Sarah Palin Resigns In A Mega-Blizzard of Lies--Revealing A Crucial Difference Between Libertarians and Liberals
It was a slow newsday, Friday before a holiday, so why shouldn't Sarah Palin suck up all the oxygen in five continents? If only that stupid Michael Jackson fellah hadn't died the week before, she could have totally pulled it off. As it was, she did pretty damn well for a couple of hours there. Her big secret? Same as it ever was: she lied. Seven ways from Sunday. She lied about being cleared in all the Alaska investigations; she lied about their cost; she lied about wanting to serve the people of Alaska; she lied about fulfilling her goals; she lied about people attacking her son Trig; she lied about being like a point guard; she lied when she said "and" and "the". She spoke, therefore she lied.
Why does Sarah Palin lie? She lies to get out of trouble; she lies to shift blame; she lies to get even; she lies to get ahead; she lies to hurt her enemies; she lies to amuse her friends; she lies to relieve boredom; she lies to have some fun; she lies because truth is bother; she lies as a key to strategy; she lies because she has no plan; she lies to confuse anyone trying to keep track; she lies to make sense to those not keeping track; she lies for power; she lies because lying works for her; she lies just for the hell of it; she lies because she can; she lies because that's how she expresses her freedom--a very libertarian idea of freedom, I might well add.
Liberals and libertarians are both about freedom, but their concepts of freedom are radically different, and Sarah Palin's compulsive, multipurpose lying is as a good a way as any to approach understanding the differences between them.
In sharp contrast, liberals characteristically express their freedom by telling the truth, inconvenient truths, as Al Gore put it. Truths about racism and war, such as Martin Luther King told, when speaking truth to power. Truths about the social order and tradition that are not supposed to be said.
After all, this is the story of people feeling unfairly compensated for their efforts who decide to form a union and go on strike in order to secure better wages and conditions. An injury to one is an injury to all.
When EFCA passes, all the rich people threatening to quit creating jobs and prosperity will find it easier to form a union, and be able to keep scabs from ruining their glorious collective action by taking up all the work they're going to abandon.
[Because folks are still being gulled by Ron Paul.]
In ancient Greek mythology, Procrustes (the stretcher) was a bandit from Attica who had an iron bed into which he fitted every passerby. If they were too tall, he would amputate their heads and/or feet, if too short, he would stretch them on the rack. Nobody ever fit, because the bed was secretly adjustable before hand. Ron Paul's libertarianism is just like Procrustes' bed: one size fits all.. or none. Including, of course, the truth.
In my two-part diary "Ron Paul OPPOSSES Cutting Taxes-IF He Smells A Messican!" [ Part 1] [ Part 2], I went into excruciating detail about how Ron Paul fundamentally and repeatedly misrepresented the issue, abandoning his signature stance of opposing taxes because of his underlying nativism and racism. Usually, however, his nativism and racism are expressed through his narrow ideology, not by abandoning it, and thus they are kept in the background. (He's a libertarian, and it's not his fault if destroying the Federal Government hurts people of color disproportionately.) In this diary, I want to highlight two crystal-clear examples of a more pervasively prominent phenomena-how his ideology utterly warps his perception and presentation of fundamental problems for which he has no answers, because his ideology is utterly inadequate.
The two examples I'll use are two biggies: health care and global warming. Neither one can be dealt with via libertarian means. Indeed, the problems with both are direct results of market failure, made much, much worse by the dominance of knee-jerk rightwing ideology that rejects the very essence of what is needed to deal with them: effective Federal Government action to "promote the general welfare" just like it says in the Constitution. This is the subtext of this diary: Far from being derived from or consistent with the Constitution, Ron Paul's rigid libertarianism is directly opposed to one of the Constittuion's core purposes.
This past week, Ron Paul's fundraising got the attention of various bloggers, and occassioned a column by Glenn Greenwald, "The Ron Paul phenomenon". In the letter section, I brought up the issue of Paul's nativist, extremist and racist associations, drawing on work by David Neiwert and Sara Robinson of Orcinus. And I ran into the standard Ron Paul defense:
Ron Paul has argued against racism. He is on record saying that it is collectivist nonsense. He should get the benefit of the doubt. It is also worth noting that he never advocates any policies which disproportionatley benefit one group at the expense of another. He clearly insists that all people have equal rights.
That's not an argument against racism. That's an argument against "collectivism" and a form of denial that he and his kind could possibly be racists.
Furthermore, it's an easily refuted view.
I went on to cite some cross-tabs that I had quickly run on the National Election Survey database, showing that feelings towards blacks were negatively correlated with support for "collectivist" policies, such as government health insurance, government activism to creat jobs, and federal spending on poor people and child care. Here I'm going to expand on that response, and underscore how Paul represents a very significant aspect of one the most significant ways in which racism has rearticulated itself as anti-racism. Indeed, this attempt goes even farther, as we have seen in phenomena such as the phony "Civil Rights Initiative" pushed by Ward Connerly in California a few years ago. This new new racism not only tries to present itself as anti-racism, it tries to present anti-racism as racism, as we'll see on the flip.
I am cross-posting this from the libertarian Democrat website Freedom Democrats. My original diary there focused mostly on thoughts about libertarians and assumptions people have about a "free market." I am modifying the diary's content and posting it here because I think it has some implications for discussions on a progressive "RLC" that would work to further a left-wing mindset within the Republican Party.
