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2010-05-21 Home Front: Politix

Tea Party Favorite Rand Paul Under Fire for Criticizing Civil Rights Act

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Posted by gorb 2010-05-21 04:28|| || Front Page|| [11130 views ] Top

#1 Mrs. Bobby's WaPo had this on the front page with the headline "Tea Party Candidate in Hot Water."

Anything to make the scary Tea Party go away. Have they tried, "Bush and Cheney are behind the Tea party"?

Posted by Bobby 2010-05-21 05:57|| 2010-05-21 05:57|| Front Page Top

#2 But Paul added: "I think a lot of things could be handled locally."

And so do I! They're wearing the "racist" card thin, but they keep on playing it nearly every time.

Posted by Besoeker 2010-05-21 06:02|| 2010-05-21 06:02|| Front Page Top

#3 shares many of the libertarian views of his father, Republican Rep. Ron Paul

Oi vey.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2010-05-21 06:36|| 2010-05-21 06:36|| Front Page Top

#4 shares many of the libertarian views of his father, Republican Rep. Ron Paul

Oi vey.
Posted by g(r)omgoru

He KNOWS who you are g(r)om. He's a mad, racist Baptist, gold hoarding dentist and has ObamaCare computer copies of your most recent panorex and fillings. [evil snark off - sorry g(r)om, I simply don't know what came over me]

Posted by Besoeker 2010-05-21 07:06|| 2010-05-21 07:06|| Front Page Top

#5 NPR and MSNBC's goal is to get sound bites for his opponents. If he doesn't realize that the MSM is out to destroy him, he's too naive to be playing in the big leagues.

Posted by DMFD 2010-05-21 07:09|| 2010-05-21 07:09|| Front Page Top

#6 So, "Blacks need not apply" is fine with him? He's toast, or should be.

Posted by KBK 2010-05-21 08:54|| 2010-05-21 08:54|| Front Page Top

#7 Blow the shit out of your ears, KBK. He swore up and down a stack of bibles that he was fundamentally hostile to racial discrimination, and that the CRA was settled law. His only point is that moral issues ought to be legislated as close to the local level as possible.

I'm not a libertarian, but I tend to agree - localized state reform is preferable to federal-level reform, because it offers a safety valve - the "laboratories of democracy", wherein the adventurous and path-breaking states can experiment with new legislation, while limiting the damage if the innovation turns out to have disastrous, unintended consequences.

Prohibition, for instance.

Posted by Mitch H. 2010-05-21 09:29|| http://blogfonte.blogspot.com/ 2010-05-21 09:29|| Front Page Top

#8 So, "Blacks need not apply" is fine with him? He's toast, or should be.

You didn't read the article, did you?

Posted by gorb 2010-05-21 10:30|| 2010-05-21 10:30|| Front Page Top

#9 "I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation" Can that be any clearer to the MSM?

Posted by Cyber Sarge 2010-05-21 10:38|| 2010-05-21 10:38|| Front Page Top

#10 Sorry to go against the grain here, but Paul stepped in it, big time. The whole point of desegregation was that the state was forced to prevent business owners from denying citizens their basic rights. Paul's gun owner analogy is idiotic. Having a certain amount of melanin in your skin is not the same as carrying a weapon. That Paul can't see this distinction suggests that he is indeed a nut. His father has long been associated with racist idiocy.

This is EXACTLY why I want nothing to do with the libertarian wackos. There's a deficit of common sense among them, and we shouldn't be putting these goofballs in office.

Reducing the deficit? Go for it. Returning to the gold standard, standing up for companies' "right" to discriminate racially? Pu-leeze.

Posted by lex 2010-05-21 10:44|| 2010-05-21 10:44|| Front Page Top

#11 Agree with KBK. He's probably toast, like his dad.

Reopening our national wound around civil rights legislation from half a century ago is the LAST thing this country needs now. The first thing we need is a decent, intelligent, level-headed anti-deficit movement, one without libbertrarian nuttiness.

Posted by lex 2010-05-21 10:47|| 2010-05-21 10:47|| Front Page Top

#12 I did read the article. I know nothing about this guy except what I read there (and that he's the son of a loon).

He supports civil rights in the abstract, but waffles on the implementation. When asked a direct question about desegregating a lunch counter, he deflected, raised a strawman, and didn't answer.

I'm in favor of localizing (and minimizing) government, also. But civil rights proved to be a special case, and wasn't being addressed at the local level. Maybe it would have been in another 100 years.

At what level should segregation be addressed? At the state level? OK, Mississippi decides to allow segregation in the private sector and Alabama doesn't? The same holds down to the city level. Businesses can make individual choices about it? That didn't work. To stop the abuse, we had to pass national laws covering the public and private sectors.

It seems to me that this guy's libertarian instincts trump his support of civil rights in practice.

You should be able to exclude a guy from your restaurant because he stinks. He can always take a bath. But he can't change his skin color.

And, yes, the definition of "civil rights" has been abused.

If Paul doesn't actually support segregation in the private sector, he should have realized he was being set up. He should have had a better answer to an obvious question.

Toast.

Posted by KBK 2010-05-21 11:03|| 2010-05-21 11:03|| Front Page Top

#13 KBK:

So it sounds like "Blacks need not apply" is not fine with him, but you feel he would not take care of the issue effectively because it requires the federal government to step in.

Maybe. But how does this balance against a private business owner's ability to make decisions that suit him, for whatever good or bad reason?

It seems like it is starting down the slippery slope of the federal government overreaching its Constitutional authority.

Although I believe it would have happened later, I also believe that some states would eventually have passed legislation mirroring civil rights, and the problem would have begun the process of going away.

Posted by gorb 2010-05-21 11:37|| 2010-05-21 11:37|| Front Page Top

#14 Stephanopoulos interviews Paul:

"Do you believe that if someone doesn't want to sell their house to someone else based on the color of their skin, that's OK?"

"Good morning, George, Good morning, Robin. When does my honeymoon period start? I had a big victory. I've just been trashed up and down and they have been saying things that are untrue. And when they say I'm for repealing the Civil Rights Act, it's absolutely false. It's never been my position and something that I basically just think is politics.

Again, deflected the question, never answered it. My opinion is that he does support not selling. Plus, he's a whiner.

This guy is a political disaster for the Tea Party. Watch him get distanced.

[Note, the last part of the above quote is a cut/paste from later in the interview, when he repeated almost exactly the same thing he said at the outset. Easier for me than getting the precise words off the video.]

Posted by KBK 2010-05-21 12:59|| 2010-05-21 12:59|| Front Page Top

#15 Not to pile on, but the guy is obviously a political babe in the woods. It has been obvious now for over a year-- actually several years, given the brutal (but completely justified) attack by Jamie Kirchick on Paul's father's anti-semitic bedfellows-- that the achilles heel of the far-out libbetrarian movement was its views on race, and that the MSM would attack them on this point.

That Paul had no idea such a line of attack would materialize, and would be unrelenting (note his pathetic "honeymoon" plea), and would be politically fatal if he didn't get out front of the issue, hunt-kill-and-eat it, indicates that he's not ready for the political big leagues.

The nation needs and deserves better. The Tea Partiers need to distance themselves from him and his dad, pronto, or they'll be MSM roadkill before they know it.

Posted by lex 2010-05-21 14:05|| 2010-05-21 14:05|| Front Page Top

#16 Paul and his dad come out of the racist neo-Confederate fringe of the libertarian movement. Kirchick-- hardly a liberal-- explains this wing and its intellectual home, the von Mises Institute, here:

The people surrounding the von Mises Institute--including Paul--may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history-- the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent Washington libertarian told me, There are too many libertarians in this country ... who, because they are attracted to the great books of Mises, ... find their way to the Mises Institute and then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of libertarian thought.

Pauls alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race....

Posted by lex 2010-05-21 14:16|| 2010-05-21 14:16|| Front Page Top

#17 ...a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history. Lex

Over 600,000 Americans killed on the fields of battle must surely qualify as a great "catastrophe." The Civil War as a "turning point" for the nation cannot be disputed. I can only recommend a reading or re-reading of some of Foote's excellent writings.

Posted by Besoeker 2010-05-21 15:09|| 2010-05-21 15:09|| Front Page Top

#18 By describing them as "neo-Confederates", I think it's pretty obvious that Kirchick means that these types view as catastrophic the outcome of the Civil War, ie the wrong side won.

Posted by lex 2010-05-21 15:14|| 2010-05-21 15:14|| Front Page Top

#19 Got the usual suspect out working the WAR. Excellent. Remember, it was about States Rights and freedom for South Africa.

LOL, boyz, get a damn grip. The idiot stepped in it. He may still win, but he'll win because it'll bring out the serious kooks to vote for him.

Posted by Shipman 2010-05-21 18:05|| 2010-05-21 18:05|| Front Page Top

#20 Next up, boys and old farts playing with guns, with a musical background, uniforms and a sense of purpose.

Hell, just drop the uniforms, music and just play with the damn guns. It's safer for us all.

Posted by Shipman 2010-05-21 18:08|| 2010-05-21 18:08|| Front Page Top

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