Badger Paul
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From Etherzone.com
DEMOCRACY FOR THY, BUT NOT FOR THEE
REPUBLICANS DON'T WISH TO PARTAKE IN THEIR OWN CAUSE IN IRAQ
By: Sean Scallon
I wrote a column a couple years ago for Etherzone.com entitled “Religion for Thy, but not for Thee?” in which I charged that the Bush II Administration was acting hypocritically in promoting “faith-based initiatives” and federal dollars to favored churches and religions like the Southern Baptists, in short promoting religious governance at home, while overseas U.S. troops were dying in Iraq trying to prevent Iraqis from exercising their belief that religion and p1olitics are inseparable. (Ronald Reagan meet Muqtada al-Sadr)
Now it looks like the same thing is happening when it comes to democracy as well, as far as the Republican Party is concerned.
As U.S. soldiers are attacked, wounded, crippled and die so that Iraqis can vote in free elections, such elections aren’t exactly taking place when it comes to choosing delegates for this year’s Republican National Convention.
In states all across the nation, from Nevada to Louisiana, from Missouri to Minnesota, from Washington to Hawaii, Republican Party bosses have reached into their bag of tricks to keep supporters of Texas Congressman Ron Paul from having any kind of representation on the convention floor in St. Paul. Doug Wead, a former Reagan and Bush I administration official turned blogger exposed their treachery:
“….there is an establishment conspiracy to keep Ron Paul’s campaign from embarrassing the Republican Party.
Oh yeah, I know, conspiracy theories are not allowed and conspiracies do not actually exist. Although, if that were true the word itself would not exist and you would not know what I am talking about. In fact we all conspire and have conspired since the first grade and some of the conspiracies become known, like the tobacco industry fudging its figures on cancer or the recent expose of the KGB planting false scientific information in the west about a so called “nuclear winter.”
No, I am not suggesting that a bunch of 80 year old Knights of Malta met at a secret location in Manhattan and voted to bring down Ron Paul to fulfill some 1500 year old promise to a French King. Or even that the Masons did it. Or even that the GOP drafted a secret memo. What I am saying is that he has been the subject of numerous meetings of GOP establishment figures and they have exchanged ideas and techniques for keeping him and his minions at bay. I know because I was accidentally and spontaneously in the middle of just such a conversation.
Last week I appeared on a number of television programs and ended up in “the green room” with a couple of GOP luminaries. One of the party’s most famous and powerful Senators and a former governor who came within a hair of becoming the vice president. You can guess which television network it was. We each had a book to promote.
Anyway, somehow they got into a discussion of Ron Paul and how his supporters had the nerve, the gall, the cheek to show up at “their” respective Republican State Conventions and practically take over. Each man described to the other how through parliamentary maneuver and outright theft they had recently blocked the Paulistas from embarrassing the GOP by winning “their” delegates to the national convention. They passed these stories back and forth with great gusto and laughter and genuine appreciation for the political skill of the other.”
So there you have it. Instead of sending election monitors to some third-world nation, or hectoring the Russians about the lack of democracy in their country, perhaps Republicans should take a good hard look at themselves.
What they will see is not pretty at all. The favorite tactic of the GOP establishment seems to be the “unity slate” i.e. a slate of delegates made up of party luminaries representing the faction of supporters of different candidates this election cycle, Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Romney, etc. This first appeared in Louisiana back in January, the brainchild of former governor Buddy Roemer, a Thompson supporter who feared that because Paul was the only GOP candidate who could muster a full slate of delegates for each of the state’s congressional districts, he would walk away with the delegates from those districts. So Roemer and his buddies came up with the unique “Ronald Reagan Delegate Slate” which included the supporters of all the GOP candidates who weren’t named Ron Paul. They even printed flyers with Reagan’s picture on it all but indicating that if you want to win one for the “Gipper” once again all you Bayou State Republicans have to do is vote for this slate. Thus, unity slates have been chosen in places like Minnesota, Georgia, Maine, and Colorado.
The only time this tactic failed was in Nevada, where Paul and Romney delegates voted down the unity slate to nominate delegates from the convention floor. When it appeared that Paul would walk away with the lion’s share of the state’s delegation, the state GOP leaders and McCain supporters reverted to an old parliamentary trick of leaving the convention to prevent it from doing business because of the lack of a quorum. Then they adjourned announcing that the time was up on their contract with the hotel convention center. As of this writing the state GOP still hasn’t reconvened the convention. Other state GOPs have reached into the bag for their own set of tricks to disenfranchise Paul voters. In Minnesota, Paul’s national delegate slates were decimated because their candidates did not go through an “interview” process set up by state chairman Ron Carey unbeknownst to them for the party’s approval to be national delegates. Governor Tim Pawlenty or U.S. Senator Norm Coleman weren’t interviewed either but they got to be elected delegates anyway. In Missouri, nearly 300 state convention delegates supporting Paul had to be questioned by a committee of state party officials because they were deemed insufficiently Republican enough for their tastes (most were seated though). In Hawaii, Washington, Georgia, Indiana and Colorado, all sorts of pre-convention rules changes and limitations on delegate slates prevented any kind of nominations from the floor. Congressman Paul himself was prevented from speaking at the Minnesota convention and party officials across the country have worked hand-in-glove with McCain supporters to ensure no Paul delegates would be elected in violation of party rules.
All of this could be written off as mere politics, the lament of the sore loser against the winner and truth be told putting up Paul’s amateurs against experienced Republican politicos determined to control everything was not going to be a fair fight. In a normal political year this would be accepted, even grudgingly.
But thousands of miles away from all this political jousting, brave men and women are dying supposedly for the cause of spreading “democracy” to the Middle East, at least that’s what the titular head of the party says time and again. And for the Republicans to deny democratic rule amongst themselves in order to provide it to others through the expense of blood, sweat and treasure makes a mockery of their sacrifice. Like it or not, this is a Republican war. The party leadership supports it as does the machinery of the federal government which the party controls and nearly all of its members to Congress and elected officials around the country. It was the Republican Party, represented by such leaders, which drafted the resolutions, made the arguments and did the planning for this war outside of the military. The Republican Party has put itself on the line in support of President Bush II’s policy of spreading democracy to the Middle East. It supports this policy and has not repudiated it. So one would expect that given the cause in which it has sent so many Americans overseas to put their lives on the line for away from their homes and families, it would at least practice what preaches at home in its own ranks.
No such luck. It’s not the only issue which the party stands accused of hypocrisy, but it’s an issue a lot more serious than Congressional earmarks.
And to show what happens to parties that refuse to practice democracy at home while trying bomb for it abroad, let’s look back to 1968, where the Democrats’ war for democracy in Vietnam is raging, young men are dying by the thousands and yet the party which committed the nation to this war nominated a candidate for president, Hubert Humphrey, who did not enter a single primary. The writer Theodore White describes the process in which the delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention were picked that voted for Humphrey in his book The Making of the President 1968:
“…one was slowly overwhelmed by a sense of the grotesquely obsolete. More than 600 delegates to the convention had been chosen by processes begun two years before. In three states one man alone could appoint all or most of the delegates to a national convention. In Georgia, the party rules let the governor appoint the state chairman who then, with the governor’s approval, appointed all the names on the slate. In other states, many or all of the delegates were appointed by the party’s executive committee, whose members themselves were chosen by processes incomprehensible to any but full-time politicians. In other states delegates were chosen by unofficial caucuses meeting at obscure halls, schools, or private homes.”
The result was that Humphrey was chosen by delegates who were picked to the convention by crooked political machines and in violation of democratic practices and the very democratic values men were being forced to kill and be killed in the stinking, blood-stained mud of the Vietnam jungles. It was one of the main reasons the party tore itself apart in Chicago in 1968 and forced itself to change the rules of its delegate selection process, which it still deals with to this very day.
Republicans, on the other hand, have avoid this catharsis largely because its members do not quibble about the rules every four years the way Democrats do and largely because the state’s themselves pick the ways in which delegates are selected. One cannot direct their complaints at the national party for the actions of one single state party.
But no one complained about the Democratic delegate selection process either until two issues for which the party spoke for, civil rights and the war in Vietnam, forced people do so. It could not carry on with the hypocrisy any longer, not while men were dying in Vietnam, not while protesters were being beaten in Selma, Alabama. And now, because of the war in Iraq, the Republicans can no longer avoid the hypocrisy either. If Iraqis can enjoy fairer and more open elections than Republicans can for national convention delegates, it doesn’t say much for the cause they’re supporting.
This is not a call for Republicans to do what the Democrats did from 1969-1971 and completely uproot their entire delegate selection process. The Democrats tainted their process with undemocratic quotas and political tribalism that has haunted the party for 30 years. The rules are fine if they are followed and enforced. It may very well be that the Paulistas need to brush up on their Roberts Rules of Order the next time around. It may very well be Paul supporters need to learn that showing up at the state convention does not guarantee one control of a party. One has to control the party’s leadership, its committees, the decision making bodies that decide how conventions are run. But what it does mean is that there is no excuse nor reason for Republicans not to have a transparent and open process to pick delegates for its national convention among Republican party activists and elected officials not only in accordance to party rules, but in the spirit and values upon which the soldiers THEY sent to Iraq are dying for in a cause THEY say they believe in.
Ron Paul has no chance of winning the GOP nomination. He knows this. His supporters know this (most of them anyway). What they want is what any political faction wants, representation and a meaningful voice. It wants a chance to speak out. For state party apparatchiks and McCain supporters to deny a few delegates slots here and there through the use tricks and unethical and in some cases illegal maneuverings borders on an unreasoned approach of total control one finds in totalitarian societies.
But maybe that’s the answer. Maybe what Republican leaders and McCain supporters want at the Republican National Convention is some sort of North Korea-style political celebration where the delegates sing their praises and light their torches in support of the “Dear Leader”, all done with your taxpayer dollars. Having Ron Paul delegates on the convention floor would spoil the whole card display because a couple of cards would be turned backwards by people strong enough of body and mind not to participate in such depressing conformity. McCain and GOP leaders do not want dissent because dissent would lead to questioning and questioning would lead to investigation and investigation would potentially lead to disillusionment and then to outrage and outrage would certainly lead to action. Many Republicans have become Ron Paul supporters in this fashion and certainly the party leadership doesn’t want to create any more of those.
But by acting in such an undemocratic manner they have established the illegitimacy of their own cause. At least the Democrats in 1968 debated the war, the pros and the cons, in a democratic fashion and voted on supporting it or not. There will be no debate at the GOP convention, not if the party brass and McCain can help it. 70% of Americans want a change in our policy in Iraq and yet the Republican Party plans to seal itself inside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul immune to call for change that comes from the country at large and will certainly come from outside the convention hall. They will pretend not to hear it and perhaps deny it’s even being said. Only a brave few Ron Paul supporters will be inside this bubble, the bubble that has engulfed this party since 2002, trying to prick the consciousness of the delegates and those watching at home. They will be no doubt be brutalized (mentally and or physically) and be ridiculed but at least they’ve made it inside to try. I wish them best of luck. Perhaps if McCain is 20 points behind Obama in the polls, if Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin are chopping into his vote totals and the party looks to be facing its worst defeat since 1964, will the delegates realize they can no longer pretend anymore and either engage the Paulities in their ideas and clarify their support for the war in a democratic fashion if they so choose, or go in a entirely new direction. Either way it will be a choice, which is what democracy boils down to and is what Iraqis and many others around the world have far more than Republicans currently do.
Sean Scallon is a freelance writer and newspaper reporter who lives in Arkansaw, Wisconsin. His work has appeared in Chronicles: A magazine of American Culture. His first-ever book: Beating the Powers that Be: Independent Political Movements and Parties of the Upper Midwest and their Relevance in Third-party Politics of Today is now out on sale from Publish America. Go to the their website at www.publishamerica.com to order a copy. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone.
DEMOCRACY FOR THY, BUT NOT FOR THEE
REPUBLICANS DON'T WISH TO PARTAKE IN THEIR OWN CAUSE IN IRAQ
By: Sean Scallon
I wrote a column a couple years ago for Etherzone.com entitled “Religion for Thy, but not for Thee?” in which I charged that the Bush II Administration was acting hypocritically in promoting “faith-based initiatives” and federal dollars to favored churches and religions like the Southern Baptists, in short promoting religious governance at home, while overseas U.S. troops were dying in Iraq trying to prevent Iraqis from exercising their belief that religion and p1olitics are inseparable. (Ronald Reagan meet Muqtada al-Sadr)
Now it looks like the same thing is happening when it comes to democracy as well, as far as the Republican Party is concerned.
As U.S. soldiers are attacked, wounded, crippled and die so that Iraqis can vote in free elections, such elections aren’t exactly taking place when it comes to choosing delegates for this year’s Republican National Convention.
In states all across the nation, from Nevada to Louisiana, from Missouri to Minnesota, from Washington to Hawaii, Republican Party bosses have reached into their bag of tricks to keep supporters of Texas Congressman Ron Paul from having any kind of representation on the convention floor in St. Paul. Doug Wead, a former Reagan and Bush I administration official turned blogger exposed their treachery:
“….there is an establishment conspiracy to keep Ron Paul’s campaign from embarrassing the Republican Party.
Oh yeah, I know, conspiracy theories are not allowed and conspiracies do not actually exist. Although, if that were true the word itself would not exist and you would not know what I am talking about. In fact we all conspire and have conspired since the first grade and some of the conspiracies become known, like the tobacco industry fudging its figures on cancer or the recent expose of the KGB planting false scientific information in the west about a so called “nuclear winter.”
No, I am not suggesting that a bunch of 80 year old Knights of Malta met at a secret location in Manhattan and voted to bring down Ron Paul to fulfill some 1500 year old promise to a French King. Or even that the Masons did it. Or even that the GOP drafted a secret memo. What I am saying is that he has been the subject of numerous meetings of GOP establishment figures and they have exchanged ideas and techniques for keeping him and his minions at bay. I know because I was accidentally and spontaneously in the middle of just such a conversation.
Last week I appeared on a number of television programs and ended up in “the green room” with a couple of GOP luminaries. One of the party’s most famous and powerful Senators and a former governor who came within a hair of becoming the vice president. You can guess which television network it was. We each had a book to promote.
Anyway, somehow they got into a discussion of Ron Paul and how his supporters had the nerve, the gall, the cheek to show up at “their” respective Republican State Conventions and practically take over. Each man described to the other how through parliamentary maneuver and outright theft they had recently blocked the Paulistas from embarrassing the GOP by winning “their” delegates to the national convention. They passed these stories back and forth with great gusto and laughter and genuine appreciation for the political skill of the other.”
So there you have it. Instead of sending election monitors to some third-world nation, or hectoring the Russians about the lack of democracy in their country, perhaps Republicans should take a good hard look at themselves.
What they will see is not pretty at all. The favorite tactic of the GOP establishment seems to be the “unity slate” i.e. a slate of delegates made up of party luminaries representing the faction of supporters of different candidates this election cycle, Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Romney, etc. This first appeared in Louisiana back in January, the brainchild of former governor Buddy Roemer, a Thompson supporter who feared that because Paul was the only GOP candidate who could muster a full slate of delegates for each of the state’s congressional districts, he would walk away with the delegates from those districts. So Roemer and his buddies came up with the unique “Ronald Reagan Delegate Slate” which included the supporters of all the GOP candidates who weren’t named Ron Paul. They even printed flyers with Reagan’s picture on it all but indicating that if you want to win one for the “Gipper” once again all you Bayou State Republicans have to do is vote for this slate. Thus, unity slates have been chosen in places like Minnesota, Georgia, Maine, and Colorado.
The only time this tactic failed was in Nevada, where Paul and Romney delegates voted down the unity slate to nominate delegates from the convention floor. When it appeared that Paul would walk away with the lion’s share of the state’s delegation, the state GOP leaders and McCain supporters reverted to an old parliamentary trick of leaving the convention to prevent it from doing business because of the lack of a quorum. Then they adjourned announcing that the time was up on their contract with the hotel convention center. As of this writing the state GOP still hasn’t reconvened the convention. Other state GOPs have reached into the bag for their own set of tricks to disenfranchise Paul voters. In Minnesota, Paul’s national delegate slates were decimated because their candidates did not go through an “interview” process set up by state chairman Ron Carey unbeknownst to them for the party’s approval to be national delegates. Governor Tim Pawlenty or U.S. Senator Norm Coleman weren’t interviewed either but they got to be elected delegates anyway. In Missouri, nearly 300 state convention delegates supporting Paul had to be questioned by a committee of state party officials because they were deemed insufficiently Republican enough for their tastes (most were seated though). In Hawaii, Washington, Georgia, Indiana and Colorado, all sorts of pre-convention rules changes and limitations on delegate slates prevented any kind of nominations from the floor. Congressman Paul himself was prevented from speaking at the Minnesota convention and party officials across the country have worked hand-in-glove with McCain supporters to ensure no Paul delegates would be elected in violation of party rules.
All of this could be written off as mere politics, the lament of the sore loser against the winner and truth be told putting up Paul’s amateurs against experienced Republican politicos determined to control everything was not going to be a fair fight. In a normal political year this would be accepted, even grudgingly.
But thousands of miles away from all this political jousting, brave men and women are dying supposedly for the cause of spreading “democracy” to the Middle East, at least that’s what the titular head of the party says time and again. And for the Republicans to deny democratic rule amongst themselves in order to provide it to others through the expense of blood, sweat and treasure makes a mockery of their sacrifice. Like it or not, this is a Republican war. The party leadership supports it as does the machinery of the federal government which the party controls and nearly all of its members to Congress and elected officials around the country. It was the Republican Party, represented by such leaders, which drafted the resolutions, made the arguments and did the planning for this war outside of the military. The Republican Party has put itself on the line in support of President Bush II’s policy of spreading democracy to the Middle East. It supports this policy and has not repudiated it. So one would expect that given the cause in which it has sent so many Americans overseas to put their lives on the line for away from their homes and families, it would at least practice what preaches at home in its own ranks.
No such luck. It’s not the only issue which the party stands accused of hypocrisy, but it’s an issue a lot more serious than Congressional earmarks.
And to show what happens to parties that refuse to practice democracy at home while trying bomb for it abroad, let’s look back to 1968, where the Democrats’ war for democracy in Vietnam is raging, young men are dying by the thousands and yet the party which committed the nation to this war nominated a candidate for president, Hubert Humphrey, who did not enter a single primary. The writer Theodore White describes the process in which the delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention were picked that voted for Humphrey in his book The Making of the President 1968:
“…one was slowly overwhelmed by a sense of the grotesquely obsolete. More than 600 delegates to the convention had been chosen by processes begun two years before. In three states one man alone could appoint all or most of the delegates to a national convention. In Georgia, the party rules let the governor appoint the state chairman who then, with the governor’s approval, appointed all the names on the slate. In other states, many or all of the delegates were appointed by the party’s executive committee, whose members themselves were chosen by processes incomprehensible to any but full-time politicians. In other states delegates were chosen by unofficial caucuses meeting at obscure halls, schools, or private homes.”
The result was that Humphrey was chosen by delegates who were picked to the convention by crooked political machines and in violation of democratic practices and the very democratic values men were being forced to kill and be killed in the stinking, blood-stained mud of the Vietnam jungles. It was one of the main reasons the party tore itself apart in Chicago in 1968 and forced itself to change the rules of its delegate selection process, which it still deals with to this very day.
Republicans, on the other hand, have avoid this catharsis largely because its members do not quibble about the rules every four years the way Democrats do and largely because the state’s themselves pick the ways in which delegates are selected. One cannot direct their complaints at the national party for the actions of one single state party.
But no one complained about the Democratic delegate selection process either until two issues for which the party spoke for, civil rights and the war in Vietnam, forced people do so. It could not carry on with the hypocrisy any longer, not while men were dying in Vietnam, not while protesters were being beaten in Selma, Alabama. And now, because of the war in Iraq, the Republicans can no longer avoid the hypocrisy either. If Iraqis can enjoy fairer and more open elections than Republicans can for national convention delegates, it doesn’t say much for the cause they’re supporting.
This is not a call for Republicans to do what the Democrats did from 1969-1971 and completely uproot their entire delegate selection process. The Democrats tainted their process with undemocratic quotas and political tribalism that has haunted the party for 30 years. The rules are fine if they are followed and enforced. It may very well be that the Paulistas need to brush up on their Roberts Rules of Order the next time around. It may very well be Paul supporters need to learn that showing up at the state convention does not guarantee one control of a party. One has to control the party’s leadership, its committees, the decision making bodies that decide how conventions are run. But what it does mean is that there is no excuse nor reason for Republicans not to have a transparent and open process to pick delegates for its national convention among Republican party activists and elected officials not only in accordance to party rules, but in the spirit and values upon which the soldiers THEY sent to Iraq are dying for in a cause THEY say they believe in.
Ron Paul has no chance of winning the GOP nomination. He knows this. His supporters know this (most of them anyway). What they want is what any political faction wants, representation and a meaningful voice. It wants a chance to speak out. For state party apparatchiks and McCain supporters to deny a few delegates slots here and there through the use tricks and unethical and in some cases illegal maneuverings borders on an unreasoned approach of total control one finds in totalitarian societies.
But maybe that’s the answer. Maybe what Republican leaders and McCain supporters want at the Republican National Convention is some sort of North Korea-style political celebration where the delegates sing their praises and light their torches in support of the “Dear Leader”, all done with your taxpayer dollars. Having Ron Paul delegates on the convention floor would spoil the whole card display because a couple of cards would be turned backwards by people strong enough of body and mind not to participate in such depressing conformity. McCain and GOP leaders do not want dissent because dissent would lead to questioning and questioning would lead to investigation and investigation would potentially lead to disillusionment and then to outrage and outrage would certainly lead to action. Many Republicans have become Ron Paul supporters in this fashion and certainly the party leadership doesn’t want to create any more of those.
But by acting in such an undemocratic manner they have established the illegitimacy of their own cause. At least the Democrats in 1968 debated the war, the pros and the cons, in a democratic fashion and voted on supporting it or not. There will be no debate at the GOP convention, not if the party brass and McCain can help it. 70% of Americans want a change in our policy in Iraq and yet the Republican Party plans to seal itself inside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul immune to call for change that comes from the country at large and will certainly come from outside the convention hall. They will pretend not to hear it and perhaps deny it’s even being said. Only a brave few Ron Paul supporters will be inside this bubble, the bubble that has engulfed this party since 2002, trying to prick the consciousness of the delegates and those watching at home. They will be no doubt be brutalized (mentally and or physically) and be ridiculed but at least they’ve made it inside to try. I wish them best of luck. Perhaps if McCain is 20 points behind Obama in the polls, if Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin are chopping into his vote totals and the party looks to be facing its worst defeat since 1964, will the delegates realize they can no longer pretend anymore and either engage the Paulities in their ideas and clarify their support for the war in a democratic fashion if they so choose, or go in a entirely new direction. Either way it will be a choice, which is what democracy boils down to and is what Iraqis and many others around the world have far more than Republicans currently do.
Sean Scallon is a freelance writer and newspaper reporter who lives in Arkansaw, Wisconsin. His work has appeared in Chronicles: A magazine of American Culture. His first-ever book: Beating the Powers that Be: Independent Political Movements and Parties of the Upper Midwest and their Relevance in Third-party Politics of Today is now out on sale from Publish America. Go to the their website at www.publishamerica.com to order a copy. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone.
