Foreign Policy Slings Mud At Ron Paul

libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Ron Paul

James Kirchick is at it again: smearing Ron Paul and urging Rand Paul to break with his father: “Dismissing his father isn’t just the right thing to do morally, but politically as well,” asserts Kirchick, who began the practice of badmouthing Ron Paul’s character from the pages of The New Republic, and has migrated to Foreign Policy to continue his gossipy writing.

Since the political philosophy of Ron Paul is beyond the ken of the Kirchicks of the world; they are more comfortable attacking his character in a manner that amounts to ad hominem.

I detected at least one error in the piece. It is untrue that Ron Paul’s “cult-like following” was “cultivated through subscriptions to the “politically incorrect newsletters published under Ron Paul’s name during the 1980s and 1990s, and unearthed strategically in 2008 by The New Republic.” (See “High Priests Of Pomposity Pan Ron Paul.”)

Ron Paul’s following is young. Senior’s supporters were either very young or were not around when the infamous newsletters were published.

Paul has led an exemplary life—has served his country and community, stayed married to his childhood sweetheart for 50 odd years, and is as devout a Christian as he is a constitutionalist. It’s not easy to impugn this impish, man, so mudslinging becomes a must.

Kirchick is correct to point out that the Paul family is a political dynasty and that both father and son have made a fortune living off the plunder that is politics (my characterization).

The article is “What Rand Paul Needs to Learn From France’s Far-Right Political Dynasty.”

The Hideousness Of Humorlessness

Critique, English, Intelligence, The Zeitgeist

On the facts, “The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever” were those of Communism. While being humorless does not come in a close second or even third—it’s still pretty hideous.

In response to the column “The Worst Crimes … “ WND reader “krowbro” (10 hours ago) proved himself a scold and a sourpuss. He quotes this line from my column disapprovingly:

This month, Kim Kardashian and Pope Francis, in order of importance …

The gets that big fat finger of his wagging:

Does this add anything to what would otherwise be a rather insightful commentary? I get the point, Ms. Mercer thinks Pope Francis is inconsequential, but what the heck does that have to do with crimes against humanity? Including snarky snippets like this in one’s commentary detracts from the message and makes one appear sophomoric.

My reply:

No, you don’t get the point of, “This month, Kim Kardashian and Pope Francis, in order of importance …”: This is called humor; cynicism; it’s a quip about a culture in which more people value KK than value the Pontiff. Wit should not need explanation, nor warrant a scolding. Even worse than the importance of KK to our corrupt culture is the inability to “get” an underhanded dig.

What’s so elusive about my sense of humor? Humor is the reason I like Ann Coulter and think she’s immensely talented (even though I disagree with most of her position): She’s witty.

Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever

Communism, Crime, History, The State

Did you know that Jews tried to flee back into Hitler’s Germany from the Communist-controlled, adjacent territories? As hideous as it was, fascism was more merciful than communism. Read “Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever,” and its source, “The Black Book Of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.” And teach it, Brother!

An excerpt:

April the 15th marked Holocaust Memorial Day. Nearly everyone knows about the industrial killing of 6 million Jews, for no other reason than that they were Jews. “Serious historiography” of the subject has ensured that The Shoah, Holocaust in Hebrew, is “consigned to posterity”; its lessons remembered and commemorated throughout the civilized world.

Although she failed to dignify the Armenian genocide of 1915, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour certainly covered the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, Bosnia, northern Iraq, Rwanda and Darfur, for a 2008 documentary about genocide. In the interest of pacifying its Turkish allies, American officialdom has generally aped Amanpour, refusing to implicate the Ottomans in the mass murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians, 100 years ago.

This month, Kim Kardashian and Pope Francis, in order of importance, remedied the Armenian “omission.” The Pontiff called the massacre “the first genocide of the 20th century.” The Armenian-American reality TV star, her posterior and the rest of her entourage, visited the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia, to pay their respects.

There is no philosopher of Hannah Arendt’s caliber, today, to give dignity to the victims of the Stalinist, systematic starvation of the Boers by the British, during the Second Boer War. Fifteen percent of the Afrikaner population was rounded up, interned and starved to death–27,000 women and children. The image of young Lizzie van Zyl, who died in the Bloemfontein concentration camp, ought to be engraved in popular memory. It is not! When she died, Lizzie looked like the Jewish bags of bones who perished in the Nazi death and concentration camps.

Mention of Hannah Arendt is a must since this remarkable Jewish philosopher illustrated the similarities between “our century’s two totalitarianisms,” the Nazis and the Soviets. Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” spoke to a truth unmentioned until the publication of “The Black Book of Communism”: Both “systems massacred their victims not for what they did (such as resisting the regime) but for who they were, whether Jews or kulaks.”

If anything, “The Black Book” treads too lightly when it comes to qualitative comparisons between the Nazi and “Marxist-Leninist phenomenon.” On the quantitative front, “Nazism, at an estimated 25 million,” turned out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism, whose “grand total of victims [is] variously estimated at between 85 million and 100 million murdered. … the most colossal case of political carnage in history.”

Qualitatively, the “‘class genocide’ of Communism” is certainly comparable to the “‘race genocide’ of Nazism.” In its reach and methods, moreover, nothing compares to Communism’s continual, ongoing invention of new classes of “enemies of the people” to liquidate. “Mass violence against the population was a deliberate policy of the new revolutionary order; and its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past.”

The fact that socialists and communists are still voted into power—with swagger in Greece—demonstrates that communists, despite their murderous past, “belong to the camp of democratic progress,” whereas the Right is forever open to suspicions of unforgiven fascist and Nazi sympathies. …

… The complete column is “Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever.”

Rubio’s Tax Plan To Redistribute Revenue

Republicans, Taxation

A tax cut is a reduction in tax rates. It means letting a poor sod (or serf) keep more of his rightful earnings. A tax credits is social tinkering or engineering such that certain politically desirable constituents benefit to the detriment of others. Not surprisingly, the latter is what Republican Marco Rubio proposes. Via the Wall Street Journal (ignore the WSJ’s praise for Rubio’s foreign policy belligerence; it ought to be obvious that I don’t care for the praise or the Rubio impetus):

… His recently announced tax-reform plan, introduced with Utah’s Senator Mike Lee, reflects the tensions inside the GOP. It proposes dropping the corporate rate to 25%, a consensus figure. But it proposes remarkably timid reductions in marginal tax rates for individuals, leaving the top rate at 35% on relatively modest incomes. Instead the plan’s centerpiece is a large, new tax credit—$2,500 per child.

With this proposal, Senator Rubio makes himself the party’s most visible ally of the “new” Republican idea that the Reagan tax-cutting agenda is a political dead end, and that the party now must redistribute revenue directly to middle-class families. It’s not clear how Candidate Rubio would hope to win a tax-credit bidding war with Hillary Clinton, who’d see and raise on the size of the credit and make it refundable to non-taxpayers. The Rubio tax credit looks like an obvious political gambit with no economic growth payoff. …


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