Lux Lucet

I see that Rush Limbaugh’s daily excoriation of all things Ron Paul continues unabated. Today on his website (I’m not a member so I have to read the transcript) he comments on a news piece by Erin Burnett in which she discusses the possibility of large numbers of democrats voting for Ron Paul in the Iowa Republican caucuses.

This is anathema to El Rushbo. Rush would have us believe that if Democrats vote for a Republican in large numbers, they would do so only for purposes of sabotage. No other explanation is possible or permitted. This puts Limbaugh in the position to spin the caucus results any way he wants. If Ron Paul does well in the caucuses, it’s obviously Democratic conspiracy designed to undermine the Republican party by voting for an unelectable candidate. If Ron Paul does poorly, this is evidence that Paul is just a fringe wacko whose appeal is limited to the tinfoil hat brigade. Heads Rush wins, tails Paul loses. What a deal!

But here’s another way of looking at it. What if a whole lot of Iowa Democrats come out and vote for Paul, not because they want to sabotage the Republicans, but because they actually like Ron Paul and support his ideas. Can’t happen, you say? Naive, you say? If this is what you think, I have two words for you: Reagan Democrats.

See, I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. He won the election in a landslide over Jimmy Carter in part due to a phenomenon called the Reagan Democrats. The Reagan Democrats were for the most part blue collar folks who got fed up with Carter’s lack of leadership, his depressing incompetence, and the general “malaise” felt by much of the nation at that time. For more on the Reagan Democrats, please click here. These traditional union democrats crossed over to large numbers to support Reagan in the general elections of 1980 and 1984.

Now as anyone who’s followed Rush even a little bit knows, Ronald Reagan is one of Rush’s heroes. Rush loves to brag about Reagan and has himself touted Reagan’s crossover appeal as a sign of the Gipper’s greatness. So how is it that if Reagan attracts Democrats, Rush finds that a good thing, but if Paul does likewise, it’s proof positive that the good doctor is a crank? Instead of bashing Paul for attracting Democrats, by his own logic, Rush should be one of Paul’s biggest supporters.

Could it be that Paul’s crossover appeal in Iowa may be a sign, not of his weakness as a candidate, but of his strength? Could it be that in the general election large numbers of Paulian Democrats may seriously undermine Obama’s electoral base and usher in a Republican landslide? Could it be that these Paulian Democrats may even turn out to benefit the Republican party in the long run by increasing the breadth of its appeal? I know, I know, in Rush’s cloistered world behind the golden EIB microphone, this is unthinkable. But it the real world, who knows, stranger things have happened.

Newt Gingrich went and did it. After several months of bluster, boasting and nonsense – he’s a historian, by golly, and don’t you forget it – he finally managed to say something interesting. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, the former speaker admitted that if he had to choose between Ron Paul and Barak Obama in the general election, he’d go with Obama. For what it’s worth, Gingrich later hedged his language, but the cat’s out of the bag.

This should surprise no one given the fact that when it comes right down to it, Gingrich and Obama have far more in common with each other than either one does with Ron Paul. Both love welfare at home, warfare abroad and neither cares a whit about the Constitution.

Now that one hypocritical, statist Republican has shown his true colors, perhaps more will have the courage to follow. Rush Limbaugh. Paging Rush Limbaugh. Has anyone seen Rush Limbaugh…

In a recent piece, I commented on an article in Time by Joe Klein. For a mainstream media writer, I thought Klein was reasonably fair to Ron Paul, and was in fact more open to Paul’s free market ideas than many leading conservatives. I also mentioned that the article had a number of errors in it as well. I dealt with one of those already: Klein’s conflation of popularity and constitutionality. For Klein, it seems, if legislation is passed by Congress and is popular with the people, it must be constitutional. It was on this basis that he defended Social Security. This, of course, is fallacious. A law is constitutional if it is in agreement with the Constitution; it is unconstitutional if it is not. This has nothing to do with popularity.

There is another common, mistaken idea in Klein’s article based on the unstated assumption that complexity is good and simplicity is bad. Klein wrote, “This is a complicated society, undergoing an ever more rapid transformation in the midst of a potentially long economic slump…It’s these sorts of times that raise up people with simple answers: ideologues and demagogues. Paul is an ideologue and – we’re lucky – an entirely honorable one.” Klein, like many people, assumes complexity is good and normal, simplicity is not.
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In a article in Time, political writer Joe Klein spotlights Ron Paul in a not too negative fashion. In all honesty, I Klein’s piece was much better than I would have expected out of the MSM. It’s funny, but in some ways the MSM is less hostile to Paul’s ideas than many prominent voices in the conservative media. Limbaugh regularly bashes Paul as do the fine folks in the flagship conservative political magazines. Not that Klein quite gets it. I doubt he’d ever count himself as a Paul supporter, but stranger things have happened.

One area where Klein could improve is in his view of Social Security. Klein writes, “On an even more basic level, it would be nice to believe that people could take care of themselves without government help, but it just hasn’t proved true: programs like Social Security and Medicare – with run directly against the Jeffersonian-libertarian tradition – were necessary because people couldn’t take care of themselves. The elderly, especially, had trouble paying medical bills after their working days ended. The American people, through their government, decided to make a rudimentary deal, to make sure their parents didn’t starve or sleep in the streets and were able to get medical care.”

Of course, this raises the question, how did people take care of themselves before Social Security? They or their families did. If that wasn’t adequate, there were many charities that assisted people. When the Republicans won the House in 1994, Newt Gingrich put out a list of books supporting limited government. On that list was a publication titled The Tragedy of America Compassion. In it, author Marvin Olasky effectively refuted the notion that before the modern welfare state – including the advent of sacred programs like Social Security – people were starving in the streets. Socialists would have you believe that were it not for government “charity,” there would be none. That idea is simply false.

Klein continues, “There was nothing unconstitutional about that – just as there’s nothing unconstitutional about requiring people to have medical insurance now. The deal was made with the consent of the governed. In the real world, these are the most popular programs the government offers – about 80% of the American people are happy with them.”

Here, Klein shows he himself to be well off base. He seems to confuse popularity with constitutionality. And while I won’t deny that many government programs have popular support, this is very different from saying they are constitutional. The logical rule is that if it is not granted in the Constitution, the federal government is prohibited from that activity. The Constitution does not authorize Social Security, therefore it is unconstitutional for the federal government to provide Social Security benefits. The logic is simple to understand, but hard to face.

The Apostle Paul stated the Christian position on charity when he wrote, “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim.5:8). Christians are to provide for their own households – including aged parents – out of their own resources, not use the government gun to do so. Charity starts at home. Ron Paul’s voting test – he will not vote for a bill unless it is authorized in the Constitution – is logical, constitutional, and in accord with Christian ethics. Would that there were many more like him in Congress.     

This morning I was driving to work on the interstate, minding my own business, and sipping a nice, hot, oversize mug of coffee. It was a pretty typical morning commute. Nothing particularly noteworthy or interesting. At least not until a Volkswagen Jetta passed me on the left. The Jetta itself wasn’t remarkable. It was like hundreds of others I’d seen before. But something about it caught my eye and caused me to do a double take. Much to my surprise, the car had a gas pump nozzle still inserted in the gas tank sticking out the side of the car. Even better, the six feet of hose still attached to the nozzle was dragging on the road surface well behind the rear tire. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Clueless!,” I thought to myself, “How could anyone be that oblivious to what’s going on around him?”

Of course, we can all be clueless at times. When I was in grade school, I used to fill up the lost and found with gloves and hats and coats. I could have outfitted half the third grade with all the stuff I misplaced.

And to tell you the truth, I’m still that way. Those who know me are well aware of my bad habit of putting things in odd places and completely forgetting about them. I recently lost my eyeglasses for a week and had no idea what I might have done with them. I finally figured out they were in the pocket of my new hoodie, but not after overturning the house and making special trips to two restaurants, thinking that I had left my glasses at the table.

Some people think that my writing is clueless too. I hope that’s not the case, but maybe they have a point. No doubt I have several cords worth of wood in my eye. A man should never judge his own case. Whatever.
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