Would the statist press even boycott a Ron Paul inauguration?
They say when you stand at the base of the great pyramid of Khufu and look up, you don’t see a pyramid, at all. The proportions are so vast that the third dimension drops away, and it appears you’re simply gazing at a flat new horizon, albeit tilted up at 51 degrees.
(This may be no accident. The western horizon was a very important place to the ancient Egyptians — the boundary between this world and the World-Beyond. And while it’s true the Egyptians were fixated on that land of the dead, it may not be true that all their best-celebrated texts were merely instructions to the traveler on how to conduct himself once he’d crossed that horizon for good. The promise of all mystery religions — Egypt’s surely among the oldest — was of a ritual and a sacrament that would allow the traveler to voyage to the World-Beyond … and return.)
But we were speaking of getting so close to things that it’s hard to see them with a proper perspective. I believe that happened to most of the newshounds commenting on the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night.
They’ve been following the inside baseball of the jockeying for position among the would-be Republican presidential nominees for so long that they seemed to miss the obvious: Many Americans have been studiously avoiding this sideshow. Tuesday evening was the first time many changed the channel and watched Mitt Romney and Ron Paul speak for a few minutes.
And what a contrast they saw.
The candidate now widely referred to as the Mitt-bot checked his five-year itinerary and noted this was the night to deliver a scripted speech designed to convey the subtext: “Ignore these Republican also-rans who have now fallen by the wayside. As from tonight, this race is mano-a-mano — me against Barack Obama.”
Thus the “He passed ObamaCare; I’ll repeal it” comparisons, which actually read much better on paper than they played out Tuesday night, with a candidate who gave it a game try but never seemed to be able to settle on a challenge-and-response rhythm with his own cheering section.
I heard commentators say Gov. Romney sounded angry. In fact, what nags one about Mr. Romney is quite the opposite: that he doesn’t seem to be able to channel any recognizable emotion at all.
His “pace yourself for a five-year marathon” approach, designed to outlast the bevy of sprinting rabbits who have been sent in against him, will likely prevail. It’s just incapable of evoking any real enthusiasm, meaning Republicans will simply have to hope he’s a good enough manager to oversee the launch of the biggest corporate downsizing in history, overcoming quite understandable qualms among the GOP rank-and-file that they’ve never fared all that well with “Democrat Lite” candidates like John McCain. (The difference between Obamacare and RomneyCare is …?)
The contrast with Ron Paul’s Tuesday night “We got 23 percent” speech — which drew virtually no comment from the press — was like night and day.
Generally, any candidate who whines, “OK we lost; but our ideas got out there!” would be correctly dismissed as pathetic.
Clearly Ron Paul is not delusional enough to believe “23 percent beats 39 percent.” But he didn’t sound the slightest bit disappointed or petulant, Tuesday, as he declared the results a victory not for him, but for “liberty.”
When he says he’s there to force an unwilling political and pundit class to discuss his issues, and that he’s succeeding, he sounds downright exuberant.
Paul doesn’t seem to care that his grandpa voice is “not ready for radio,” that it sometimes goes too high and breaks. He’s clearly having a ball, sticking with a message that he didn’t have to study and memorize up in the hotel room this afternoon (see Rick Perry of Texas, trying to remember which three federal departments he’s supposed to want to cut), since it’s remained largely unchanged for decades.
Let everyone else in the field regurgitate their carefully pureed focus-group sound bites. Paul insists that without him, none of these guys would even be talking about the looming financial crisis brought on by the Federal Reserve, the debasement of the dollar and insane levels of spending and borrowing — let alone our counterproductive and vastly expensive overseas adventures.
The paid-for pawns of the military-industrial hegemony — both pundit and politician — claim Paul would leave us defenseless. On Tuesday the former Air Force officer, who often polls best among actual members of the military, knocked that out of the park, insisting:
“So often they say that if we tell people we think we should spend less in the military, they say, ‘Oh, that means you want to cut defense.’ No, if you cut the military-industrial complex, you cut war profiteering, but you don’t take one penny out of national defense.
“I sort of have to chuckle when they describe you and me as being ‘dangerous,’” Paul went on. “That’s one thing (about which) they are telling the truth, because we are dangerous to the status quo of this country. And we will remain a danger to the Federal Reserve system, as well. …
“Just think: This is the first presidential campaign that the subject ever came up since the Federal Reserve was started. So we are now — because of what is happening, it will remain a dominant issue. There’s no way they’re going to put it to bed, because they have destroyed our money. It’s worldwide. There’s a financial crisis going on. And it’s only sound money and personal liberty that can solve the crisis. …
“You have to stop the inflation, because that’s what destroys the middle class, and that’s what transfers the wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy. And that is why the wealthy got their bailouts and the middle class shrunk and they lost their jobs and they lost their houses. …
“We have to cut the spending. This is why I have made a token suggestion in the first year in office: We would cut at least $1 trillion from the budget. …
“If you are a true humanitarian, you have to fight and argue the case for free markets, sound money, property rights, contract rights, no use of force, and a sensible foreign policy. …”
His “irate minority” is “going to continue to grow by leaps and bounds,” Paul vows. “And we will restore freedom to this country.”
If somebody else on the campaign trail has charted out that bold a course back to more freedom and less government, if someone else on the campaign trail in the past quarter-century has sounded that unscripted yet inspirational, I must have missed it.
# # #
I see where the Clark County Commission received seven serious applications to replace Las Vegas District Attorney David Roger, who resigned the post just one year after telling voters he really, really wanted another term.
The field was promptly thinned to three (instead of five, as ordered) by a seven-lawyer “screening committee” clearly not immune from political influence.
Not even making this first cut were senior Nevada Deputy Attorney General Patrick Ferguson and former deputy district attorney (and former elected district court judge) Don Chairez, the only applicants who’d actually bothered to challenge Roger for the office. (Ferguson lost by a sizeable margin in 2006, but Chairez lost in 2010 by a mere 20,000 out of nearly half-a-million votes cast.)
Could this be because Chairez accused Roger of being soft on political corruption in the county, pointing out the only way crooked county commissioners ever go to jail in these parts is when the federals step in, asserting jurisdiction through the absurd technicality that local phone calls between bribers and bribees bounced off a cell phone tower in California, making them “interstate calls”?
Could it be because Chairez made it clear he’d take a closer prosecutorial look at questionable police shootings, like those of Erik Scott and Trevon Cole?
Now that hands-off-the-cops David Roger has moved on — to a job with the police union, surprise! surprise! — we’ll soon know … especially if the commission chooses the hand-picked candidate of that same police union (and of state Supreme Court Justice Mark Gibbons, who wrote an ethically unusual endorsement letter) — City Councilman Steve Wolfson.
January 20th, 2012 at 11:03 am
The ancient Egyptians called Khufu’s pyramid “The Horizon of” something-or-other…
January 21st, 2012 at 7:12 am
@ Eric Oppen : “Khufu’s horizon”
@Vin: in terms of results, Dr. Paul will be this young generation’s “H. Ross Perot”; it’s a deliberately self-terminating gambit to keep the disenfranchised marginally hopeful, no more. The shite hit the fan a long time ago, and it’s a measure of the extent and duration of our slow-boil defeat as a people that we’ve become so thoroughly accustomed to the taste.