The Snake Meat Chronicles

Let’s get a few things straight.

President Obama is not the Messiah. He cannot make unicorns appear. He has no pixie dust to spread around that will make everything perfect.

Although liberals express disappointment daily that the President has not radically remade America, and the world, in the image they see in their mind’s eyes, it is undeniable that he has accomplished many things liberals hold dear. Jonathan Chait checked off a handful of monumental achievements in his recent article decrying liberal disappointment with the President:

His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Chait also pointed to a number of the President’s “secondary” accomplishments, such as the successful restructuring of the automobile industry, education reforms, green energy initiatives, the regulation of greenhouse gases, the fair pay act, the elimination of wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

Its quite a record. But liberal disappointment nevertheless persists.

Its nadir is manifesting itself in liberal support for Ron Paul. The Huffington Post ran an article this morning titled “Why Liberals Should Consider Ron Paul.” Its central thesis is that President Obama’s first term is really the third term of the Bush administration.

By contrast, the author argues that a Paul Presidency would pursue truly liberal ideals because Paul has “advocated an end to the death penalty, the legalization of all drugs, the removal of American troops from across the globe, and voted against the Patriot Act.” Although the article acknowledges that Paul advocates the elimination of the EPA and the Department of Education — which liberals obviously oppose — it nevertheless praises Paul’s “unabridged and straightforward honesty.” Indeed, the author argues, the ”most practical reason for liberals to vote for Ron Paul is that it would move the goal posts of discussions to a more liberal platform.”

Say what?

Ron Paul is old-line, anti-modern conservative with a voting record that any liberal would find abominable. A good catalog of the doctor’s voting record can be found here from the blog “Crooks and Liars.” One passage puts Paul’s supposed progressive liberalism into stark focus:

Everyone’s most hated retiring Democrat, Ben Nelson votes more progressively than Paul on every one of these issues, usually by a factor of three or more. For instance, on health care, Nelson beats Paul 55.02 to 12.62 percent — and remember that Nelson was one of the people who killed the public option. On making government work for everyone, not just the rich, Nelson beats Paul 58.59 to 15.88 percent. Progressives rightfully hate Nelson, but Nelson is way, way better than Paul.

By that score, the President is way, way better than Paul by a factor of at least fifty.

And, its not just Paul’s voting record itself which is abhorrent to liberals. The positions he advocates more generally puts him squarely in the nineteenth century. Again, from Crooks and Liars:

• He wants to abolish the federal income tax.

• He wants the U.S. to return to the gold standard.

• He wants to abolish all anti-trust laws.

• He believes that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional.

• He opposes the Federal Deposit Insurance.

The list goes on, and on, and on. Its a round-up of positions and assertions of a person that is indeed stuck in 1875, and who refuses to acknowledge that the world is a much more complicated place than the tidy reality of the distant past that he imagines to have existed.

And, if all of this isn’t enough, note also that Paul delivered the keynote address at the August 2009 conference of the South Texas branch of the John Birch Society:

Paul’s speech to the adoring Birch crowd was quite fitting. He likely agrees with these statements on the group’s website:

• “the JBS doesn’t agree with water fluoridation on the grounds that it is an unconstitutional mass medication of the public.”

• “Those that continue to work against the Constitution do so brazenly, continuing to make promises and entitlements to citizens that the country cannot afford while committing future generations to crushing debt and ever decreasing prosperity at the expense of liberty.”

•  ”Civil rights legislation should have come from the states and the communities rather than being used as a steppingstone toward our present-day out-of-control federal government.”

No liberal should consider supporting a person that feels at home in the John Birch Society. Ron Paul is a radical conservative. Period.