Ron Paul’s 9/11 (with Helpless Comments from True Believers)

I have been pointing out for months on this blog that Congressman and Republican presidential candidate candidate Ron Paul frequently volunteers statements that are false, or incredible, or too difficult to verify. I have stated repeatedly that I distinguish between inaccuracies politicians may make when surprised by a question for which they are not prepared and pseudo-information they volunteer freely to aggrandize their cause or themselves. My several postings on the topic have been greeted by rational discussions as well as by bouts of insanity. There has also been innocent, stubborn denial, of the kind you would expect when reasonable adults get caught in flagrante of hero worship.

I have suggested several times that Congressman Paul is himself cracked. I based my judgment not on the nature of his followers but on the sum of his own many nonsensical statements. I was also impressed by the fact that Ron Paul asserted that Ron Paul did not read the Ron Paul Newsletter that published racist statements several times in the nineties.

Today, I am going to depart from the distinction outlined above. I will refer to statements Mr Paul made off the cuff, on the spur of the moment, and videoed on the spot. He was responding to a woman who I think was a supporter not a hostile party attempting to entrap him.

As he was standing a in an identified room surrounded by people, Mr Paul was trying hard to discuss the Federal Reserve Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the alleged sinister relationship between them. A youngish woman who seemed to me like an enthusiastic well-wisher interrupted him and asked:

“Why can’t you come out and tell the truth about 9/11/”

Ron Paul replied distinctly, “ Because I can’t handle the controversy… I have too much on my plate.”

And then he resumed talking about banks.

What can the woman have meant? Are there any other interpretation than the one that comes to your mind instinctively?

Here is what Ron Paul did not say in response, “ What truth?” “What do you mean?”

The video is embedded in an article by Bryan Preston, a conservative who is evidently hostile to the Paul candidacy. The article is on the REAL CLEAR POLITICS  website and  dated December 10^th 2011. I viewed it on April 27^th 2012. It is only one of several reports from people who are themselves of a libertarian bent about Ron Paul and 9/11. The main witness is an long-time aide who, of course, would be called a “disgruntled employee” by true believers

I emphasize the video because it allows me to say that I heard Dr Paul myself utter those words. I have no doubt that it was Ron Paul I was watching and listening to. If someone wants to argue that what my eyes saw and my ears heard was just a movie production with an actor or otherwise a montage and not what I think I saw and heard, I hope he will take the trouble to do it on this blog. But if you are one of the people who really believe that any part of the the US government took a part in setting up the 9/11 aggression against our society, please stay away. We have nothing to talk about if you think this is tenable. If wish you well though wherever you may be, in a large enclosed park with tall trees and white-smocked attendants.

In the meantime, I believe more then ever that Ron Paul is cracked. I am disappointed and very sorry that he has succeeded in representing libertarian thinking to the rest of America. Libertarian ideas are unconventional, radical enough on their own. The last thing we need is a spokesman of dubious sanity.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2011/12/27/ron_paul_is_a_911_truther_amp_that_disqualifies_him_269938.html

Ron Paul’s 20 Billion On Military A.C. – N. S.!

In an attempt to achieve holy humility, I am dealing with objections against the several times I accused Ron Paul of being insouciant about facts. The first time I questioned on his blog Ron Paul’s veracity with respect to the alleged facts he throws out freely, I expressed disbelief at his assertion that the US spent 20 billion (B) a year on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan (“ Ron Paul Won’t Get My Vote” posted December 3st 2011.) I declared, of course, that I did not believe that number for a minute. I also speculated in that posting on the possible sources of such silliness.

In reaction, frequent critic of this blog and fervent Paulista Crackpot sent me a flurry of links to press items supposedly supporting Paul’s statement. The 20 billion figure was so absurd on its face that I did not, at the time, make enough of an effort to activate the links. He sent me again recently, in a more user-friendly form, linkages to three press items purporting to prove to me that this country really spent 20 billion dollars annually on air conditioning warring in Afghanistan and in Iraq (Obviously, for Iraq, the figure has to be applied retrospectively. Not a problem.)

The first item, from the British Telegraph, usually a good source, does not endorse the claim but clearly attributes it. It turns out that the claim was made by a retired general named Steve Anderson. I think no one at all seconded him. It turns out from the Telegraph piece and, more clearly, from the third source, NPR (of all things) that the retired general had an ax to grind. He had been struggling in vain to make the higher brass accept the idea of insulating military tents with foam. It appears from the NPR report that the general had “green”concerns among other concerns of a more directly military nature. (This is not statement on whether the general was right about the foam.)

The Telegraph story gives figures that put the total annual cost of the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq in past years at 171 billion,or possibly at 180 billion. ( I am correcting a little upward for a given Iraq estimate based on 2011, a low year). Thus according to the same report in the Telegraph, air conditioning would account for something like 1/9^th of American military expenditures for the two theaters of war together. Assuming a run-of-the mill underestimate of the total costs of war, air-conditioning would still eat up around 1/10^th (ten per cent) of the whole.

That’s ridiculous, of course, but it may make sense sense if you keep in mind that the general was trying to prove a point. His accounting involves imputing to air conditioning some unknown fraction of the very high expenses naturally incurred when moving large amounts of freight over physically difficult, undeveloped terrain and under the constant threat of military attack.

Again, it’s no clear what formula you would use to attribute a fraction of the total transport expenditure to air conditioning. I note with interest though that if there were zero air conditioning in both countries, the transportation costs of everything else (ammunition, aviation fuel, trucks, parts, food) would probably amount to pretty much the same total. This is all a little fishy.

Yet, the idea of distributing the cost of an infrastructure across all users makes sense; it’s even quite intelligent, in fact. Perhaps, it’s a practice that should be adopted whenever market forces are lacking to tell us the true price of things. But at this point, it’s a highly unusual way of presenting information. It leads to false comparisons. (See above.) And, think of an apple grown in Washington state and transported to New York City to be sold there. If there were no market to tell me the true price of this apple, I am pretty sure that, with General Anderson’s accounting method, I could probably present the New York cost of that single apple as a cool $10 or more.

Note again that no one with credentials equal to those of General Anderson seems to have confirmed his A.C estimate. The Pentagon gave some alternative figures that NPR (of all sources) faithfully reproduces. There is every reason to believe that the Pentagon, a government agency, has to rely on conventional accounting methods. The Pentagon made these two relevant statements:

1     It spends annually for energy $15 billion for all its military operations around the world. “Energy” involves much more than air conditioning, obviously. The whole wold is a lot more than Iraq and Afghanistan.

2   It gives recent figures for fuel costs for Afghanistan alone equivalent to about $2.4 billion annually. It’s difficult to imagine that fuel for air conditioning specifically constitutes more than a fraction of all the fuel used in that theater of war including for trucks, cars, and especially, for airplanes. It seems reasonable to think that the air conditioning expense for Afghanistan is a small fraction of 1/10^th of the amount advanced by General Anderson.

Now, if you think the Pentagon is lying here although it is one of most watched organizations in the world, you must either admit that there is no way to obtain this kind of information or, alternatively, you have better sources. If you do, please share them, don’t hog them, please!

I think that what happened with the bombastic allegation by Congressman Ron Paul is that the information came from some people on his overenthusiastic staff. As is often the case with enthusiasts, they didn’t take the time to study the very documents they use to shore up their pre-conceived notions. I persist in thinking that Mr Paul himself does not crack the whip on helpers with respects to such peccadilloes as saying “10” for “much less than 1.” Congressman Paul and his staff are, at minimum, unusually credulous. I am not sure I would not prefer that they lied like many other politicians and their organizations.

If you insist in spite of everything on believing the absurd 20 billion figure, you might at least console yourself with the thought that the estimated cost of the recent US military intervention in Libya was only 1/20^th as much as the cost of air conditioning the war in Afghanistan and Iraq in a hot year, with full personnel. The liberation of Libya was a steal, I would say!

(This last info is from The Week, the third source Crackpot provided in a futile attempt to overcome implausibility.)

I am not sure whether you will be able to activate the links below that Crackpot sent me. If you can’t, perhaps Crackpot will oblige again.

The UK’s Telegraph on $20 billion a year for air conditioning (which we’ve already gone over a number of times):http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8601975/US-spends-12.5-billion-a-year-on-air-con-in-Iraq-and-Afghanistan.html

The Week on $20 billion a year:http://theweek.com/article/index/216786/the-militarys-20-billion-air-conditioning-bill-by-the-numbers

And, last but not least, NPR drops the $20 billion bomb:http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-war-20b-in-air-conditioning

Leadership, International Trade, Hormuz and Ron Paul, Minorities and Ron Paul: The Last-Before-Last Republican Follies

Well, I am just about debated out. It’s difficult for all the candidates or pretend-candidates to maintain their dignity while answering complex questions in sixty seconds with thirty seconds for rebuttals. It’s worse when the debate is moderated, and many of the questions formulated, by one local unknown and two liberals, one of whom has been an air-head for as far back as I can remember. I am referring to Diane Sawyer, of course, and I can remember at least thirty years.

Two general comments about the Saturday night New Hampshire debate. (I missed the Sunday morning debate, sorry.) First, as usual, much time was wasted with questions and answers about “leadership.” I don’t understand the questions. I don’t understand the answers. I suspect (strongly) that the candidates understand neither the questions nor the answers about leadership. Leadership is a word that is worse than useless. Trust me, I taught management for about 25 years. If the concept were useful, I would have noticed. It’s useless the way baby-talk is useless. To the average one-year old, everything is a “wah.” It takes all the resources of parental love to assign to or to invent a meaning for each “wah” utterance. I don’t have such love for anything politicians say. Any politician who made it a rule to eschew completely the use of the word “leader” and of its derivatives would instantly gain in clarity and in sincerity.

My second comment is that, as happens every time, the candidates demonstrated their deep ignorance of basic concepts of international trade and of international economics in general. It makes me feel good that I taught the topic for about thirty years. I think retrospectively, that I must have been doing something useful. I expect such ignorance among liberals. It’s disheartening to encounter it on the conservative and libertarian side.

Two main things: a) If you raise trade barriers against the products of other countries, China, for example, it’s likely that other country will do the same against your products. The general principle here is reciprocity, otherwise known as tit-for-tat. There is no free lunch. It’s not obvious who will suffer most, the other guy’s people or yours. And, by the way the words “free trade” and “fair trade” are not complementary, they are alternatives to each other. “Fair trade” means “not free trade.” In the public arena, the word “fair” always announces the formulation of some protectionistic measure or policy. Let me repeat something I have been saying for thirty years and most economists have said for one hundred and forty years: In the aggregate, protectionism, any restraint on free trade, are a recipe for poverty. (Please, see my several, well-organized and quite accessible lectures on the subject on this blog.)

b) The main reason manufacturing jobs have been shrinking in this country is technical progress. In the meantime, the value of American manufactured products almost tripled in ten years.

Individual participants in the Saturday New Hampshire debate re-affirmed who they are in my book.

Rick Santorum confirmed that he is a clear-headed and brave man. I don’t know why he does not have much traction but he does not. Perhaps next time, perhaps he is too narrow.

John Huntsman is not a serious candidate. Yesterday, he spoke Mandarin to Romney, to make him feel bad and unsophisticated, no doubt. Cheap trick, sophomoric!

Gov. Perry proves once again that he is abysmally ignorant. Not surprising. Those big boned, broad-shouldered handsome guys in high-school always got the benefit of doubt when they said something that sounded misinformed. He said something spirited yesterday about “Iran moving back into Iraq.” I am not completely, completely sure what he meant but would you be willing to bet good money against the following proposition: The governor thinks that before the current elected Iraqi government, Iran occupied Iraq. He might even think Saddam Hussein was Iranian?

Gingrich is often formidable. He is well informed, cultured, rational, possesses a practical, high-power analytical mind in addition to a political past that’s, of necessity, an open book. He speaks clearly, in particular, of such things as Islamic terrorism. I don’t care much about anything else in a President except basic honesty. Gingrich possesses it irrespective of how much money he made eating at the Fannie Mae trough. I wish he hadn’t; I wish I were taller and thinner. I wish that, on that particular occasion, way back then, I had said,” You must be mistaken,” instead of “Fuck off!”

Ron Paul illustrated again what I have been telling you for weeks: He is irresponsible, he will say anything without worrying about factualness if he thinks it serves his argument. Either, he lies, or he believes in his false statements. The latter is worse. My intuition is that he believes them. My intuition matters because I have met people like him often before: “true believers,” in the words of the regretted Eric Hoffer. (Look him up if you are young.)

A couple of examples of Paul’s lack of attention to truth:

He said that minorities suffered more in war than whites. That’s not true. It may have been true when Leftists were saying this at the time of the Vietnam war, 30 years ago. It’s not true now. The reverse it true: White soldiers and Marines die more and get wounded more often. Incidentally, folks, I am tired of doing everyone’s research instead of going to the beach. Here is a proposal: If you don’t believe me, bet me some reasonable amount to be paid by loser to your favorite charity. Can I be more generous? If you don’t want to put your money where your mouth is, there must be a reason. Think it through.

In connection with Pres. Obama’s recent speech on cutting the US military budget, Paul also said clearly that those are cuts in increase to military expenditures, not absolute cuts. As one who has been reading the Wall Street Journal for the past thirty years and also for the past thirty days, I tell you that this is not true. It’s another cheap rumor Mr Paul gathered from Leftists. He is a Congressman; he should know better. And if you don’t believe me, see my bet proposal above,

And then, once in a while, Mr Paul makes seemingly innocent statements that suggest that his many false assertions are embedded in an entire imaginary world in which he lives most of the time. He said Saturday night in New Hampshire that if the Straight of Hormuz were closed (by the Iranians, or, presumably, by anyone), Eastern Europe would be “de-stabilized.” To the regular people who have a job, or who go to school, and who don’t necessarily read the small piece in the last page of the WSJ, the statement implies that eastern Europe, specifically, has a special dependence on the Middle-Eastern oil carried through the Straight of Hormuz. One could easily forgive oneself for not being aware of this bit of trivia. Of course, I will tell you that there is no such dependence. Mr Paul made this up inside his mind for reasons that escape me because I am not privy to the whole movie playing in his mind. And you are right, I did not look it up. I don’t need to. Want to bet?

The long and the short of this primary campaign is that Romney is a colorless, risk-averse smooth character I don’t especially love. But I am a conservative and therefore, a rationalist. Unlike Obama voters I don’t need to be in love with my candidate. (Unlike Chris Matthew of MSNBC, rarely have I felt a tingle along my leg when I thought of a presidential candidate or of a President!) He is far from a good Tea  Party candidate. Yet, when it comes right down to it, if I have to, I will vote for Romney for President. Of one two things I am sure: First, no matter what, he is more conservative than Barack Obama. Second, he is easily more competent than Barack Obama, the man who never achieved anything in his life except  get elected.

I have to keep reminding myself that elections – including primaries – are a lot like negotiations: When all the parties walk away pissed off, you know there has been a valid compromise.

A final thought, one of patriotic pride: In a majority-Protestant country, in the party of conservatism, in the alleged party of the haves, in the imagined party of wealth, two candidates remaining are Catholics, two are Mormons; the other two are Texans, for Christ’s sake!

Ron Paul Won’t Get My Vote

My low-level research on Ron Paul has paralleled his rise in the polls. What I have done is to give a number of opportunities to people who I know favor his candidacy and to people and organizations who I think support him to react to the latest accusations against him. This is low-level research as I said. (I am a respected conventional social scientist; no need to bore me with injunctions about scientific rigor.) This low-level research is more than most people try to do in pursuit of a rational vote, I think.

The latest accusations are also old. I am referring to the report that newsletters entitled: “The Ron Paul Letter” and such, published in the 1990s, contained both clearly racist and clearly anti-Semitic statements. (I mean anti-Semitic, not anti-Israel. He had some of those too but that’s another story altogether.) I have asked Libertarians, and what I call “orthodox libertarians”,( non-party members who are doctrinally aligned with the Libertarian Party) what they thought of the charges. This is a deliberately open-ended question. It gives the respondent a wide latitude to answer even if by changing the subject.

I received no answer or no clear answer from anyone, on my blog or through Facebook. One orthodox libertarian with whom I argue often on this blog gave me, gave us, a reading list. Of course, I don’t need, don’t want a reading list. My reading schedule is full until June 2012. Besides, there is something presumptuous about giving others reading lists. One should do it with much restraint, if at all. I imagine that my correspondents, my reader, who favor Ron Paul could have given me instead any number of easy-to-grasp, reasonable answers. After all, as thinking people, they have, or they had, to make up their minds, to decide for themselves unless they are eager to avoid the topic of those accusations altogether.

Here are some possible answers:

I don’t believe it.

It does not matter because it was a long time ago.

The statements attributed to him (that Paul himself does not deny) are not enough to prove either racism or anti-Semitism.

I don’t care if he is a racist.

I don’t care if he is anti-Semitic.

He, Paul, was not paying attention to his newsletters, as he said himself. So, the statements show nothing about him. Therefore, I don’t care.

Here is what this attentive libertarian-leaning conservative thinks about this issue. I have two explanations that are not mutually exclusive and that tell us much about him as a potential president

I think Ron Paul is both a racist and an anti-Semite but in a mild, passive way, if there is such a thing. Racism first. It has several possible sources. We are used in America to the poisonous, virulent kind of racism, to the brand that is associated with lynching. I doubt Paul has this in his heart. I think his passive racism is rooted in indifference, in callousness only. When an ardent follower of his, an orthodox libertarian insists (on this blog) that one kind of Africans massacring hundreds of thousands of another kind  of Africans with machetes and bricks is none of our business, he demonstrates precisely this kind of callousness.But he certainly does nothing to encourage one kind of black people to murder another kind of black people. He just thinks that both killers and victims are too unlike us for us to be concerned. (There is a huge paradox there in that libertarians tend to define as “us” those who share citizenship in our state, the same state they say they want to eviscerate.) Besides, we don’t know enough to hold off the machete or the brick. Besides we don’t even know who started it. . . .

Similarly, I suspect (“suspect,” I don’t know) that Ron Paul shares in the casual anti-Semitism of his Southern social class. He is an MD. It’s common (not universal by all means) for medical doctors to have received a poor undergraduate education in the liberal arts because of the focus on “pre-med” competitiveness. His anti-Semitism, if any, is of the passive kind. It will never lead him to favor the slaughter of Jews but it allows him to live comfortably with a hazy knowledge of the harder European brand of anti-Semitism and of its historical consequences. Plus, medicine is a field of endeavor where one might bump hard against common Jewish unscrupulous industriousness. (Not my formula; I cribbed it; how sad I am it’s not mine!) Dr Ron Paul would not discriminate ever against Jews but he would not be exceedingly alert to the occurrence of such discrimination in his environment. That’s not because he is evil but because he is extremely dogmatic. Ideological dogma helps you stay consistent by telling you what to ignore.

I am adding something separately so no one will accuse me of sneakiness. It’s not difficult to find, on talk-radio and even around my coffee-shop, individuals who spout the perfect libertarian anti-interventionist line and whose discourse against Israeli “aggression” quickly drifts into the expression of characteristically anti-Semitic sentiment. I agree that politicians in general and Ron Paul in particular cannot generally be held responsible for the words of all their followers. Yet, when an occasion arises spontaneously to condemn what’s disgusting among one’s disciples, one should seize this opportunity vigorously and loudly. Mr Paul has not done this.

In addition to moderate, passive racism and anti-Semitism, Mr Paul displays a sovereign disdain for factualness. As I have pointed out several times in this blog, Mr Paul does not only make light with facts when he deals with an unexpected question, or a “gotcha” question from a reporter, or from a rival, a question for which he is not prepared. He will sometimes volunteer false information the better to make a point:

The Iraq war and the Afghanistan war are not only very wasteful, they are

stupidly wasteful. So, for example, the US armed forces spend 20 billion

dollars each year in those war theaters on air-conditioning alone.

 

There is a chance that 2 billion dollars would not be impressive enough so, why not add a zero, two zeros? What the hell?

I have met this kind of shameless mendacity before. It’s common among leaders of virtuous small sects who have spent many years in the wilderness, addressing only small groups of the already converted, the elect, those who will never contradict. In the seventies, I knew members of tiny Trotskyst groups, splinters of splinter of splinters, the shavings of multiple ideological schisms. They would speak well, with winning logic, and demonstrate a thorough knowledge of history. And then, they would come up with a howler that reminded you instantly that schizophrenics too can sound intelligent. Not that I claim Ron Paul is insane. His mind is just way out on a limb and he does not care that it is, and he probably even enjoys it.

Underlying the passive racism, the matter-of-fact anti-Semitism, and the indifference to fact lies a tremendous intellectual elitism that is fundamentally undemocratic. Ron Paul, like his fellow isolationists from the Left, does not really care what the great unwashed masses of voters know, understand or believe. He thinks they should vote for him because he is right on everything, or on everything that matters. If they don’t, too bad for them.

As I have said repeatedly, on domestic issues, I am closer to Ron Paul than to any other candidate. And I don’t treat lightly the other big difference I have with him, and with Libertarians, on foreign policy and on defense. Yet, interestingly, if this last difference did not exist, I still would not vote for Paul for president. I would not vote for him for some of the same reasons that would have turned me off Barack Obama if he had been a libertarian-leaning conservative, one favoring radical shrinkage of the federal government. There are personality issues that disqualify.

And, naturally, I have not dealt here again and explicitly with the fact that Ron Paul’s foreign policies views make him as dangerous as President Obama to the survival of this constitutional republic. Or, possibly, he is even more dangerous since Mr Obama l finally revealed himself a secret admirer of covert military action against those who would destroy us. The 01/2/12 issued of the Weekly Standard has several nice pieces about the moral giant Vaclal Havel who died last week. One article reminded me that Havel was firmly in favor of the expansion of NATO.

In the Wall Street Journal of Thursday December 29^th 2011, the political columnist Daniel Henninger gives his own take on Mr Paul’s recent surge, pre-Iowa surge, in the polls. Henninger argues that though Paul has his own strong, small but consistent following, the upsurge is simply the latest expression of the mass of “not Romney” voters seeking a good horse to ride. In this perspective, the Paul upsurge is of the same ilk as the earliest vogue for Perry, then for Cain, then for Gingrich.

Meanwhile, every day, brave young Syrians die for wanting the liberties we take for granted. None of our business, of course.

PS My constant concern about anti-Semitism does not mean that I am Jewish. I am not, never have been, never will be.

AND I AM PRETTY SURE THE MAYAS’ MATH SKILLS WERE GREATLY OVERRATED. THE FATAL DATE WAS ACTUALLY 1212. I DOUBT THE WORLD WILL REALLY END THIS YEAR, 2012, BUT IF IT DOES, I HOPE WE WILL HAVE TIME FOR ANOTHER END -OF-THE-WORLD PARTY.