Post 1: Wherein It's Supposed To Be About Napolitano But Then It Gets Out Of Hand

Samuel here.

Please forgive the length of the first real post on News Feed Fact Check, but remember that you don't have to slog through this post for the next half hour. Here is an easy-to-digest audio file narrated by Mr. Suave (yours truly), just because I care! [I will record this file the moment my housemates aren't sleeping or working. So it should be up by May.]

Here is a direct link to the youtube video in the status. You'll want to watch it, since the first half of my post is a point-by-point reaction to it.

So, I really do like the first half of this video, but most of what Napolitano says is tautologically true. What I want to point out is my issues with the actually substantive things he says, starting at about 2:15.

The first allegation is that Barack Obama campaigned as an anti-war, pro-civil liberties candidate, and failed on both counts. I assume that here Napolitano is referring to the ending of the Iraq war, Obama's pledge to stop pretending that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be "won", and the closing of Guantanamo Bay. Here's the score: Obama ended the Iraq war. Obama has ever spoken about Winning. And Obama never did close Guantanamo simply because he never had a supermajority. Between 2008 and 2010, the Democrats were all over the place, since many won in absurdly red states and felt a need to cling to conservative stances to make themselves palatable to independent voters. The Republicans, however, feared absolutely no political retribution from legislative turtling because the only Republicans Obama didn't take down in 2008 were the ones from very red districts or states who never side with the Democrats. The choice became either passing some form of Medicare or something else, and medicare won out, as it damn well should have. Napolitano's position also requires overlooking a few more things about Obama's war record. I just finished reading Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward, and it seems to me (I'll substantiate this if prodded) that he did a superb job of avoiding the escalatory pitfalls of the Johnson and W. Bush administrations. I mean a really superb job; it's the closest thing I have ever read about to scientific policymaking, which naturally appeals to me very much. Furthermore, I would like to point out that the conflict in Libya was exactly what any anti-war person should expect and applaud. No boots on the ground, in and out in a matter of months, precise and rapid victory at the prompting of an eager and vigorous population. Refutation that this was a wise action, I think, requires refutation of the whole Just War Theory. So, as someone who came of political age during the Obama administration and has basically no prior investment in the fate of the Democratic party, I have to say that I am deeply satisfied with how the President has done and I have no clue whatsoever what Napolitano is talking about.

I recognize that there are other civil liberties-related things that he has done that people find unpalatable, so let me try to address a few. He cannot overturn any of the Bush-era domestic surveillance rules for obvious reasons (look at how long he's been trying to tackle the Bush tax cuts), and regarding the ability of the president to kill citizens of the united states, that was a Republican amendment to this bill. Not a shitload he could have done about it.

Regarding George W. Bush, you absolutely cannot blame him for departures from campaign promises in the foreign policy arena, for blindingly obvious reasons. And I'm not sure I agree that the tax cuts for the wealthy were a departure from his campaign promises, but I can't exactly say I remember all that well.

Regarding "the era of big government is over", one line in a state of the union stuck in there against the better judgment of much of his staff does not mean that his presidency was a hypocrisy. It means he said a thing once. People do that sometimes. Calm down.

The stuff about Reagan, Santorum, Romney, and Gingrich is probably all correct.

The notion that people in the establishment are intentionally pigeon-holing the electorate is a claim that I cannot understand. It's the same as the claim that all politicians are corrupt. It's like insulting lawyers. Everyone does it, no one thinks it's funny any more. In this case, Napolitano seems to just be spouting platitudes. "what if the parties were two sides of the same coin? What if they're both corrupt? What if they represent a paradigm designed to box in the electorate?" Well, okay, what if? Why should I think that this is the case? Everything you've said about the presidents is easily explained by other means, everything else you've said are just strange generalized questions. "What if zeppelins were made entirely of lead? What if I were not wearing a tie? What if you were made of cheese?" I don't know. What do you want from me?

What he is describing is simply a basic bi-product of any democratic system. You've heard the boring-ass common knowledge statement that democracy is a slow form of government. That's because, to be electable, you have to hold an essentially status quo opinion. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I am vehemently in favor of complete legalization of marijuana for all people. Let's say that I believe in fining families who own more than 1 car, and I believe in fining families who throw out more than one bag of trash per week, and I believe in using that money to subsidize bicycles and walking. Let's say that I believe that all guns should be illegal in all cases, except for trained officers of the law. Let's say that I cannot ever fully support a government that thinks that taking people and sticking them in a small room for years is appropriate or humane. If I enter politics, of course I'm never going to utter a single word of that. I'm going to take the main road. Why? Because that's how things get better. You don't make things better by looking nuts. You make things better by playing the game, by impressing the people you need to impress and then slowly, incrementally, winning people inch by inch closer to your point of view. Don't like it? That's democracy. That's the rules of the game. And that is why anyone who tries to tell you that all politicians are corporate shills needs to step back, take a deep breath, and start reading the news.

"Barack Obama's policies, too, are merely extensions of those from George W. Bush" well that is obviously incorrect, and I think I've said enough about that above.

Finally, I am not sure how he draws all of this back to Ron Paul. Here are the substantial differences of opinion between Ron Paul and Barack Obama, in the random order in which I'm remembering them:

1. Ron Paul would end the drug wars; Obama consistently scoffs at the idea of legalizing pot. Mostly what I think it boils down to is that Obama wants to be elected, Paul knows he won't be. But let's look at it from a moral standpoint rather than a pragmatic one. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I agree that weed should be legalized. In the false dichotomy that two-party democracy *always* presents, I'm still with Obama on this one. Here's why: firstly, I axiomatically believe that it is the duty of a government to protect its populace. I like having rights and stuff, but anyone who tells you that the right to do crack cocaine is an essential element of your liberty is just plain wrong. They like to make a slippery slope argument: "if the government can tell me what I can and cannot put into myself, what's to stop them from telling me that I can't use prescription drugs! How about food! How about water? WHAT ABOUT AIR?" Here's the reason why that's utter bullshit: we can tell when it crosses the line. It's a pretty empirically reliant position: the government should be able to outlaw anything that you are meant to consume that will probably kill you very quickly if you consume it. Cigarettes and tobacco are a borderline, and we can have an interesting argument there. Heroine, not so much. But the popular libertarian extension of that idea is bullshit. No politician would ever say "since possession of heroine and crack cocaine is criminal, I'm going to make tomatoes criminal too." That's not a thing, and it never will be. Furthermore, here is why legalization is morally irresponsible: it's nice to say "people should have the right to do what they want with their bodies." But I would say a vast majority of drug users have no concrete understanding of what these things will do to them, and I'm still undecided as to whether or not people should have the liberty to destroy themselves. Here is a good study breaking down drug use that doesn't directly substantiate this, but it does it according to race and it shows you which communities tend to do the really dangerous drugs (SPOILER ALERT: it's the poorer ones where education is the worst.)

2. Ron Paul wants to "restrain the Federal Government from spending and then turning that over to the Federal Reserve and letting the Federal Reserve print the money" by making gold and silver legal tender. Obviously this is not an accessible argument to most people (especially not to me), but here are a few good rebuttals from Paul Krugman. It seems to me that any proposal with as little political support as this one that seems to have glaring holes as big as this one does warrants a major discussion. That I have not yet been privy to. Here I can concede that Napolitano was probably right; this warrants more coverage.

3. Ron Paul would cease foreign aid. This is something that means a hell of a lot to me, so let me reprint a formal argument I once wrote that goes a bit further than this, but that can easily be extended to counter Paul's position. In it, I cite books and everything. Don't miss the part where I'm a socialist!

Any wealth disparity is morally unacceptable, and our society's inherent rich versus poor dichotomy is the colossal failure of our oppressive economic system. This system institutionalizes our inhuman tendency to ignore suffering, and is our tool for perpetrating mass starvation on defenceless human victims. Any system that creates an economic hierarchy is morally indefensible, contradicted by our most fundamental convictions, and inferior to a system of material equality. The uneven distribution of wealth in our society is a major cause of crime, racism, and our insufficient motivation to produce great works. The vast majority of crime is the direct result of economic disparities in our society. A person will only steal an object when they can't access the capital to purchase it on their own terms; crime rates are much higher in areas with a larger disparity between the rich and the poor, as in the case of the United States in contrast with Sweden. Canadian journalist Pierre Berton (1991) writes that drastic increases in the rates of crime and violence were direct results of the Great Depression in Canada (p. 87). A larger economic disparity means higher crime rates; our system, which demands economic disparity, demands crime. Our economic system also oppresses based on skin colour. Historian Paul Johnson (1992) contends that African Americans have been severely economically disadvantaged in the United States for centuries and remain one of the poorest demographics in that country today (p. 151). However, although they have been poorer than the majority of white Americans since slavery, several generations of African Americans have passed since then. Therefore, either African Americans are inherently less able to make a fortune than white people, or our economic system punishes those who start out poor; through a lack of inheritance, lack of education and no family social stature to maintain, many African American children are economically oppressed on a mass scale, forced into lifelong poverty because of an accident of birth. To make this more relevant to Canada, simply replace "African American" with "Native". So a completely unfettered free market would be one of the purest examples of racism in the history of the world. Completely free markets also beget the mindset that goods, both luxuries and necessities, are to be hoarded, and this mindset prevents humans from doing great deeds. There is less incentive to build new bridges or more magnificent buildings when it is at the cost of money taxpayers need to feed their families, and there are plenty of reasons not to explore the cosmic frontier when it seems expensive. Carl Sagan (1994), the great popularizer of science, writes about “how vulnerable the repository of all our potential” is so long as it is localized to the fragility of Earth, and yet taxpayers remain reluctant to pay even a hundred million dollars for a preliminary rover to Mars (p. 334). It is often said that economies with equitable distributions of wealth produce unmotivated citizens, but it is only in a system with no safety net where action is discouraged on a large scale. It is only the participants in a completely free market who have to choose between saving for their childrens' education and sending humans to the moon, and it is foremost a free economy that promotes violence and hatred and racism and crime.

Western society's most basic political, economic, and religious tenets already discourage any distinction between the rich and the poor, because we find it fundamentally reprehensible. The concept of a social safety net is in place around the world, and it tries to give everyone a basic subsistence and to remove the extreme economic disadvantages inherent in a free market. Bill Clinton (2004) explains the need for a safety net when he states in his autobiography that a strong nation requires “a strong sense of mutual obligations, and a conviction that we cannot pursue our individual interests independent of the needs of our fellow citizens” (p. 362). Welfare, a crucial component of the social safety net, is too often portrayed as a government handout for those too lazy to work; this is a blatant lie, and even in the United States, a country recently subjected to large-scale financial deregulation, there is brazen support of welfare from across the political spectrum and throughout its history. Theodore Sorensen (1996), an aide to President John F. Kennedy, writes that welfare “helped millions of very young children and their mothers weather a dismal period of typically three years or less until they could get back on their feet, helped low-wage earners obtain the health- and child-care and other services that enabled them to work, helped untold numbers of widowed, divorced, and deserted women through a cashless transition to a better life, helped reduce [America's] tragically high rate of infant mortality, and helped countless children of poverty obtain the education and work experience they needed to leave the slums behind” (p. 52). Whig and Republican Abraham Lincoln (2006) spent his entire career promoting Keynesian spending on infrastructural improvements (p. 89), modern Republican President Richard Nixon (2001) said in his 1971 State of the Union address when he needed to gain votes that two major priorities of the country must be “welfare reform” and “improving health care and making it available more fairly to more people” (p. 297), and as governor of California, Republican Ronald Reagan (1982) raised taxes, reformed welfare, and boosted several aspects of social spending in order to turn an economic deficit into a surplus (p. 244). The social safety net which seeks to even out capitalism's inherent wealth disparity is part of our implicit social contract, and is a key component of modern conservative and liberal ideology as well as a core value that politicians tap into when they need to win votes. This safety net exists because we agree that it is wrong to deprive others of the opportunity to contribute equally to society, and humans can only contribute equally to society if they are treated equally in the eyes of the law, medicine, education, and their fellow humans; this is not possible in a system where the social safety net covers only the most basic necessities and only for the very poorest, and therefore an extension of programs like welfare is the only way to meet this fundamental political and economic tenet. The religions most prevalent in our society also object to the presence of a wealth disparity. In the Old Testament, a holy book both for Christians and for Jews, the books Leviticus and Genesis spell out specifically what portions of your harvest to give to the poor, and in most places in the bible it is astronomically larger than we would give today; anywhere from a tenth to a quarter is supposed to be reserved as a gift to the poor, and in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism it is mandatory to regularly give a portion of your income to charity. These religions, which permeate every interaction in our society, hold that it is wrong for some humans to be significantly poorer than other humans. This charity is about feeding the lonely traveller and about ridding yourself of wealth to ensure a better judgement by God, but it is self-evident that the lonely traveller is better fed when he can feed himself. Each of these tenets of our society, when brought to its logical conclusion, advocates a system of approximately equal wealth; each of these tenets struggles against the wealth disparity that is crucial for a free market.

Humans no longer produce great works. We've stopped building great cathedrals and we barely invest in knowledge; we can't even be bothered to explore any longer. While the twin forces of globalization and the free market allow us to oppress exponentially more people exponentially faster, the humans of the capitalist world stand idly by and watch as racism and crime and starvation become crutches for a new global paradigm. In his inaugural address, President Kennedy (1988) declared “to those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required --- not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right” (p. 12). The President was ahead of his time, but he is behind ours. His call to action is too narrow. In our quest for freedoms we have turned against ourselves, and a paradigm that predicates access to food on privileged lineage is a useless and dehumanizing paradigm. The rich versus poor dichotomy is unacceptable and a crime against humanity.

4. Ron Paul would want an option for young people to opt out of social security. Two things: First, I don't believe in the Right To Fail, because I axiomatically believe that the government should care for its citizens, so naturally I find it unpalatable to let people compromise their ability to ever retire. Second, I think that it weakens the social contract to allow withdrawal from government programs. I think that the entire point of a functional social safety net is that it really does provide a universal sense of community. And that's awesome.

5. Obama spearheaded the bailout, Paul voted against it. I think there would have been a wholesale and unrecoverable collapse of the American and world economy had they not bailed out the banks. I think that this is generally accepted. I also happen to think it really, really sucked. But that's the way it goes sometimes.

6. Paul, perhaps more than the former constitutional lawyer Obama, preaches constitution first. I simply disagree with this. Morality first. Constitution second. Pragmatism third. If the separation of church and state isn't strictly in the constitution (as Paul claimed in "Christmas in Secular America" in 2003), it should be a pillar of society nonetheless. I realize that this position means that one particularly self-righteous administration can overhaul the function of the American government, but when you're right, you're right.

7. Ron Paul supports State's Rights, as in the general case he supports decentralized government. Try as I might, I don't know why. I just don't. I think it's another constitution first thing, but in terms of practical moral benefits of letting states make laws that impinge on the liberty of the people (like the death penalty), I simply don't know. Sorry.

8. Ron Paul is a social libertarian. I think in almost every case he is right here, but I think that Obama represents the status quo not by choice but because he has never had command of the entire bicameral legislature. I explained in section one my major objection to social libertarianism, and I've explained that I take it as an axiom that the government is responsible for looking out for its citizens. Ron Paul is on the right side of gay marriage, the PATRIOT Act, and the draft, and more importantly he is on the right side for all the right reasons. I agree with most of his stances here, and so does Barack Obama. I think that I might share his position on affirmative action (against, because it promotes an exclusive group mentality based on superficial characteristics), but I'm honestly not sure.

9. Ron Paul doesn't think that global warming is an immediate threat to human civilization. I think he's wrong. But he doesn't like polluters, so that's good.

Anyhow, to the one person who made it this far, thanks for reading the whole thing. I swear my posts will be shorter in the future. Please leave me a comment to tell me how you liked it, and if you read this far, incorporate the words "social battering ram" into your comment so that we can spot who has a real attention span. Once you've done that, please help me fulfill my interminable craving for human attention; phone your friends, tweet your grandmother, smoke signal your alien overlords, and tell them there's this dude on the internet and he's really really mad.

Until next time, keep on trucking.