Tom Watson

Ron Paul, Shiny Penny

It's no accident that the ugliest moment in last night's Republican Presidential debate centered around Texas Congressman Ron Paul and his extremist anti-government views.

"What do you tell a guy who is sick, goes into a coma and doesn't have health insurance? Who pays for his coverage? "Are you saying society should just let him die?" Wolf Blitzer asked.

"Yeah!" several members of the crowd yelled out.

The question by the CNN anchor - and by the way, how disgraceful was CNN in "partnering" with the fanatical hate-mongering Tea Party Express on the production? - was aimed squarely at Paul's hard-core conservative libertarianism, a deeply corrosive, amoral force in today's Republican Party. Paul attempted to soften his response (and the audience's evident blood lust) by pulling back to the 30,000-foot "Founders" level, the usual 18th century refuge for scoundrels and hypocrites who seek the to run the very government apparatus they'd like to abolish. They selectively divine the intentions of Jefferson and Madison (often skipping over Hamilton, the nation's first great liberal crusader) in a naked attempt to create a laissez faire playground for big business, a kind of giant mainland Cayman Islands.

And every four years in this sad era of never-ending wars, Ron Paul pulls in a few suckers on the civil libertarian left with the shiny penny of vast cuts in defense and military spending (hint: it's isolationism, folks), while tossing all entitlements and infrastructure and regulation out with the bathwater - along with civil rights, of course.

I agree with Adele Stan on AlterNet: "There are few things as maddening in a maddening political season as the warm and fuzzy feelings some progressives evince for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the Republican presidential candidate. The anti-war Republican,' people say, as if that's good enough." She details Rep. Paul's radical record in the post, but here's the gist:

But Ron Paul is much, much more than that. He's the anti-Civil-Rights-Act Republican. He's an anti-reproductive-rights Republican. He's a gay-demonizing Republican. He's an anti-public education Republican and an anti-Social Security Republican. He's the John Birch Society's favorite congressman. And he's a booster of the Constitution Party, which has a Christian Reconstructionist platform. So, if you're a member of the anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-senior-citizen, anti-equality, anti-education, pro-communist-witch-hunt wing of the progressive movement, I can see how he'd be your guy.

This is the man who gave the keynote speech at the 50th anniversary gala of the John Birch Society. Yet many progressives automatically bestow most-favored Republican status on Paul every four years. In one respect, Glenn Greenwald (undoubtedly the preeminent civil liberties blogger on the left) is right: Paul is neither a "fruitcake" nor a "whackjob." His ideals and ideology are deadly serious, and the product of many years' labor. He should not be dismissed as "weird" because he doesn't have Mitt Romney's hair or Rick Perry's chest-thumping bluster; both of those guys are essentially professional actors. Ron Paul's the real deal.

But that real deal is a vision for America that guts the very society created (imperfect and always-challenged, especially in a nation where nearly 50 million people now live in poverty) by our representative democracy. Yet the liberal web is chock-a-block with appreciations for Paul. Dig this from Charles Davis at Counterpunch, who claims Paul "is more progressive" than Barack Obama. (Well yeah, if by "progressive," you mean "wants to do away with almost all domestic social spending.") It's textbook liberal Paul love:

Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I’ll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn’t protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn’t overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government’s criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

[snip]

Let’s just assume the worst about Paul: that he’s a corporate libertarian in the Reason magazine/Cato Institute mold that would grant Big Business and the financial industry license to do whatever the hell it wants with little in the way of accountability (I call this scenario the “status quo”). Let’s say he dines on Labradoodle puppies while using their blood to scribble notes in the margins of his dog-eared, gold-encrusted copy of Atlas Shrugged.

So. Fucking. What.

I'll admit it does have a ring. And yeah, people are angry and rightfully so. But to answer that final question: imagine the demolition of the entire Federal government, back to a level would barely sustain a loose agrarian federation of competing states. Think of the pain, the anarchy, the tribal and regional disorder. Think of the crowd at the GOP debate lustily cheering death among the uninsured. That's Ron Paul in charge. So applaud the anti-war talk all you'd like, but pass on the politician and his twisted ideology.

The End of WikiLeaks

Last fall when the news broke that WikiLeaks was in possession of a quarter million U.S. diplomatic cables, I wrote that the putative pro-transparency organization was in fact a detriment to a serious movement aimed at more openness in government. Mine was among the few voices on the left at the time to take this position, but I believed in my bones that WikiLeaks founder and leader Julian Assange was more interested in fame and power (and money, as it later turned out) than he was in a true democratization of government secrets and data. Further, I came to believe that the flamboyant and outspoken Assange was WikiLeaks - that his voice, his decisions, his direction, his personal politics, and his personality were fused permanently to the organization.

Finally, I asserted that openness by force in a democratic society without the consent or participation of the governed isn't really openness at all. "Wikileaks is resolutely anti-engagement, anti-development, anti-cooperation, and anti-peace, " I wrote last December. "And virulently to its very DNA, anti-democratic."

The events of the last few days prove that my 2010 assertions were entirely correct, but there's not much joy in the realization. You see, WikiLeaks could have been a contender.

Releasing the full database of unredacted cables has exposed scores of U.S. information sources to the world (and to the intelligence services of regimes that would do them harm). WikiLeaks' original media partners in the carefully redacted and researched initial tranche of limited releases - The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel - excoriated the organization in an extraordinary joint statement today:

We cannot defend the needless publication of the complete data – indeed, we are united in condemning it. The decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone.

My friend Micah Sifry, author of WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency and one the most important voices for more open government data, correctly sketched the epitaph for WikiLeaks in his TechPresident post today.

WikiLeaks has now indiscriminately dumped the whole cable set into the public arena, and in doing so it has tossed away whatever claim it might have had to the moral high ground. The argument that others were doing it already, or that bad actors were already getting access to the leaked master file and thus this was a mitigating step to reduce coming harms, or that it's somehow The Guardian's fault for publishing what it thought was a defunct password, doesn't absolve WikiLeaks of its large share of responsibility for this dump.

People are human; to err is human. But refusing to admit error, that is hubris. Assange, like Icarus, thought he could fly to the sun.

And in doing so, Assange may well have set the cause of more open public sector data on a backward path. Do we need an independent international organization to safely traffic in verified secrets, and responsibly see that those documents are distributed to journalists and the public, while at the same time protecting whistleblowers who often risk all to tell vital stories?

Yeah. We do. WikiLeaks promised all of that - and delivered none of it. And in failing so spectacularly, WikiLeaks almost assuredly discouraged those who would come to trust others with secret information.

Tonight, the Guardian's James Ball finally told the inside story of his three months as a WikiLeaks staffer during those tumultuous months after the cable leak was first made public. It's bravely told; Ball understands that he will come in for a tidal wave of opprobrium from the cohort of hard-core Assange fans who prowl Twitter and other forums. But even for this WikiLeaks completist (I continue to find the entire story fascinating) Ball's tale is pretty shocking:

I joined WikiLeaks last November as a staffer for a three-month stint. Culture shock came just a few days in, when Julian Assange gathered core staff and supporters at Ellingham Hall, a manor house owned by the Frontline Club founder and WikiLeaks supporter Vaughan Smith.

Around the dining table the team sketched out a plan for the coming months, to release the leaked US diplomatic cables selectively for maximum impact. Phase one would involve publishing selected – and carefully redacted – high-profile cables through the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais. Phase two would spread this out to more media organisations.

But clearly a large volume of cables would remain, of little interest to any media organisation. Several at the meeting – myself included – stressed these documents, which would probably number hundreds of thousands, could not be published without similar careful redaction. Others vehemently disagreed.

Johannes Wahlström, Swedish journalist and son of antisemitic WikiLeaks activist Israel Shamir, shouted: "You do realise the idea of not putting ALL of these cables up is totally unacceptable to people around this table, don't you?"

Julian took Wahlström's their side. One way or another, he said, all the cables must eventually be made public.

Ball goes on to detail financial misdealing, psychological pressure, an atmosphere of total personal domination by Assange, allegations of providing assistance to the interior ministry of the repressive Belarus regime, and "a growing cultlike ethos at the centre of the group." Finally, he recounts conversations with activists and aid workers fearful that their cooperation with U.S. diplomats or other actors would come to light and endanger their work, and their lives.

Before the first publication of carefully redacted cables, human rights activists, NGOs, and organisations working with victims of horrific crimes contacted WikiLeaks begging us to take steps not to publish any names. To be able to assure them details would be protected was an immeasurable relief.

These cables contain details of activists, opposition politicians, bloggers in autocratic regimes and their real identities, victims of crime and political coercion, and others driven by conscience to speak to the US government. They should never have had to fear being exposed by a self-proclaimed human rights organisation.

Indeed. This is the end of WikiLeaks. The story of Julian Assange and the downfall of his organization remains a fascinating one - but it is not a story of transparency, of openness, or of an informed and empowered society.