Headupassitis II: Ron Paul Is OWS's Cafeteria Candidate

There are a lot of things which concern me about the Occupy movement - the ideas which participants hold indicating that voting isn't worth the effort or that both political parties are the same.

The first idea is not only stupid, it's being insidiously played and touted to these people as a viable stand by celebrity media talking heads, each with their own personal agenda, many of whom are pimping publicizing books, and several of whom touted Nader as a viable candidate to the young, naive and stupid who voted in 2000.

We all know where that got us.

But what totally gobsmacks me the most about a lot of the participants in the Occupy movement, is their fervent embrace of Ron Paul as the candidate of their dreams. Time after time, I've read article after article stating that many of the Occupy Wall Street supporters were turning to Ron Paul, as the only candidate of real change and stating that both the Democratic and Republican parties were mirror images of each other.

I can only hope that such protesters making such remarks are either very young and very naive and need to learn to read and think for themselves, but I suppose there are more than enough disgruntled older people who think they know as much about governing and government as the next person, but who, sadly, don't. And these people, let loose, are dangerous.

Be that as it may, if any of you are still propagating that myth about both parties being the same, well, I'm sorry. I don't suffer fools gladly, but just to save yourselves my ire (and this goes out to all OWS protesters who think this way), Milt Shook does an excellent assessment of why and how the parties differ from each other. You can read that here.

Now, about Ron Paul.

It never fails to amaze me how some protesters bewail Ron Paul as the saviour of their movement based on only a sketchy knowledge of the candidate and the principles for which he stands. I wrote about the cognitive dissonance in young people protesting channelling Paul. You can read that here or you can read The New Yorker's excellent interview with eight OWS protesters.

Particularly frightening were the comments of a twenty year-old protester, Hank Norton, who - sadly - hails from my neck of the woods in Virginia. Norton is a Paul supporter and sounds, for all to hear, very much the budding Libertarian:-

I’m observing this more than anything. The main demand is for change in the distribution of wealth. We need a coherent and cohesive message because a lot of people are yelling and that’s where we alienate people. We need three goals. I think they should be tax the shit out of the rich, regulate, and downgrade the military, almost to the point of dissolving it. I want Ron Paul to get more attention because he’s the only Presidential candidate who offers true change.

(snip)

None of what he (Obama) promised during the election has happened. There’s been no real change. Ron Paul is our only hope.

Hank, as I previously pointed out, is only twenty years old and, so, has never voted in an election before, but there are others in this protest, who seem to want free single-payer (oxymoronic, I know) healthcare and housing and Ron Paul on the ballot.

People, let me tell you ... if you want government-funded healthcare and housing, you ain't gonna get it with Ron Paul in the Oval Office. And if you seriously want to "tax the shit out of the rich," Ron Paul ain't the man who'll do that. Libertarians hate taxes; that's why so many of them signed Grover Norquist's piece of paper.

Ron Paul is the cafeteria candidate for the young and the politically foolish.

Cafeteria candidate? Well, that's like a cafeteria Catholic - Catholics who pick what suits them about their faith and let the rest of the stuff fester by the confession booth. So the people reckoning themselves politically hip, take those Paul ideas who appeal to their liberal ideas and ... just pretend the ugly stuff in which Ron Paul believes just doesn't exist.

Ron Paul wants to end the Federal Reserve, and to many in the OWS movement, that's just fine; because, you know, it was the wicked, evil Fed who started all our financial problems, lost all our money and jobs and homes. A lot of OWS people believe this, probably bolstered by Alan Grayson's braying cry to audit the Fed, but Paul wants to end the Federal Reserve for reasons which are diametrically the opposite of those concerns of OWS.

Paul is a Libertarian who subscribes to the liberarianism practiced and preached by Ayn Rand. Her type of libertarianism was a curious mixture of Darwin and Nietzsche. It's an anything-goes-survival-of-the-fittest-no-strings-race-to-the-top, the winners of which are hailed as supermen and deserving of our praise and respect because of their financial wealth. The rest of us are just callow losers. Ayn Rand Libertarians believe that no government should fetter financial dealings. Another person who followed the tenets of Ayn Rany was Alan Greenspan, Mr Andrea Mitchell.

So when Ron Paul wants to end the Fed, he doesn't want to take on Wall Street from OWS's point of view. He wants to give Wall Street the green light with no strings attached.

As an blogger on the actual Occupy Wall Street website explains about Libertarians:-

Push any one that says End The Fed to explain what it means, they will eventually say it means move to a different monetary system, usually the gold standard, a Resource based economy or something in between. This is what Libertarians want, this is Ron Paul.

It's a misleading slogan designed to do exactly that, distract, turn your attention to something else, but achieve a specific goal. If we End the Fed our current monetary system would be in shambles and at the mercy of the world market and they know this. They know if we END the Fed we have to change to a gold standard or similar monetary system.

The gold standard, eh? Doesn't that sound eerily familiar? Didn't Glenn Beck want a return to the gold standard? Isn't that what some Tea Party people wanted? Answers? Yes, and it's what Ron Paul wants too; in fact, Paul - a staunch believer in States' Rights - also believes the States should have a right to mint their own currency too.

Gail Collins, writing in The New York Times today, does a pretty good job enumerating things of which Ron Paul disapproves.:-

“Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom” has more variety. It’s full of essays, mostly about things Paul disapproves of, from abortion to Zionism.

It’s quite a list. Paul says he believes that the federal government (“the wealth-extracting leviathan state”) shouldn’t be doing anything that’s not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, which once caused him to vote against giving a Congressional medal to Mother Teresa.

He doesn’t really believe in global warming, but, even if he did, he doesn’t think government is smart enough to be able to do anything about it.

He also doesn’t believe in, well, let’s see: gun control, the death penalty, the C.I.A., the Civil Rights Act, prosecuting flag-burners, hate crime legislation, foreign aid, the military draft under any circumstances, campaign finance reform, the war on drugs, the war on terror and the war on porn. Also the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. Taxes are theft. While his fellow Republican candidates fume about gay marriage, Paul thinks the government should get out of the business of issuing marriage licenses entirely. (“In a free society, something that we do not truly enjoy, all voluntary and consensual agreements would be recognized.”)

I've highlighted a few things which I think might compromise Occupiers in their slavish devotion to a Paul candidacy. Another thing in which he doesn't believe is abortion. In fact, for a man who believes the United States government's involvement in its citizens' lives ends at the Tenth Amendment, he contradicts himself because he says the government should dictate what occurs within a woman's womb. Why? Because of his Christian faith.

"Life comes from our creator, not our government," Politico reported Paul as saying. "Liberty comes from our creator, not from government. Therefore, the purpose, if there is to be a purpose, for government is to protect life and liberty."

Paul's stance on abortion won him the endorsement in 2008 of none other than "Jane Roe" from the landmark Roe v. Wade legal case of the '70s.

"Roe," whose real name is Norma McCorvey, became a pro-life advocate a decade ago and supported Paul in the last presidential election specifically because of his views on abortion. "I support Ron Paul for president because we share the same goal, that of overturning Roe v. Wade," McCorvey said. "He has never wavered ... on the issue of being pro-life and has a voting record to prove it. He understands the importance of civil liberties for all, including the unborn."

There you go. Not only does Ron Paul get the support of Norma McCorvey, whose case sparked the Roe v Wade decision, McCorvey correctly defines Ron Paul as actually being in favour of personhood - putting a zygote's rights ahead of the living being incubating that.

A Ron Paul presidency would mean no gun control legislation, but women being policed about pro-choice rights; it would mean no environmental legislation. You could get all the formerly illegal drugs you could buy, but if you get ill because of your addiction, don't expect any help from the government. The quality of your education would depend on the state in which you lived, and there are some states today, who are surreptitiously seeking to end free public elementary and high school education.

Ron Paul wants to take the country back - back to the time when if a person got sick to the point of hospitalisation and had no money, he'd be dependent on the charitable organisations for the indigent and poor or the churches to foot his expenses. It's even thought he'd want to take us back to the the times of the original Constitution - the 18th Century, as Collins observes:-

Basically, Paul seems to want to revert to the 18th century, when every bank could set its own monetary policy and every community ran its own schools — presuming, of course, the community wanted to pay for them.

“The founders of this country were well educated, mostly by being home-schooled or taught in schools associated with a church,” he reasons. Those of us who were not born in the gentry could presumably go back to sowing and reaping hay.

Maybe that's what a lot of these kids want, but I'll wager they're not thinking past the "End the Fed" slogans, the ending of all wars and bringing the troops home and the legalisation of drugs and prostitution. The banks would have a free-for-all, discharged veterans would be on their own and addicts and prostitutes could expect no help or support from any government health agency. There wouldn't be any.

If you support Paul for those three tenets, you're just as ignorant and irresponsible as those so-called Progressives who only voted for Barack Obama because it was cool to vote for the black guy. In fact, if you were old enough to vote in 2008, you probably are those people. And if so, of course you'd know all about Paul's famous aversion to the Civil Rights Act.

Here he is talking about that:-

“I believe that property rights should be protected,” Paul stated. “Your right to be on tv is protected by property rights because somebody owns that station. I can’t walk into your station. so right of freedom of speech is protected by property. The right of your church is protected by property.”

If you don't think anything is wrong with this, then you seriously need to read some US history - specifically, the part dealing with the period from 1850-1860. You see a lot of references to "property rights" there. It's what most Southerners venturing Westward whined about when wanting to make sure the "property" they took to Missouri or into the Oklahoma territories would still be their "property" after they'd made the move.

That's "property" as in "slaves."

So when anyone nowadays brings up "property rights," especially in relation to private business owners deciding which types of people with whom they'll do business or serve, it's a euphemism for "segregation."

If you're still in doubt about Ron Paul's attitudes towards race, have a listen to this endorsement of Paul by none other than Stormfront, the American Nazi Party. And whilst the endorsement is playing, take a gander at the pictures of all the members of the American Nazi Party and the Klan with whom Ron Paul has knowingly posed.



Just a final observation in the inanity of the EmoProg Left in their embracement of Ron Paul: these selfsame people abhor Ron's son Rand - for all the reasons listed above; but Ron and Rand are one and the same as far as beliefs go. In fact, people were appalled when Rachel Maddow revealed Rand's aversion to the Civil Rights Act.

Why is the father different from the son when he's not?

Someone needs to learn the art of critical thinking, because support for Ron Paul is not like being a cafeteria Catholic.