...about the Rand Paul speech at Howard, and what a great success it was with the real audience, which was not the one in the actual room.
UPDATE. The paragraph breaks went away for a while, but they seem to be back now; please let me know if the formatting goes haywire again.
It seemed to me to be just Rand Paul-style centrism. He was speaking neither to black people nor the right-wingers who hate them, but to those middle-Americans who feel uncomfortable being in a room full of too many of either.
ReplyDeleteDarn, I was kinda hoping for a week's worth of Margaret Thatcher paeans to laugh at.
ReplyDeleteI'm at the airport and I'm on my iPhone. I assume that they all mention Paul's ultra-leftism, right?
ReplyDeleteApparently Rush is disappointed that Rand Paul didn't start the speech with "Listen, ingrates."
ReplyDeleteOr, something more piercing than "ingrates."
ReplyDeleteWhatever else the wingers thought about this, it's not a great lift to say that Rand Paul was not the person to be doing outreach. His father's record on race, along with own trashing of the Civil Rights Act, simply mean that his reputation precedes him by many miles, and he wasn't there to apologize. If anything, he was trying to make the case that an accurate repetition of his own words and claims was unfair, that being accurate about his remarks distorted his record. That's the mark of a weenie, not of a trailblazer. The definition of bigotry isn't limited to one dragging some black person behind a pickup truck.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's why the GOP and Paul are essentially doomed where the black community is concerned. For more than sixty years, the GOP has increasingly become a welcome haven for people who think that institutional racism is okay, as long as it's broadcast in code (a simple, easily-broken code, mind you--otherwise a whole lot of them would remain utterly baffled). They can't at the same time profess that they're race-neutral and engage an educated black audience on the greater glories of St. Ronnie Raygun, for example, without exposing themselves to deserved criticism. They can't extol the virtues of the Republican party for elevating the likes of Samuel Pierce, or Kindasleezza Rice, or Powell, or Herman Cain, or Clarence Thomas, when those examples are rife with incompetence, toadyism and/or ideological allegiance to the wealthy and powerful white bloc of the party.
They can't be Republicans and at the same time offer most blacks anything at all. There's an old saying that comes out of the South, I think, that applies to GOP efforts at outreach. They only want votes, not actual members with a say in the direction of the party: "hand full of gimme, and a mouth full of much-obliged."
I'm waiting for Paul to say, "Look at you. You're unruly. You need us to control you. We're two halves of the same coin. So, let's hop in the transporter and reassemble ourselves because the Japanese guy is freezing his ass off on the planet."
ReplyDeleteIn a HuffPost roundtable, libertarians didn't much address the effect of the speech on black folks…But they agreed that Paul speech showed libertarianism was the wave of the future.
ReplyDeleteMeaning it's their preferred design for the new wrapper for sugared turds they try to sell as Tootsie Rolls.™
The most entertaining part of that tiny carnival was the desperate rush to declare Senator Spongehead's positions as "libertarian", when all he did was mouth the excuse his party's been giving now for forty years. Paul is less of a libertarian than I am. He's George W. Fucking Bush without a centralized structure of Republican power to appoint him the nominee. And no matter how the party tries to shorten its campaign season, and limit the exposure of its one idea, "I support turning [name of issue] over to the states" is gonna get savaged real fast.
"Paul should remember that "when you're introducing an idea that doesn't
ReplyDeletejibe with what your audience has heard for decades, and is this
emotional, it's best to introduce it delicately."
Yeah... our boy Rand needs to work on his Call and Response.
And end the speech with "You people will thank us for this."
ReplyDeleteJason L. Riley: [B]lacks who are open to the GOP's message are more likely to be found among the young people on college campuses -- and in barbershops and community centers and among small business owners -- than at NAACP conventions.
ReplyDeleteIncluding young community organizers, like Barack Obama. Oh wait. . . .
Yep--complete mystery as to why a room full of exceptional college students simply would not succumb to Rand's tsuonami of bullshit.
ReplyDeleteI was really hoping that Brand Paul would have at least found common ground with the audience on the issue of slavery. After all, as a healthcare provider himself, he did say "if you think you have the right to health care, you are saying basically that I am your slave." I'm sure the audience at Howard would have eaten that right up.
ReplyDeleteHe opposes abortion, pushing a "fetal personhood" bill in the Senate.
ReplyDeleteNothing says "libertarian" quite like "the government should get all up in your uterus."
~
Hey... today's fetus is tomorrow's heroic libertarian entrepreneur...
ReplyDeleteI'll admit to being a rube about the speech. I thought he'd pursue a different line. After the drone filibuster, it seemed like he had found a niche in which to base his ambitions. I expected him to give a speech focusing on the war on drugs and the mass incarceration of black people. He could have spun the libertarian line that this was the bad hand of big government, and it would have gone over pretty well with both the crowd in the room and the conservative press. He would have kept his maverick aurora of leading the left on some social issue while side-stepping the ugly history of the Republican party and libertarianism with racism.
ReplyDeleteI should have known though. Rand's social libertarianism is just the sauce on the side of the tear-down-the-civil-rights-act sandwich.
I also don't think I'll ever understand the tangled history of libertarianism and racism. In some ways, it reminds me of the Communist bedevilment with sexism. The philosophy was dead-set against it, but the practitioners could never move beyond it. It became a minor blemish that had to be covered over by the propaganda wing. Only, in the case of libertarianism, things are more intertwined. I think some libertarians are willfully blind to the racist implications of their policies, while many racists are happy to shelter their boats in the harbor of "freedom" -- state's rights, business rights, school choice, and so on -- that libertarianism holds.
But that describes things as they were 30 or 40 years ago. Now I think the motivations are so blended that the new disciples can't really unravel them.
Reminds me of the history of "right to work" laws, libertarian laws put forward by racists for racist reasons.
ReplyDeleteReading it with relish, Roy, but jeez, what happened to your Enter key? Or is the VV saving money by not using paragraphs?
ReplyDeleteSo the Negro outreach isn't really for Negroes? Instead it is to impress the idiots already voting Republican? So they get the reacharound - again. Such a tease, that Rand. The aura of 'W' is strong with this one.
ReplyDeletePaul is less of a libertarian than I am
ReplyDeleteMost right-wing libertarians are. They're only libertarian in the narrow straits of government regulation and taxation. Some of them pay lip service to drug decriminalization and gay marriage. Fewer still support abortion rights. Basically, if it's not something of direct concern to corporations and rich white folk, their authoritarian streak begins to show through the cracks.
There's a whole generation of "cyber-selfish" libertarians, the ones I interacted with in collage, who carefully look past the human suffering, their eyes intent on the horizon. If they have to walk to that horizon of freedom stepping on the injured bodies of the less deserving, then so be it. Just be sure the camera shot frames them from the waste up so no one can see their flagpole-like erections from stepping on people.
ReplyDeleteSnark aside, I think that these libertarians aren't straightforwardly racist. They want policies that create class boundaries to show their worth and peel away the losers, but they aren't particularly interested in the racial make up of the loser/winner categories. Compared to the racist libertarians who have noticed exactly how this will play out, I guess it's a distinction without difference.
if you think you have the right to health care, you are saying basically that I am your slave
ReplyDeleteRand Paul doesn't believe this shit, he just says it. If you invest a large amount of money in a corporation and in return you own a sizable share of it, you expect certain things from it (such as profits) and you get a say in the direction it takes. Rand Paul, Lord of the Free Market, most certainly understands that concept.
You elect a government and you pay taxes, you expect things from it (perhaps including healthcare), and you get a say in the direction it takes. It's a similar principle. I refuse to believe that Paul is capable of understanding the former but not the latter.
Which leads me to the conclusion that he's just a hateful, racist POS who's okay with people dying due to lack of access to healthcare.
Not Roy's fault. It's happened to me with a few other Village Voice articles, too: carriage returns showing up in one browser but not another, or even sometimes in the same browser and sometimes not. Pretty annoying. I assume it's a PHP error or something. I'm not an expert.
ReplyDeleteThere's a whole generation of "cyber-selfish" libertarians
ReplyDeleteOy, ain't that the truth. The Internet is full of people who are too hip and cool to give a shit about things like institutional racism and sexism, and certainly too hip and cool for self-reflection or self-improvement.
And these are often the same people who suddenly act like freedom of information on the Internet is the only important civil rights battle of our time*, and turn into the fuckin' Justice League as soon as their own privilege is threatened.
*This is in fact an important battle, but I don't sympathize with people who only stand up for the rights that middle-class white dudes need.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WArLRwBPfTs
ReplyDeleteYour mistake is assuming that any of these guys have principles.
ReplyDeleteI note that although there are paragraph breaks in the source code for the page (blank line following each paragraph), there are no paragraph open/close codes in the source (you know, "p", "/p"), so any browser will simply concatenate the entirety of the text in that maddening rambletrollspeak format.
ReplyDeleteAnnoying is right, and really, I had no idea how much I'm dependent upon paragraph breaks for coherence.
I look forward to someday reading Roy's good work when this problem is resolved.
Just a quick note to ask why the VV piece has no paragraph breaks in it.
ReplyDeleteLibertarianism: "I want TOTAL FREEDUMB, right now, and if I can't get that, beware! I'll be as petulant as an unwatered petal! "(Libertarians don't even known how flora works).
ReplyDeletePaul speech showed that libertarianism was the wave of the future.
ReplyDeleteThe wave of the Repug future. The repug brand is so despised they're gonna have to re-name it.
I'm pretty sure it would help Roy if all the commenters here went over to the Voice to make their comments. The article has 0 comments over there and a healthy conversation over here. Roy gets paid for that one.
ReplyDeleteI made edits at an outside location and something went blooey -- think it's fixed now.
ReplyDeleteI think it's fixed now. Whoops. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteI made edits at a different computer than usual and, unbeknownst to me, it eliminated all the p-tags. Don't know why. Thanks for pointing it out.
ReplyDeleteI am a bad person and I thought of Tricky Prickears' address to the United Nations.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.undergroundcomixart.com/drawings/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=2458&g2_serialNumber=2
Commenting was easier with the old VV system, where you could post w/o having to create an account.
ReplyDeleteI used anonymous posting and signed my name. No prob.
ReplyDeleteThose cyber-snobs lack sympathy for - and sometimes express contempt for - blue collar manufacturing workers pushed out of a job by "globalization". They seem to feel secure that nobody's moving their (IT or legal or medical) jobs to China or India. For the time being, anyhow, they're probably right.
ReplyDelete