What concerns me about Ron Paul.
Ron Paul is not the man people pretend he is. I've had it with all the worship of a man who has a long trail of issues people tend to brush off.
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Omaha World-Herrald: Leonard Pitts Jr.: “Ron Paul’s extremism is foolish and scary.” From An African American Male Perspective.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, meet Ronald Ernest Paul. He is the very soul of a foolish consistency. Meaning that he is willing, often to a fault, to follow his ideology to its logical and most extreme conclusions.
But in Paul’s take on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he doubles down on the bad premise instead.
Paul has long argued — and reiterated recently on CNN — that the act, which liberated untold millions of African-Americans from the tyranny of Jim Crow, “destroyed the principle of private property and private choices.” In other words, forcing a restaurant to take down a Whites Only sign infringed the rights of the restaurant’s owner. A similar argument was made by segregationists in 1964 — and by slave owners in the 1850s.
Maybe it’s easy to make freedom an issue of “property rights” when you have never been the property.
That said, it is of little importance to wonder, as some are now doing, whether all of this makes Ron Paul a racist. Yes, we’ve recently learned of a newsletter sent out under his name in the 1990s that included racist language. Yes, Paul has won — and declined to disavow — the support of various white supremacist groups.
But yes, too, Paul has decried the War on Drugs as a war on African-American men— a view shared by many on the right. Then ask yourself what sort of nation this would be if that view ever prevailed.
Can government be overlarge, overbearing, overwhelming, over restrictive, over intru-sive? Of course. And where it is those things, it is the right — and duty — of the electorate to pare it back.
On the other hand, unless you enjoy salmonella in your food and lead in your paint, unless you think it’s OK that your doctor has no medical degree and your lawyer no license, unless you’re fine with breathing sooty air and drinking tainted water and unless you really think a black woman in Mississippi, locked out of public places by threat of violence and force of law, should have been required to wait on market forces to rescue her, you must regard Paul’s moral imbecility with a certain appalled awe.
Heaven help us if the intellectual rigidity he symbolizes is really the only alternative to the intellectual malleability of so many of his colleagues.
At its best, government vindicates and defends a people’s noblest ideals. The Civil Rights Act was government at its best. Paul disputes this and styles himself a defender of freedom for so doing. Too bad he can’t spend a day being black in Mississippi in 1964. He might emerge with a better understanding of that word.
As it is, Paul’s extremism only proves this much: Emerson didn’t know the half of it.
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“Ron Paul Attacked for Views on Health Care.”
Ron Paul’s views on health care came under fire tonight at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, where his position on eliminating Medicaid was met with open hostility from the audience.
Paul has called for the eventual elimination of Medicare and Medicaid and has suggested that charity hospitals should pick up the slack for the uninsured. That view got one woman in Manchester up in arms.
“Thirty three percent of the children in the U.S. are on Medicaid and another 10 percent are uninsured,” the woman said. “You have offered charity by doctors as a solution to this. Do you really think that 43 percent of America’s children will be taken care of by charity?”
Paul said that his current budget preserves the program, but it would eventually be phased out because of the unsustainable cost. Paul added that when he worked in a charity hospital in the 1960s nobody was turned away.
“I really want to promote these medical savings accounts so people can put their money aside and get it off their taxes, and buy their own insurance and pay cash to their doctors,” Paul said.
As the congressman was finishing his answer, another woman in the audience shouted, “What about the 43 percent?”
Paul, seemingly taken off guard, shot back, “You mean when? Right now?”
“I described this transition,” Paul responded over the voice of the woman.
“Why not look at how the country looked before 1965. Maybe it wouldn’t cost so much,” Paul said.
Paul’s voice then picked up as he stared at the woman and added, “It sounds like you’re cold hearted, you don’t care about people.”
“It’s all going down the tubes if we don’t do something about it too soon,” Paul said.
This isn’t the first time Paul was questioned about his views on health care. At a recent GOP debate, Paul was asked a hypothetical question about whether an uninsured 30-year-old working man in coma should be treated.
“What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul responded, adding, “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk. This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody…”
The audience erupted into cheers, cutting off the congressman’s sentence.
After a pause, Paul was asked, “Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?” to which a small number of audience members shouted, “Yeah!”
Paul, a doctor trained in obstetrics and gynecology, said that when he got out of medical school in the 1960s “the churches took care of them.”
“We never turned anybody away from the hospital,” he said. “We’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves or assume responsibility for ourselves. Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it. That’s the reason the cost is so high.”
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/ron-paul-attacked-for-views-on-health-care/
