We have puppets to do the work for us:
Posted on 07/16/2007 8:31:51 PM PDT by JTN
Among the other firsts of his campaign, Ron Paul is probably the only presidential contender to be compared to a Samuel L. Jackson movie. The Texas congressman, a dark horse candidate for the Republican nomination, was being lightly grilled by Kevin Pereira, a host on the videogame-oriented cable channel G4. "Young people online, they were really psyched about Snakes on a Plane, but that didn't translate into big ticket sales for Sam Jackson," Pereira said. "Are you worried that page views on a MySpace page might not translate to primary votes?"
The reference was to the Internet sensation of 2006, an action movie whose cheesy title and premise had sparked a burst of online creativity: mash-ups, mock trailers, parody films, blogger in-jokes. Hollywood interpreted this activity as "buzz," and New Line Cinema inflated its hopes for the movie's box office take. When the film instead did about as well as you'd expect from a picture called Snakes on a Plane, the keepers of the conventional wisdom declared that this was proof of the great gulf between what's popular on the Internet and what sells in the material world.
Ron Paul is popular on the Internet, too, with more YouTube subscribers than any other candidate, the fastest-growing political presence in MySpace, a constant perch atop the Technorati rankings, and a near-Olympian record at winning unscientific Web polls. Like Snakes, he is the subject of scads of homemade videos and passionate blog posts. When Pereira mentioned the movie, he was making a clear comparison: Yes, your online fans are noisy, but will their enthusiasm actually translate into electoral success?
It's an interesting analogy, because the conventional wisdom about Snakes on a Plane is backwards. The reason the online anticipation for Snakes didn't translate into big ticket sales is because there actually wasn't much online anticipation for the movie. Yes, some of those parodists were interested in seeing the finished film, whose notoriety has given it minor cult status. But the others couldn't care less about the studio's product. Their online activity was an end in itself, a great big belly laugh at the expense of goofy high-concept movies. Their riffs and spoofs were far more entertaining than any actual feature about airborne reptiles was likely to be. Those fans weren't waiting for a show. They were the show.
That's one difference between Snakes and Paul: The congressman's fans really do want him to do as well as possible in the polls. But victory isn't the only thing on their minds. For many of them it isn't even the topmost thing on their minds. Like those Snakes on a Plane spoofs, the grassroots activity around Paul's campaign is interesting and valuable in itself. Here are three reasons why:
It's transpartisan. Paul's fan base stretches all the way from Howard Phillips to Alexander Cockburn. His libertarian message has resonance, as you'd expect, among free-marketeers dismayed by the GOP's love affair with federal spending. It is also attractive, as you'd expect, to lefties who like his opposition to the Iraq war and the post-9/11 incursions on our civil liberties. But the race has no shortage of anti-spending conservatives and antiwar liberals. Paul is especially appealing to people who don't fit the narrow stereotypes of Blue and Red: to decentralist Democrats, anti-imperialist Republicans, and a rainbow of independents.
The Internet makes it easier for such dispersed minorities to find each other, and the congressman's candidacy has given them a new reason to seek each other out. When Pittsburgh's Paul backers gathered via the MeetUp site, which arranges get-togethers for users who share a common interest, the blogger Mike Tennant attended. He found at least one Democrat, at least one anarchist, several disillusioned Bush supporters, a member of the Libertarian Party, a member of the right-wing Constitution Party, "and a whole roomful of folks disillusioned with the two-party duopoly... The one thing that unites us all is a desire to have a president who actually believes in liberty and has a record to match his rhetoric." Paul fans have been arguing forcefully for their candidate at both the conservative Web hub FreeRepublic and its liberal counterpart, Daily Kos—where, to be sure, they are met by angry opposition from more conventional Republicans and Democrats.
It's idea-driven. Were you wondering how Paul answered that question about Snakes on a Plane? He said, "I don't worry much about that at all. I worry about understanding the issues and presenting the case and seeing if I can get people to support these views." Some politicians are in this race because they really want to run the country. Some are in it because they want to be vice president, or be secretary of state, or extract some other prize from the eventual nominee. Paul is in it to inject ideas into the campaign. He wants to get votes, of course, but like Henry Clay he'd rather be right than be president. (Unlike Clay, he really is right most of the time.)
For Paul, it's a victory just to be on stage with Rudolph Giuliani arguing for a non-interventionist foreign policy, because it serves as a reminder that it's possible to be a fiscal conservative with bourgeois cultural instincts and yet oppose the occupation of Iraq and the effort to extend that war into Iran. That novelty, coupled with his fans' online activity, has earned Paul a rash of TV interviews: In the last two months, he has appeared on This Week, The Daily Show, Tucker, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and The Colbert Report, among other venues, raising his profile far above the other second-tier candidates. Each appearance is an opportunity not just to ask for votes but to express his anti-statist ideas, spreading a message rarely heard in the context of a presidential campaign.
It has a life of its own. After Jesse Jackson's populist campaign did unexpectedly well in 1988, many of his supporters hoped the Rainbow Coalition would become an independent grassroots force. But Jackson was more interested in his own political career, and he opted to make it a smaller group he could control. Similarly, Ross Perot resisted every effort to make the Reform Party something more than a vehicle for his presidential ambitions. When it slipped out of his control anyway, and in 2000 gave the world two competing presidential nominees, he stiffed both and endorsed George Bush instead.
A different fate befell the left-wing "netroots" that embraced Howard Dean in 2004 and Ned Lamont (among others) in 2006. They've maintained their decentralized character, and they're obviously larger than any particular pol. But unlike the Perot movement or even the Rainbow Coalition, which included left-wing independents as well as Democrats, the netroots aren't larger than one particular party. They may hate the Democratic establishment, but they're still devoted Democrats.
The Paul movement is different. Unlike the Jackson and Perot campaigns, it is open, decentralized, and largely driven by activists operating without any direction from the candidate or his staff. Unlike the netroots, it has no particular attachment to the party whose nomination its candidate is seeking. Paul himself left the Republican fold in the '80s to run for president as a Libertarian, and he still has friendly ties to that party. When he returned to the GOP and to Congress in the election of '96, the national party establishment threw its weight behind his opponent in the primaries, an incumbent who had originally been elected as a Democrat. Paul turned to independent sources to fill his campaign coffers, raising substantial sums from the libertarian, constitutionalist, and hard-money movements. Those have always been his chief base of support.
Barring a complete meltdown of the party gatekeeping apparatus, Ron Paul will not be the Republican nominee next year. And he says he has no plans to run as an independent. But you can't erase all the traces of a self-directed, transpartisan, idea-driven movement. Long after Snakes on a Plane was relegated to the cult-movie shelf, the people who spoofed it online are still writing blogs and editing mini-movies, applying the skills they honed mocking an action flick. Howard Dean is just a party functionary today, but the troops who assembled themselves behind him are still active in the trenches, their original leader nearly forgotten. I suspect that Paul will have a longer shelf life than Dean or Snakes. But whatever becomes of him after this election, his fans will still be there, organizing rallies, editing their YouTube videos, launching their own political campaigns, and spreading ideas.
You can if you want to, but I'm not. If they don't like it then let them delete it. This place is getting just too PC anyway. Don't know how much longer I will be able to stand reading the drivel. There are days when I think I've wandered on to DU from the sentiments expressed.
Maybe I said too much. I was concerned because we know the Paul-haters are ganging up to hit Abuse on anyone who says anything positive about Ron Paul. They’ve virtually come out and admitted it on several of our threads. And some of the bitter Juliebots are still here, trolling about to get most anyone they can banned from FR. Apparently, it’s lonely over there in WideAwake Hell.
Happens all the time - At least JR is not a Rudybot. Of all the Republican candidates il rudce is to me the one most indistinguishable from Hillary and Osama
You do realize you come off as talking down to people, do you not?
Back at ya! :>)
Well, your pic is still there so I was nannying you over nothing, it seems. I was concerned because of some of the comments I’ve read that those graphics are from Lefties in NYC who hated Rudi and that they shouldn’t be allowed on FR. But, maybe all those whiners I recall are those now-banned Juliebots!
and btw, I quoted your fearless leader word for word, verbatim. interpretation is in the eye of the beholder, but if you gathered 100 people randomly anywhere in this country, I guarantee that most would read his words and agree with me.
lastly, I'm very happy to be from GA and would never consider this 'occupied'. That's an insult.
then you obviously have never been to Norcross, Doraville, Dalton or any other foreign enclaves in GA
Since your posts seem to have quite a few insults in them, (tell me is it Christian to be snide about someone you disagree with? Are you friends with Laura Mallory?) I don't much care if you find my screen name to be insulting or not. But for all of you armchair/keyboard hawks who are so pro war, Dr Paul was a Viet Nam MD. so he just might know a little more about the consequnces of war than you do.
Mr. President, please add me to this ping list.
thankyouverymuch!
You'd have better luck getting Dracula to drink holy water.
I'm a raving fan of Paul's domestic agenda. I don't even begrudge him being opposed to the war per se. It's the reasoning behind some of it that is troubling as you pointed out.
He sounds like one of the "moderate" Arab speakers who when asked whether they support the terrorist's actions reply "we condemn terrorism BUT...America did _____"
Even Tony Blair who despite being a domestic Labour Party socialist understood that these loons will come up with any excuse to attack us. They hate us because we invaded Iraq? What was their excuse on 9-11? The Palestinian issue? The arabs hate the Palestinians. They don't even want them in their own country.
We have puppets to do the work for us:
Would you mind quoting my exact insults from each post?
If you are going to accuse anyone of anything on FR, you have to make it stick.
OK, you accused me. Let's see the insults, in quotes.
yea, that is true, but Ialso recall Clinton was at 3% in Iowa during the primaries I believe, so anythings possible. I read a really good blog post which compared Howard Dean to Ron Paul, I can’t seem to find it, but it had some graphs showing Dean had much much greater support than RP at this point. We’ll see what happens... :)
lol, funny about libertarians arguing with themselves, I think we do tend to do that a lot, quite a diverse group for being so ‘extreme’. :)
Yawn!! Somebody wake me when this little twit has some real point to make.
American intervention in the Middle East goes back a lot farther than that, and in fact there were many people that warned that continued interference was going to cause serious problems for America. For example
If you look at much of what Cato's foreign policy team wrote prior to 9/11, you could make the case that had U.S. policymakers paid more attention to actual "libertarian minimalist," "pre-9/11" thinking, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.Back in 1999, for example, Cato's director of defense policy studies at the time, Ivan Eland, wrote "Does U.S. Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism?" In it, Eland laid out a litany of terrorist strikes against U.S. interests that were inspired by unnecessary U.S. interventions in foreign conflicts that posed little threat to our national security. Eland warned -- and bin Laden later confirmed -- that more recent U.S. interventions, in Kosovo, Somalia, and even Gulf War I, could soon provoke a catastrophic attack on the U.S. homeland.
Eland was even more prescient in his 1998 paper "Protecting the Homeland: The Best Defense is to Give No Offense." There, he wrote:
A study completed for the U.S. Department of Defense notes that historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and terrorist attacks against the United States. Attacks by terrorist groups could now be catastrophic for the American homeland. Terrorists can obtain the technology for weapons of mass terror and will have fewer qualms about using them to cause massive casualties. The assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs maintains that such catastrophic attacks are almost certain to occur. It will be extremely difficult to deter, prevent, detect, or mitigate them.
As a result, even the weakest terrorist group can cause massive destruction in the homeland of a superpower. Although the Cold War ended nearly a decade ago, U.S. foreign policy has remained on autopilot. The United States continues to intervene militarily in conflicts all over the globe that are irrelevant to American vital interests. To satisfy what should be the first priority of any security policy--protecting the homeland and its people--the United States should adopt a policy of military restraint. That policy entails intervening only as a last resort when truly vital interests are at stake. To paraphrase Anthony Zinni, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, the United States should avoid making enemies but should not be kind to those that arise.
And more Eland, from his 1999 paper "Tilting at Windmills:"
Once regarded as pinpricks by great powers, attacks by terrorist groups can now be catastrophic for the American homeland. Such weapons can cause tens of thousands or even millions of casualties. The DSB concluded that terrorists can now more rapidly obtain the technology for weapons of mass terror and have fewer qualms about using them to cause enormous casualties...
..the threat of a terrorist attacking the U.S. homeland with a weapon of mass destruction is now the greatest single threat to U.S. security.
That was written in 1999, well before the GOP had given chemical or biological terrorism a lick of real consideration.
In 2000, Eric R. Talyor warned that the U.S. homeland was woefully underprepared for a bio, nuclear, or chemical terrorist attack -- an issue no on in the GOP paid a lick of attention to until after 9/11.
And we can go back further. In the lead-up to the first Gulf War, Cato's Vice President for Foreign Policy Ted Galen Carpenter and adjunct scholar Christopher Layne wrote:
Arab grievances over Western colonialism are an open wound, and Islamic fundamentalism is superimposed upon Arab nationalism, creating an explosive political mixture. A longterm U.S. presence in the Middle East will simply fan the flames of Pan Arabism and weaken the American and Western position. It will make the United States a lightning rod for all the rage and frustration of that troubled region.
That was in 1990.
Bin Laden has made clear several times over that it is the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, the first Gulf War, the sanctions and no-fly zones imposed on Iraq, and our history of intervention in places like Somalia are what motivated him to plan, fund, and carry out the attacks of September 11. If that's true, Cato's "pre-9/11 thinking" was about as far as one could get from "unrealistic." On the contrary. It was tragically realistic.
“fearless leader” was the term used on the rocky & bullwikle show by a pair of clods - Natasha and Boris - to refer to their totalitarian boss. Implication is that RP is a totalitarian, and anyone who supports him is an idiot.
You are giving me WAY too much credit for being clever. Not only did I NOT think of that, but I'm not sure I EVER could have thought of that. Don't over analyze.
Now, shall I quote all of the very polite things I said to you in all of my posts?
"sir"..."sorry"..."respectfully"..."thanks for the civil exchange".
I find it interesting how many people call my (or others) Christianity into question because I can debate them effectively...without curse words, without insults.
I have (intentionally) insulted some mostly former FReepers from the Darwin Cult...just to see them self-implode and, in many instances, get themselves banned.
It was like tickling a blowfish...LOL!
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