Rand Paul is front-and-center in mainstream media, showing what some call “leadership.” Not a week goes by when the son of Ron Paul—the legendary libertarian legislator from Texas—is not introducing one act or another, ostensibly to lighten the incubus of government.

This week it’s the REINS Act (“Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2013”). Last week it was the “Sequester Alternative Plan.” I like the Senator from Kentucky’s energy. The question is: Is this political Brownian motion—the case of activity substituting for achievement—or real Randian energy in furtherance of liberty?

Rand’s “Sequester Without Layoffs” suggestions trump most debt theatrics out there—except that they display the kind of philosophical compromises that attached to the senator’s Tea Party State of the Union 2013 rebuttal. For one—and from the libertarian stand—the goal is to reduce the malign effects of government, scope and size, not only its costs. Why exclude layoffs?

True enough, Rand Paul’s rebuttal was the only speech worth listening to on that day. Still, why, for example, would a smart man like the senator deploy “official” unemployment figures, rather than real joblessness, referred to by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as U-6? Even the U-6—which includes the unemployed, those who would like to work but who have not looked for a job recently, as well as those involuntarily working part-time—is inadequate. According to economist John Williams, total unemployment is nearing 23 percent, not the 7.8 percent (12.1 million people) to which Obama and Paul cop.

Another bum note Rand sounded was on the “Balanced Budget Amendment.” “To begin with, we absolutely must pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution,” he roared. It’s the sort of compromise his father would not have made. Ron Paul would have demanded that entire departments be shuttered—not that the bums merely bring into balance what was stolen (taxes) with what is squandered (spending).

Besides, what a balanced-budget requirement implies is that government has the constitutional right to spend as much as it takes in—that government is permitted to waste however much revenue it can extract from wealth producers. Not so.

Paul misstepped again by demanding an “end to all foreign aid to countries that are burning our flag and chanting death to America.” Better to end foreign aid, period. Yes to private US aid, no to USAID (United States Agency for International Development).

As for Rand’s expressed dread of “another downgrade in America’s credit rating”: why? A well-deserved downgrade is a good thing—a must. The US government is insolvent, and no spending cuts have been forthcoming.

Oy! And Rand Paul supports charter schools. Educational vouchers and charter schools are not part of a free-market order; they are part of the state-run system. Tweaking a government-managed pedagogic gulag will only prolong the torture it inflicts.

Rand Paul’s latest political song and dance saw the senator return $600,000 in savings, accrued in the course of running a cost-efficient office, to the US Treasury, where it does not belong. The savings belong to taxpayers. Stolen goods stuffed down the maw of the federal beast will disappear without trace. For all we know, and given the fact of fungibility, these savings could be diverted into the domestic drone program.

Yes, Sen. Paul followed legal protocol in returning taxpayer property to the Treasury. However, the positive manmade law is not a libertarian loadstar. From the son of Ron more is expected.

But should this be the case? Perhaps Rand Paul deserves a break. All too familiar is the libertarian type that has nothing to say about policy and politics for fear of compromising theoretical purity. Suspended as he is in the arid arena of pure thought, this specimen has opted to live in perpetual sin: the sin of abstraction.

The “ideal of liberty,” philosopher-pundit Jack Kerwick has urged, must be “brought down from the clouds to the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.”

But should the command to lead an earthbound existence push us into political compromises?

Like most Americans, I like an action hero. I am just incapable of telling whether Rand Paul is such a hero, or whether he is no more than a political performance artist.

It is a smart libertarian who retains a healthy contempt for politicians, even the libertarian ones. Ultimately, they’re all empire builders, who see nothing wrong in using fame and the public dime to peddle their influence and their products.

The people—at least those who’ve never fed at the “public” trough, unlike every single politician and his aide—are always morally superior to the politicians.

In all, some politicians are less sickening than others, but all fit somewhere along a sick-making scale.

This must be a slow news week; we’re discussing CNN and its plummeting Nielsen ratings.

In a calculated attempt “to capture [its] lost glory,” Rush Limbaugh has anticipated that the Cable News Network would “move further to the left.”

Question: How will we tell that CNN has made that move?

The Obama Heads at CNN are true believers. Although not as shrill as the MSNBC desperados, CNN’s John King, Jessica Yellin, Dona Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Soledad O’Brien, Piers Morgan—all are shifting into campaign mode, as the November election nears.

Especially intense are the pitches coming from likes of O’Brien (she is the Agony Aunt of the “Black In America,” “Latino In the Same Place,” and plain “Boring in America” propaganda series), Yellin (a yelling for her man), Gloria Borges, Suzanne Malveaux, and other women.

It’s impossible to miss the sexual overtones. A gleaming flash of dentition, a glowing complexion: when the women folk report on Big Daddy O, their fondness is on display for all CNN’s 291,000 national viewers to see.

O’Brien, by the way, was filmed fist-bumping Roland Martin, another race-issues agitator at CNN. In the CNN hood, a fist bump is the way you congratulate a comrade on a job well done for Obama.

Under the O’Brien belt is another big production, “Boiling Point: Inside the Tea Party.” In this amateurish effort, a poorly written script and a scary sound track were deployed to convey a never-subliminal message: When it comes to the tea party, CNN’s dwindling viewers should run for their lives.

However, the rajah of right-wing radio gives CNN too little credit. The planners at CNN are craftier than Rush thinks.

What do I mean?

The GOP message is not worth much. But for what it’s worth, the political nerve center at CNN is working to shape that message. It does so by presenting to the public Republican commentators who are left-liberals in all but name.

CNN is cleverly crafting the meta-message.

Take Ana Navarro, nascent Republican star on CNN. The verbose Navarro is a Republican identity-politics activist, who would have liked Obama to deliver on his original immigration-policy promises. Navarro had been in the employ of Sen. John McCain, known for surrounding himself with, and siring, vapid women.

Yet another liberal Republican who’s been entrusted by CNN with moving the GOP “forward” is John Avlon, former chief speechwriter for one-time New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. On Independence Day, this wolf in bipartisan clothing framed the act of reaching across the aisle in compromise as a supreme act of independence, in the mold of the Founding Fathers. (The reverse is true. Bipartisanship is a euphemism for relinquishing principle for political pragmatism. To paraphrase one hardcore tea partier, the only time you want your representative to reach across the aisle is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat.)

Certainly in the incessant babbling of Erin Burnett, host of “Outfront,” it is hard to discern a point of view. But late in June, Burnett let slip, inadvertently, that she too holds out hope for socialism. Burnett was hosting “a valued member of the ‘Outfront’ Strike Team,” whatever gimmick that stands for. The “striker” was Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer of PIMCO. Gross positively spun the political platform of Francois Hollande by describing France’s manifestly socialist agenda as “pro-growth,” and as “a different way forward.”

Together, Burnett and Gross entertained the possibility that President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party might just “save Europe’s economy and ours.” I listened to the Gross man live on TV. Gross made a salutary reference to France’s founding principles of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” CNN’s transcriber failed to transcribe the reference, writing in its place: “(INAUDIBLE)”.

But here is Mr. Gross(out)’s verbatim nod to the blood-drenched, illiberal French Revolution and its legacy:

“I think what [Hollande] is trying to do is favor labor as opposed to capital. Remember ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité‘, and you know he’s moving in that direction. To the extent that he moves only gradually, I think that’s a positive. What France needs, what Euro land needs is growth. And to the extent that they can prevent a continuing recession, then the growth is going to be positive.”

Erin’s strike man was conflating France’s vote against austerity with a “pro-growth” agenda!

The Law is a pamphlet published, in 1850, by Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat. A classical liberal “economist, statesman, and author,” Bastiat castigated his countrymen for becoming “the most governed, the most regulated, the most imposed upon, the most harnessed, and the most exploited people in Europe.”

Bastiat saw France as a society that “receives its momentum from power”; a passive people who “consider themselves incapable of bettering their prosperity and happiness by their own intelligence and their own energy.”

The brilliant Bastiat did not share Mr. Gross’s fondness for French “fraternity.” “Enforced Fraternity Destroys Liberty,” he proclaimed. “In fact, it is impossible for me,” wrote Bastiat, “to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot.”

“So long as they expect everything from the law, their relationship to the state [will be] the same as that of the sheep to the shepherd.”

This mindset leapfrogged across The Pond and took hold in America, where agents like CNN help it spread.

I imagine readers would prefer that I discuss the TSA’s breach of Jonah Falcon’s “formidable” breeches. But there are better ways to keep the terrorists of the TSA in the news, than to spotlight a well-endowed individual who—to go by his boasting—suffers from “small man syndrome.”

The truth is that the tea-party Congress has failed to tackle the Transportation Security Administration attack dogs. Once Rep. Ron Paul retires, there will be nobody to call for the tagging, collaring and impounding of these Cujos of government. (For the unflattering comparison, I apologize to Stephen King’s famous, rabid St. Bernard.)

While they bear a philosophical family resemblance, Rand Paul is nothing like his libertarian father. When the son of Ron was manhandled at the airport, he put in a good word for the folks at the TSA: These were good people bogged down by inflexible rules.

This is the “I was just following orders” defense. It was invalidated at the Nuremberg Trials. It certainly does not pass biblical muster. A true Christian would sooner go hungry than hurt or humiliate innocent human beings for a living.

By glumly suggesting wavers for frequent fliers (like himself), who’d be willing to part with more personal data for the TSA—Rand was adopting the conventional Republican special pleading. (The senator has since had a change of heart, and has joined his dad in calling for the abolition of this rogue government agency.)

Perhaps Rand was hip to the growing indifference among members of the public. For a while, the natives were restless over being handled like meat at a packing plant. Travelers, however, have begun to relax, and have eased into the role of stunned cattle.

A jury of “submissives” has even gone so far as to enjoin any resistance to TSA tyranny.You know the drill. During a routine TSA screening, Carol Jean Price, aged 59, had her buttocks, breasts and genitals touched by an agent. Except that Price didn’t think the prodding should be routine. She became upset, as victims of sexual assault often do. “When TSA supervisor Kristin Arnberg approached the outraged Price after the initial screening,” Price had the temerity to demonstrate the anatomy of  “gate-rape” on the super.

A jury not of her peers convicted the victim (Price) of battery.

In a constitutional republic, The Law should apply to civilian and civil servant alike, with no exceptions. If a country’s legal code outlaws sexual assault—then the act of fondling an innocent and unwilling stranger, without probable cause, between her thighs and around her breasts, must be proscribed to all people, in all places.

Correspondingly, Ms. Price was correct to instinctively infer that if certain forms of touching are legal in her “great” country, governed as it allegedly is by laws and not men—then everyone should be able to practice the treatment these laws prescribe on everyone else.

If the law allows a TSA agent to touch me intimately (and one has!), the same law should give me license to return her “affections.” That is the logic of just law in a constitutional republic. It is the logic behind a citizen’s arrest, for example. Because we are agreed that the behavior to be stopped violates rights—it matters not who stops the crime.

Conversely, if, as we are told, the TSA’s touching is in furtherance of the same natural rights—then, it should be perfectly proper for civilians, in turn, to pat these agents on their privates (repulsive though that may be).

Since so few of us comprehend that what the TSA does flouts the inviolable Fourth-Amendment rights “of the people to be secure in their persons”—still fewer are able to deduce that we now live under the law of rule, and not the rule of law.

The enemy of the pliant American people is celebrating its victory in the Florida county court of Judge Frank Mann Jr. “We are thankful that the state attorney’s office recognized the severity of [Carol Jean Price’s] violation, and took the appropriate action in pursuing this conviction,” TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz told the media. “This decision should send a strong message that violence against our officers will not be tolerated.”

Members of certain cultures, once considered backward, greet each other with a harmless and voluntary rubbing of the noses. In our “culture,” we rub your genitalia, whether you like it or not. Now who’s the real “primitive”?

Blanket charges of racism have become the stock-in-trade of the liberal media in reporting on Town-Hall protesters. For converging to petition their representatives about the administration’s profligate policies, independent-minded, patriotic constitutionalists have been savaged by rabid reporters who see signs of the divine in Obama and the devil in his detractors.

One apropos sign at a tea party captured this state of affairs: “It doesn’t matter what my sign says, the press will call it racist.”

In fairness, members of the media are more inclusive in their reprimands about racial exclusion. The general, (alleged) racial backwardness of the American people is a repeated refrain in the popular press. This non-stop, relentless propaganda, enforced by the tyranny of political correctness, helps explain why most Americans ─ who themselves harbor no racial animus, and, if anything, are remarkably naïve about human differences, cultural or racial ─ believe racism saturates their society.

It is one thing for a starlet like Janeane Garofalo to defame tea party attendees as “a bunch of teabagging rednecks,” and accuse men and women she knows nothing about of “hating a black man in the White House” and harboring unadulterated racism. It’s quite another for cable-network anchors to parrot the loopy lady’s lines.

Nevertheless, ape they did.

So it was that thought-crime investigator Keith Olbermann broke news on his MSNBC nightly show. With his most solemn, commissar-like countenance, Keith informed his viewers, matter-of-fact, that the intensity of the animosity toward Barack Obama is based on his being a black man. Instead of arguing their “case” with reference to facts and reason, Keith and Company chose to impugn their disputants based on assumptions about their motives. Still worse: this balderdash, framed as breaking-news, was bolstered by another logical fallacy: an argument from authority. The feeble-minded Jimmy Carter had seconded Garofalo the histrion.

By Keith’s journalistic standards, this was all the proof he needed to pronounce the libel true, and apply the pejorative liberally. Olbermann proceeded to “debate” this ad hominem with the effeminate, bug-eyed blogger Markos Moulitsas, and before him with politician-turned-pundit, Lawrence O’Donnell. The shifty and shameless O’Donnell asserted in all seriousness that because Carter had claimed that conservative and independent tea-party goers were guilty of harboring and acting on racially impure thoughts, this was indeed so. After all, the former president was from the dreaded South! He ought to know!

At the time Obama ascended to the throne his approval ratings ran to 70 percent. Carter, Keith, Chris (Matthews), and Contessa (Brewer) were asking their viewers to believe that between March and September of 2009, the aforementioned Americans had developed a bad case of racism rather than buyer’s remorse. No wonder, then, that the malign men and women of MSNBC pointedly failed to report conclusive findings to the contrary.

A progressive research group ─ among whose stars is Democratic political consultant and prominent clintonista (now Obamaniac) James Carville ─ discovered that when it comes to their assumptions about older, white, Southern Republicans, the cable quislings had been wrong all along. As the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner research group recently, and reluctantly, reported, the Americans whom the liberal media had been righteously denouncing were not racists.

Although the research group had done its darnedest to disparage the conservative base of the Republican Party, its racism spotters were forced to exempt this “mocked minority” from the media’s charges for lack of evidence.

The Group’s Key Findings leap off the pixelated page:

“Instead of focusing on [the] intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters’ beliefs – but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of  Joe Wilson’s incendiary comments at the president’s joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion – but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point.”

The “rubes” were given a clean bill of racial health by an organ of the rulers. But the fraudulent zealots at the intellectual hinterland that is MSNBC have yet to come clean.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaliy.com & Taki’s Magazine
November 6, 2009

* Screen picture credit