- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
"Throughout his political career he has argued for legalizing gold and silver as legal tender, ending most foreign aid, abolishing the income tax, eliminating the Department of Education, and ending the federal war on drugs, among other things."
With a few tweaks, this sounds like the domestic platform of the American Party of the 1970s. Remember those guys? They were basically John Birchers whose party ran an insurgent Republican congressman (again with the insurgent Republican congressman!) named John Schmidt in '72, apparently because Nixon was too much of a commie, and fell behind George Wallace in '76. The paranoia of the old fringe right is just below the surface of the Paulist movement, but in these days of build-your-own-reality via the Internet, that goes largely unremarked.
It should be quite depressing to anyone with a sense of history that such a wholesale detachment from the complexities of American society should, in A.D. 2007, be considered fresh and incisive. Were it not for his anti-war stance, how would Paul be viewed by the political virgins pointing and clicking under his banner?
