Rangel: One of Many

Charlie Rangel stepped down from his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee due to mounting ethics investigations yesterday, and to significantly less attention than other notable political criminals. Politico reports:

Rangel says he's stepping aside only temporarily, but he officially resigned the post in a letter submitted to the House Wednesday morning. Technically, he could be restored by a future House vote, but that's a political long shot given that he was forced aside by ethics troubles.

It was not immediately clear who would take the committee’s reins in Rangel’s absence, with some insiders predicting it would be the next man in line, California’s Pete Stark, and others predicting it would be Sander Levin of Michigan. Under House rules, Stark is chairman unless Democrats act affirmatively to put someone else in his place, according to a House GOP aide familiar with House operations.

A race to succeed Rangel in the next Congress — if Democrats hold onto their majority — could be a wild donnybrook involving several potential candidates, including Stark, Levin, Jim McDermott of Washington, John Lewis of Georgia and Richard Neal of Massachusetts. Xavier Becerra of California, vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus, could also be a factor, as he has won a party leadership election before.

Rangel chose to step down, he said, because the matter “is bringing so much attention to the press and [I want] ... to avoid my colleagues having to defend me during their elections.”

Those electoral pressures had put Rangel in a bind: Either resign or face being forced out by a Republican-written resolution that was quickly gaining Democratic support, both in public and in private.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) statement on Rangel Wednesday morning had a certain tone of finality to it.

“Chairman Charlie Rangel has informed me of his request for a leave of absence from his duties and responsibilities as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. I will honor his request,” Pelosi said. "I commend Chairman Rangel for his decades of leadership on jobs, health care and the most significant economic issues of the day."

The catalyst for Rangel’s removal came last week, when the ethics committee ruled that he had broken House gift rules by accepting corporate-sponsored travel to the Caribbean.

It is understandable for a reasonable person to question why Rangel was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to begin with. His career has been marked with near-systematic occurances of corruption, starting in 1965 when he used public housing funds to renovate his Central Harlem home. Even just in the past few years Rangel has been fingered in several ethics investigations involving his financial infidelities.

There is nothing about Rangel's career that should come as a surprise to political observers, for he should find amiable company in the ranks of other major black public figures, such as Kwame Kilpatrick, Sharpe James, William Jefferson, Dianne Wilkerson, Marion Barry, Maxine Waters, Carol Elizabeth Moseley Braun, Roland Burris, and many others. Most of them were elected (and reelected) in minority jurisdictions and all of them support the types of social welfare programs that overwhelmingly benefit minorities and immigrants, and most blame racism for their crimes. All of them are explicitly corrupt.

What inevitably results from these situations is an unwillingness by the minority-dominated population to hold "one of their own" accountable at the ballot box when it is in their distinct interests to keep the crook in office. It virtually amounts to organized crime against the rest of the population.

There are, of course, countless white politicians wrapped in similar corruption cases... but very rarely can they be attributed to a complacent, racially-minded constituency all too willing to overlook the crimes of their representatives because of material benefit and baseless racist accusations. For that, we have only ourselves and our failed political system to blame.

Put another feather in the cap of mass democracy, I suppose.

Ron Paul Experiences Tea Party Blowback?

Ron Paul is coming off of a straw poll victory at CPAC this past month, not to mention a strong showing by Campaign for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty, two groups founded by his acolytes. But despite--or perhaps because of--this, it appears Paul may not coast to victory in his congressional primary race, according to Politico:

It’s an unusual turn of events for a veteran congressman who has reached stardom in conservative populist circles and who just last week emerged as the victor of the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Yet despite his solid anti-establishment credentials and non-conformist views, Paul finds himself under siege from three Republicans who are embracing many of the themes that have defined Paul’s career. At the heart of the resistance is the notion that the 10-term Paul has gone Washington, abandoning his constituents as he pursues his white whale—the presidency.

“To be honest, I was surprised when these guys started coming out of the woodwork,” said Fort Bend County GOP Chairman Rick Miller. “They’re trying to tap into the idea that it’s time for a new face. It’s a sign of the times. It’s what’s happening in our country.”

Paul remains the favorite in the race but the opposition clearly has him looking over his shoulder.

In a January email alert titled “They’ve Turned Their Attack Dogs Loose On Me!”, Paul warns that both parties are “doing everything they can to make sure I am defeated.”

“These candidates include three Republicans in my own primary on March 2,” he wrote, “and they will stop at nothing to tear down and destroy all we have worked for.”

Richard Murray, a University of Houston political scientist, said strong anti-incumbent winds are buffeting even members like Paul who have never been embraced by the political establishment.

It would seem that Paul has reason to worry about this anti-anti-establishment backlash, right?

For all the grumbling back home, however, there is little question that Paul, armed with a $2.5 million war chest, still leads the field. And there appears to be widespread belief that he will finish on top, with the only question being whether he will win enough votes to cross the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.

Oh. Nevermind.

Libido for the Stupid

After the appearance of Sarah Palin’s ghost-written Going Roguein November 2009, the former Alaska governor saw her celebrity soar. Her book sold over 600,000 copies within 36 hours of the time it went on sale. And even that paradigmatic liberal Oprah Winfrey worked hard to have Sarah on her TV programs. FOX News went agog over her 320-page work, and for about a week, her face was more visible on FOX than that of any of the channel’s other favorites.

The only influential people on the establishment right who expressed reservations about her, up until her recent overexposure on TV, were David Frum and Charles Krauthammer. But within the neoconservative camp, other opinions also surfaced. Bill Kristol and his fortnightly Weekly Standard have been high on Sarah, a fact that may be attributed to her Christian Zionism and her outspoken defense of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.And Krauthammer has moderated his critical attitude by observing on FOX that Sarah “will be a significant force in Republican politics, even if she never becomes president.”

Sarah’s prominence on the American right might seem to some to be disproportionate to what she has shown in terms of verbal facility or knowledge about current events. It is hard to consider her a serious presidential candidate as soon as one thinks about how often she put her foot in her mouth—after McCain (or his campaign manager or Bill Kristol or whoever) plucked her out of icy Alaskan obscurity in order to supply a sinking presidential candidate with an unlikely running mate. Her embarrassing performance during an interview with Katie Couric, when she displayed a woeful ignorance of foreign affairs, was not a leftist ambush but a shocking revelation.

Whether it was tactically useful to have her in that interview or exposed to other similar contretemps is a secondary question. What this exposure revealed was what the McCain campaign tried to hide, namely, how little Sarah knew outside the nitty-gritty of Alaska political life. The lady also had a way of punctuating her vaguely stated points with such folksy phrases as “youbetcha,” a practice that became even more painful for some of us to listen to, considering that what she said was mostly an exercise in self-validation or a string of GOP campaign clichés.

Despite the obvious but enigmatic hatred that she generates on the American left and her recent oration at the Tea Party convention in Nashville, Sarah is certainly not a hard right-winger. She approves of anti-discrimination laws and other directives that are intended to “help women,” and she attributes her success as a high school basketball star to anti-discrimination measures imposed at both the state and federal levels. In her words, “I’ll tell you, I’m a product of Title IX in our schools, where equal education and equal opportunities in sports really helped propel me into, I guess, into the position that I’m in today.’’

She was also indignant over Senator Harry Reid’s remarks about President Obama’s appeal as a nice black person. Or so she said on January 11, when she appeared alongside a slobbering Bill O’Reilly as Fox’s latest “contributor.” Sara seems to have been shocked that Reid would have noticed the president’s nonwhite pigmentation, in discussing his electoral strengths, in what was a private conversation that the Senate Majority Leader was having with a friend. At the very least, Sarah insisted, Reid should have been removed from his post due to his racial bigotry.

Sarah has never rushed to the front as a critic of immigration, although since the appearance of her book, she has noticed that “illegals” are crossing the American border. But as Peter Brimelow has observed at VDARE, it is hard to figure out the reason for her mild opposition to what she had previously largely ignored. Sarah tells us that illegal entrance into the US is a “problem” because it places unnecessary burdens on governors in border-states who are wrestling with a flood of illegals. But most of these governors, according to Brimelow, have done pitifully little to deal with this flood. Some have turned a blind eye, lest they lose their Hispanic voting base.

To whatever extent Sarah has spoken out on foreign affairs, she seems to have taken her opinions from the previous administration. As a spokesperson for a “conservative” foreign policy, she has never moved beyond neoconservative tags. She peppers her statements on international relations with lots of references to “human rights.” In someone’s alternative universe, this idealistic rhetoric encapsulates a conservative foreign policy.

As a self-declared Christian, Sarah does oppose abortion, and even gave birth to a child whom she knew had Downs Syndrome. And she poses for pictures with a rifle and backs the National Rifle Association. Moreover, the sight of this earthy mother of four, holding a hunting rifle while dressed in outdoor attire, sends tremors of excitement through her middle-aged male devotees. Less clear, however, is that her package of stands amounts to anything more than a kind of center-right Republicanism overlaid with neoconservative sentence fragments.

Despite counterarguments to the view of her as a serious right-winger, Sarah has generated a crazed following on the right. It seems to be composed largely of middle-aged and older American conservatives who adore Sarah for two reasons. One, she strikes her admirers as one helluva gal, a woman who presents herself in a manner that her male votaries associate with the Eternal Feminine, that is female folksiness. A calendar with Sarah in hunting gear sold enormously well after last year’s election, and from all accounts, the calendar’s primary buyers were older Republican men, who flipped over their preferred poster girl.

Two, and even more importantly, Sarah taps a populist vein, which is peculiarly American. Unlike its European bourgeois counterpart, typified by a movement such as the Lega Nord, American populism equates corniness with anti-elitism. Sarah’s speaking habits and even her lack of readiness to deal with complicated policy questions may well endear her to her followers. Such traits indicate her homey upbringing.

Further, her education at a community college and at the University of Idaho renders her even more attractive to those who are already inclined to like her: her lack of impressive educational credentials betokens the lack of the snobbery that is identified with the bearers of Princeton or Harvard degrees. A New York Postcommentary by Michael Goodwin contrasts Obama’s “Ivy League eloquence” to the true conservative openness of Sarah Palin. Obama’s careful diction “now seems tired next to her [Sarah’s] wrong-side-of-the track passion.” Obama’s rhetorical style shows that he “has aligned himself with the left wing of his party instead of the ordinary people who identify with Sarah.”

If the American Left stresses victimhood, managerial control, and Political Correctness, then the American populist Right exalts PLAINNESS. In a campaign speech I heard the then Republican governor of Wisconsin Lee Dreyfuss give in Madison in 1980, the speaker electrified the crowd by proclaiming: “We’re all descended from the scum and refuse of the Old World.” As Dreyfuss finished this sentence, the ecstatic lady sitting next to me cried out: “That was really rightwing!” That, by the way, was the last time I attended a Republican rally, as a party member or even as an outsider.

In the last century the American Right was not consistently egalitarian. Among its luminaries were such anti-egalitarians as H.L. Mencken, Albert Nock, the young W.F. Buckley, and the Russell Kirk who authoredThe Conservative Mind. And if there were vulgar and not particularly cerebral politicians whom rightists once defended, they argued that these public figures represented solid principles and so we could excuse their bad manners, plebeian ways, and/or verbal awkwardness. Rarely on the right during the postwar years were cultural mediocrity and educational limits considered positive qualities in someone we hoped to see lead our movement and country. No one celebrated Joe McCarthy as a hard, profane drinker who wore baggy clothes. Some conservatives considered themselves to be McCarthyites despite the social failings of the man whom they, rightly or wrongly, believed was saving us from Communist agents. In Sarah’s case, the opposite may be true. It is not her substance or articulation of principles but her lack of sophistication that appeals to the current American Right.

This Right went ballistic when Obama followed court etiquette and bowed before the Japanese imperial couple. An outcry was heard over the “undemocratic” manner in which the American president approached Japanese royalty. The rightwing columnist Michelle Malkin produced two syndicated columns excoriating Obama for his “spinelessness” at the Japanese court. Neoconservative criticism by contrast was more restrained. It stressed the contrast between the overly informal behavior toward the British queen shown by Barack and Michelle Obama and the president’s obeisance to the Japanese Emperor and Empress. Obama had supposedly slighted our “special relation” with the British, the nation that had previewed our now perfected form of democracy.

But however programmed and predictable was this response, the outcry against any concession to monarchy seemed even more ludicrous. It reflected the plebeian sentiment of those who despise gourmet food, fine art, and polished syntax and who, not least of all, slobber over Sarah Palin.

In this celebrity, they have found exactly what they value, and until her recent dip in popularity on the right, she could seem to do no wrong. When Sarah’s teenage daughter got pregnant by some jock, who has since deserted his wife by shotgun marriage and his baby daughter, Sarah’s fans applauded her loyalty to her troubled daughter. Supposedly it was impertinent and even leftist to ask how her daughter got into this mess in the first place. Where were her parents when she became involved with someone who sounded like a thug, and whom Sarah later injudiciously had dragged to the GOP convention to sit with her family? Although one might think that such tastelessness would have disturbed Sarah’s fans, it had exactly the opposite effect. Her popularity among the faithful took off again. (She was showered with similar but by then diminishing indulgence when she later unexpectedly resigned her post as Alaska governor.)

After all, we are told, ordinary people have to face daily problems, and what are Sarah and her weirdly named children but the quintessence of the Ordinary, raised to a Platonic Ideal? The Palins are the human equivalent of McDonalds, Burger King, and Kmart, all business establishments that Sarah’s followers are likely to frequent as self-identifying acts.

After the Second World War, the authoritarian conservative jurist Carl Schmitt advised his acquaintance Francisco Franco to restore a Spanish monarchy, even if he had to take the crown for himself. According to Schmitt, Latin peoples could only accord legitimacy to a government that came wrapped with the pomp of monarchical institutions. Whether this observation was true, it is indeed the case that the American Right celebrates Sarah Palin for instantiating their political and social ideals. For the current American populist Right, it is not royal blood but ordinariness and strings of garbled phrases that confer legitimacy on those they would like to see rule.

Conservatives, Liberals, and Libertarians

I’ve been thinking about the psychological differences between Ron Paul supporters and mainstream conservatives.  Since the main issue of disagreement seems to be foreign policy, we can apply the lessons we learn to how each group sees this issue.

Mainstream conservatives are more numerous because TV tells people that Republicanism is one of two acceptable options.  When they realize that they’re not masochistic enough to be liberals, the Republican takes conservatism as a package.  When I first accepted free market economics I didn’t care about abortion or a hawkish foreign policy but supported both because I knew that those who wanted to redistribute wealth were on the other side.

Ron Paul’s people fall into two main categories: misplaced hippies and ideologues.  A few join his movement because they sense that they are marginalized members of society and state power is used to punish them; these include drug users, religious fundamentalists and Stormfronters.

The neo-cons seem to hate the media, the universities and the government.  They believe themselves to be a beleaguered minority.  For the most part, this view is accurate.  So why the insistence on spreading the American way of life to other parts of the world?  Is the hope that one day Afghani and Iraqi traditionalists will feel as marginalized by their respective mainstream cultures as white Americans do today?    No one ever seems to see the contradiction between hating every institution in your country and calling yourself a superpatriot.  The reason for this is that conservatives aren’t very smart.  The Republican may buy into the propaganda about the melting pot and land of opportunity because theories of institutional racism and heteronormativity go straight over his head.  Or he may be motivated by spite, hating both the liberals he feels inferior to and the Muslim who scares him.

The libertarians are either ideologically opposed to war or have lost so much faith in their society that they don’t feel comfortable using the term “us” when talking about foreign affairs.  I fall into the latter category.

What’s I’ve always felt was weird was that a man who loves war like McCain is considered by liberals to be a moderate while anti-interventionists like David Duke and Pat Buchanan are fringy.  This shows that the left understands that American power is used to spread multiculturalism.  Otherwise, the elites’ natural revulsion to whites hurting non-whites would take over and they’d be just as anti-war as they are outraged when anybody advocates closing the border or a positive white identity.  Unlike conservatives and like libertarians, liberals sometimes have high IQs so it’s actually worthwhile to look for consistencies in their ideas and actions.

Conservative careerists know that being “tough on defense” is the path of least resistance.  Liberals will grumble or support you if you advocate war.  They will fight you on everything else and destroy you if you go off script on race or gender issues.  The masses can’t exactly articulate why they hate the establishment but know that calling them “soft on terror” is an excuse to attack the elites.

The reason that paleoconservatives and libertarians shouldn’t just throw in the towel on foreign policy and enter into a coalition with the mainstream right on cultural and economic issues is because in such an alliance foreign policy tends to become its defining feature, as we saw during the Bush administration.  When it comes down to cutting government Vs. controlling the world, the latter has always won.  When it’s time for conservatives to compromise with the left, liberals would rather sacrifice a few goat herders to be tortured than give ground anywhere else.  This satisfies the bloodlust of the conservatives while allowing the establishment to continue destroying America without too many objections.

Ron Paul Wins at CPAC

A friend who was at CPAC writes me the following:

I was at CPAC for three days and people affiliated with Campaign for Liberty are everywhere. Paul is extremely polarizing. Everyone who hasn’t become part of his cult of personality hates him. That’s how he was able to win 31% of the straw poll votes but get booed when the announcement was made that he’d won! It’s really unfortunate, because on domestic policy all his views are extremely popular. When Ann Coulter was asked if she favored ending the federal reserve, she replied that if Ron Paul is for it and it doesn’t involve foreign policy she supports it! The crowd cheered.

You should really check out Glenn Beck’s speech. He came out against building democracy. He talked about Woodrow Wilson establishing the federal reserve and asked “How’s that working out for ya?” He lifted these ideas straight from Paul, but in Beck’s mouth everyone cheered for them.

I watched Beck’s speech, and what strikes me is his complete rejection of egalitarian premises. Usually Republicans will say things like “Sure, everybody should have health care and education, but the free market is the best way to make that happen.” Beck doesn’t pretend that in a free society everybody will be able to have everything. You may not get everything you want or even deserve, but asking the government to provide it for you is theft. All claims to the property or labor of others should be rejected on those grounds.

Beck’s short rant against spreading democracy is a good start on foreign policy. In my dealings with Republicans and conservatives, I’ve always found their buying into the “war on terror” to be the most disturbing thing about them. Their military and 9/11 fetishism strike me as creepy, the subservience to Israel strikes me as pathetic, the willingness to sacrifice liberty for security is cowardly, the refusal to accept that not everybody in the world needs or wants multicultural democracy smacks of Trotskyism, and relying on anecdotes of dead Americans instead of being able to understand the statistical arguments as to why terrorism isn’t a big deal is a result of plain stupidity. What’s called the “national security” issue is a stain on an otherwise beautiful revolt against federal activism, statism and egalitarianism.

While CPAC grew over the last year, the expansion of Campaign for Liberty has outpaced that of the conference as a whole. There were 1,757 ballots in the straw poll in 2009 compared to almost 3,000 this year and Ron Paul’s share of the vote went from 13 to 31%. The election of Rand to the Senate would ensure that the fed obsessive and anti-war libertarians aren’t going anywhere. May they come to completely overwhelm CPAC and destroy the scourge that is the neo-cons.

According to The Politico,

Paul’s victory renders a straw poll that was already lightly contested among the likely 2012 GOP hopefuls all but irrelevant, as the 74-year-old Texan is unlikely to be a serious contender for his party’s nomination…

CPAC organizers were plainly embarrassed by the results, which could reduce the perceived impact of a contest that was once thought to offer a window into which White House hopefuls were favored by movement conservatives.

A spokesman for the conference rushed over to reporters after the announcement to make sure they had heard the unmistakable boos when the screen first showed Paul had won the straw poll.

Not supporting someone because they can’t win is the clearest example in the world of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as who people support determines who wins in the first place.

The important thing for Campaign for Liberty will be to not leave the establishment alone. Ron Paul is where the passion is and good luck trying to get people as excited about Tim Pawlenty.