Gus Hall, the long time Stalinist leader of the Communist Party USA, had a hobby of running for President. He did it regularly, like Metamucil for the body politic. In the end, it was a running joke, "oh, it's a Presidential election already? Let's see if Gus Hall is running... YES!" I expect any time now to find Zombie Gus Hall on the ballot again, because death can't keep a good joke down.
So now Ron Paul takes up Gus Hall's mantle and basically announces he's running, again. I suppose it's fitting. After all, Gus Hall was an ideologue who placed his ideology over any attachment to, like, actual reality. And Ron Paul is an ideologue who, if actual reality contradicts his ideology, chooses his ideology over reality. Two peas in a pod, really. Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
I'll say one thing for Ron Paul -- at least he speaks pretty straight. He mostly says what he means, glibertarian though it may be, without the usual pussy-footing poli-speak BS. And I do approve of his anti-war isolationist stance. I caught a clip of him on "The View" which was posted at ZeroHedge, where they worship Paul the Ron (not so much the Rand.) Whoopi asked him about the Wars on Muslim People (she didn't phrase it that way, of course) and Paul said "End 'em." I also like how he and Bernie Sanders cracked the vault of secrecy at the Fed, at least a little bit. I'm not down with at least 50% of his libertaritardishness, but at least Ron Paul is an honest opposition to TPTB. His son's a weasel, though.
ReplyDelete"Whoopi asked him about the Wars on Muslim People (she didn't phrase it that way, of course) and Paul said 'End 'em.' " - Bukko
ReplyDeleteThe wars? or the people? I ask because there seems to be a lot of the latter attitude going around these days.
It's always refreshing to deal with a straight-forward lunatic rather than one of the creepy lizard people who dominate politics today, but it's always wise to remember that, no matter how sincerely they talk about their lunacy, it is, in the end, still lunacy.
ReplyDeleteAnarcho-capitalism ("libertarianism") cannot work in the real world any more than Communism can (another thing Ron Paul shares with Gus Hall -- devotion to an unworkable ideology). The end game of anarcho-capitalism is hydraulic empire, where whoever manages to corner the supply of some critical resource via monopolies ends up as de facto emperor through the power of life or death he exercises due to his control of that critical resource. Or feudalism, an oligarchy where a very few end up owning everything, and everybody else has to pay rents to these few for the privilege of living, an arrangement that typically ends up with outright serfdom. This is what history tells us, and the anarcho-capitalist's rejection of history tells you as much about their devotion to actual empirical reality as anything else does.
- Badtux the History Penguin
You southern penguins must have been more fixated on the communists than the rest of us. I remember the perpetual candidate was Harold Stassen who ran 11 times for President, more times even than Pat Paulsen. By the 60's it was hard to get past his name before people laughed. Stassen was at the other end of the political spectrum from Paul.
ReplyDeleteYeppers, Montag, even in 1990 Texas made you take an oath that you weren't a Communist before you were allowed to be a teacher. Harold Stassen wasn't a joke for my generation because we came of age after Stassen's prime. Gus Hall, on the other hand, was up to his foolishness at the same time we were coming of age. It's interesting that after all the uproar about Communist infiltration of America etc., the CPUSA managed to get a whole 30,000 votes for their head Stalinist in the end... probably the entire membership of the CPUSA, including the entire system of Soviet sleeper agents. So much for that McCarthy era bunk, eh?
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Not-Communist-Obsessed Penguin