, xenophobia, and Christianism as an overtly political entity. And in the era of globalization, like it or not, that is simply not a viable option.
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