Citizen's United II - the other foot

[kandrathe]

And, back to the biopic...

For certain people, extra scrutiny is bad. That is, until someone emerges as the "new media darling" that they all suddenly find can do no wrongs.

In the wake of CU, I remain suspicious of all political speech as propaganda, half truths, lies and or smear campaigns. I am not optimistic that the general public will invest the time to do their own homework.

To respond to your attempt to crawl into my head;

The reaction to "Rand Paul's top aide thought the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was awesome" is "oh, well, Mark Penn! And what about all those things Obama might have written, if only we could read them?" This is false equivalence taken to a very high level indeed.

I was not trying to make an equivelance. And... he was not "top aide". Former campaign social media aide in Kentucky... I intentionally refrain from both liberal and conservative media (radio and tv), because it's about entertainment and base rallying. I don't know all the context of Mr. Hunter's comments, his rationale and exactly how serious he was as opposed to titillating his audience. I've been sent to the South at times for work, which as a "yankee" is challenging to break the "good ol' boys network". I see less racism there than where I live, probably because here there are fewer and tend to be very economically segregated to an urban ghetto. In fact, if you pulled apart our average levels of economic and educational attainment disparity by race you'd see our gaps are probably among the worst in the nation AND we are a bastion of DFL politics. How can the DFL here be so racist? I see exactly how institutional racism works, because it is rampant in Minnesota. I know exactly why our justice system is biased, because I see it happen here every day.

For the confederacy, the assassination of Lincoln was ultimately a retaliation for the attempted assassination of Jefferson Davis by Ulric Dahlgren, so the Union failed its attempt. Not every discussion of the merits of the Confederacy position is a vote for bringing back the days of slavery. We can objectively look at history without resorting to that kind of black and white thinking. The victors write the history -- so, it's worthwhile to step away from it to look at other possible points of view. For example, here.

Lincoln made some brutal decisions I would not have, and again, I'm far removed from understanding the standards of warfare that were acceptable at that time.

I don't believe the Northern rationale for the war was to stop slavery -- but rather to prevent the South from seceding creating economic havoc for the North. The Southern rationale for the Civil war was an economy built on cheap cotton, (made possible by Eli Whitney and slaves), States Rights, the "Missouri compromise", Kansas-Nebraska Act and the unbalance of pro-slave versus anti-slave states, religiously driven abolitionists (Dred Scott, John Brown, Fugitive Slave Act, etc.) and the election of Abraham Lincoln with only 40% of the very polarized popular vote (and split 4 ways). It's too simple to distill it to "slavery", which was the core divide. The cause of the civil war was horrible polarity in the politics, without acceptable compromises. In the end, all sides lost, the promises were broken and black southerners suffered almost 100 years under segregation and Jim Crow until the civil rights movement in the 1960's.

I mean, I *loathe* Mark Penn. But he's so far above neo-Confederate slavery apologists that they aren't even remotely comparable. Hunter's crime isn't that he's "partisan." It's that he is TOASTING the assassin of the man who ENDED SLAVERY. I'm all for historical nuance, but John Wilkes Booth? That's like toasting Osama Bin Laden, or Nicolas Ceaucescu - just perverse.

Hunter's "crime" is that he's a shock jock, and pandering wannabe journalist who glommed onto traditional conservative southern memes. I was raised in an era where in primary school we learned that all the US presidents were heroes. My higher education has tarnished their halos, and specifically that of Lincoln (who was as racist as Booth). Lincoln did not end the misery of southern former slaves, and in many, many ways made their suffering manifold.

How much time have you spent with southerners (east of the Mississippi)? If we want to pursue guilt by association, we could get into Chris Hightowers Myspace page too (who seems to have been more of a KKK thug). I could fathom why southerners who study the *real* facts of our civil war could find Booth more of a patriot and Lincoln a villain. Booth is reprehensible to me, but I'm not a son of the south either.

The bottom line is that you think Rand Paul is a racist. Because, of all the people who he's enlisted in his campaign, we've found some associates who are sullied by their past. Bill Clinton isn't a racist. I think we need to get past the scorched earth politics if we ever want to resolve racial issues.

The innuendo about Obama is just strange, Glenn Beck-ish "question asking". Do you have any reason to suspect that this otherwise-reasonable individual has anything in his writings that even vaguely approach the kind of nuttery that goes on in the Rand Paul camp?

Like "nuttery" is exclusive to the "Rand Paul Camp"? I was merely reflecting that we have all said / written things we'd probably have edited or redacted with some hind sight. It appears to me that Obama either has none, or is unwilling to share anything before he published his life story as a means to further his political aims. I've read exactly one anti-Reagan, anti-defense build up article Obama wrote in college. Surely there was more. It's just odd that you resort to analysis of the ancient writings of an ousted campaign aide for Rand Paul on the one hand, but are unwilling to wonder about the ancient writings of the ACTUAL politicians. I just find they are sanitized and packaged -- to do any level of investigative journalism on their past is touted as "an evil". Unless it's about your candidates opponent, then its good investigative journalism. I was against Obama from the beginning, due to his inexperience, which was what got Bill Clinton labeled as a racist, and now with his two term record of war mongering I'm even more against him. I believe we know very little about the real Barrak Obama.

Afterthought: In case we aren't clear about my larger argument here in the thread: The idea that "Oh, both sides are so bad, we must despair of all politics" is horsepuckey. It's intellectual laziness, freeing us from the obligations of evaluating politics and politicians on their own merits, and therefore, just maybe, supporting the better ones and eliminating the worse.

No. But, *I* do despair and feel "caught in the middle" of two dysfunctional camps who unfortunately wield the money machines that produce our political candidates. Both sides are bad, and have skeletons, or should I say inevitably, all sides are bad. When you bring out a lout like Mr. Hunter, I feel it is only fair to point out that all sides have issues. There is plenty of skeletons in Hillary's associates closet -- which was all I was implying. I'm not even really sure anymore how many former Clinton (or Bush, or Reagan for that matter) associates have done jail time. Is scapegoated a verb? You are free to despair or not as you choose. I just tend to look at the field of potential leader material and... despair.

You write: "It's boring... We heard two sides argue... No easy answers... Move on." and I can't agree more. But that's exactly what this thread seems like to me: For every Republican misdeed, we can find a Democratic one, and vice versa. Ergo, all politicians are slime, and we need some outside force (Rand Paul and the Libertarians?!?) to fix it.

I was reflecting on the CNN news cycle, not my view. We never get to dialog, only scorched earth tactics where both sides yell, but never find any common ground. That is not how I think society should work. I think we should start by listening to what other people are saying, even when it's people we don't like such as Jack Hunter, or Mark Penn. Then, we rebut them. I feel both sides err on racial reconciliation in the US. Those who had the unfair advantage need to acknowledge their decades of unfair advantage, and seek forgiveness -- and the other side needs to be willing to forgive the past. Yes, racism will still exist, but every well publicized incident is not further proof of the complacency of all.

In this too, we are being ruled by fear.