How Dare Ron Paul Talk About Blowback?

Poor Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute (RPI).  What did he do?  He posted a naughty article in which were written some Bad, Bad Things that even consenting adults apparently shouldn’t be allowed to read or discuss.

The column, written by Paul Craig Roberts, asserted that the Charlie Hebdo shootings had the earmarks of a professional hit job and that the suspects Cherif and Said Kouachi could have been patsies.

McAdams titled the article, “Charlie Hebdo Shootings: False Flag?”  This made it clear that no implied assertion was being made by McAdams or Ron Paul that the shootings were a false-flag operation.  LRC ran the column with a similar question title, and it’s well known that it often runs items that it doesn’t necessarily agree with.  (And this writer doesn’t buy Roberts’ posited theory.)

French politicians continue feigning support for free speech while arresting French citizens for making statements that French politicians don’t like.  The RPI case evinced some interestingly similar double standards.

One of the first to sound the heresy siren was neocon Grand Poobah Bill Kristol, linking to an article at his Weekly Standard with the title, “Ron Paul Institute: Charlie Hebdo Massacre, Like 9/11, Was a False Flag Operation.”  The last sentence of the post by Daniel Halper read, “One wonders what Rand Paul thinks of this crack pot [sic] conspiracy theory pushed by his father’s institute.”  Excuse me?  What theory was pushed by RPI?

This was some interesting splinter picking by Kristol, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) supporting “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”  (That’s right, a policy of “moral clarity” which included supplying about 2,500 TOW and 18 Hawk missiles to Iran between 1985 and 1987 while demonizing Iran’s regime, but let’s be sure to shove that moral clarity down the Memory Hole as fast as we can.)

Kristol’s PNAC was instrumental in pushing the U.S. into the disastrous Iraq War (2003-) in which about 4,400 U.S. servicemen and women as well as 110,000-120,000 Iraqi civilians were killed for lies about weapons of mass destruction supposedly possessed by an Iraqi dictatorship that was a former U.S. ally against Iran.

How on earth Kristol could be a coveted writer and television panelist in the U.S. and not a universal pariah is unfathomable.  Yet many conservatives, especially those who get their information from the likes of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the Wall Street Journal, see Kristol as a foreign-policy maven and patriot.

Yet Ron Paul, who did everything in his power to prevent the Iraq war and thousands of unnecessary American and Iraqi deaths, is somehow a traitor and kook?

On the other end of the supposed left-right spectrum was an even more surreal post by the left progressive RawStory’s David Ferguson.  The name suggests a site that separates facts from innuendo to bring its readers the unembellished story, yet it couldn’t have gotten closer to the exact opposite in this case.  First the title: “Charlie Hebdo ‘false flag’ nuttiness becoming a real headache for the ‘Libertarian moment.’”

For clarity, Paul Craig Roberts is not a libertarian.  While he is undoubtedly not a fan of pre-emptive war or empire, he is a supporter of federal programs such as Social Security and Medicare.  How would he be more accurately classified?  It’s debatable, but what isn’t is that far more left progressives share the totality of his current views than libertarians.

After the title, the RawStory article went further downhill: “At risk for damaging his credibility and spoiling the ‘Libertarian moment’ are the Paul Institute’s startling assertions the [sic] CIA agents carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack…”  Paul Institute’s “startling assertions?”  Where?

One more: RPI “has a long history of publishing ‘some seriously bizarre commentary over the years.’”  Long history?  RPI is not even two years old.

The supposed crankery of Ron Paul and RPI’s position on Ukraine was raised.  Never mind that no less than the Council on Foreign Relations’ prestigious Foreign Affairs published an article last Fall placing blame for the Ukraine crisis on the West.  So now apparently even the University of Chicago’s John J. Mearsheimer can be counted among “Putin-defending cranks.”

Then there was Salon which was propagating outright lies: “Ron Paul defends insane Charlie Hebdo conspiracy theory: I’m just trying ‘to get the truth out’!”  Amazingly, the post by Luke Brinker even referred to a Newsmax interview in which Paul was asked if he believed Roberts’ theory and Paul’s answer was as unequivocal as you can get: “Well no, obviously not.”

The real intention is almost certainly to deliberately conflate discussing verboten ideas with supporting them to (like France’s politicians) pose as supporters of tolerance, diversity, and free expression while actually attempting to silence ideas and people that Kristol, Brinker, and Salon don’t like.

Brinker earlier asserted that Roberts was a “longtime Paul supporter.”  Roberts has actually bashed libertarians as being dogmatically committed to the idea that freedom and liberty trump everything else in life.

Is the FBI Controlled By Conspiracy Kooks?

If even so much as discussing the possibility of a false-flag operation automatically makes one a kook, then the “left” and “right” (i.e., neocon) progressives might find themselves a bit conflicted by such a position now and then.  For example, one week after 9/11 several letters were mailed to different locations in the U.S.  Besides containing anthrax spores that ended up killing five people and infecting almost twenty others, the letters also contained handwritten messages that clearly sought to implicate Middle-Eastern Muslims as the source of the letters.

Photo: Google Images

Yet the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ultimately determined that the perpetrator was a federal-government scientist and the source of the spores a U.S. biological weapons lab at Fort Dietrich in Frederick, Maryland.  In other words, according to the FBI, Amerithrax was a false-flag attack.

What was embarrassing was that apparently some conspiracy kooks—anthrax denialists?—at the National Academy of Sciences questioned the FBI’s methods in arriving at its conclusions.  Poor Bill Kristol.  Will knuckle-dragging cranks ever stop torturing him and leave his beloved federal government alone for once?

Kooks: PC and un-

Another point to ponder: Kristol and his ideological comrades were and will once again become big boosters of Mitt Romney if Romney runs again as the lone establishment choice for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

In 2012, Romney went on the campaign trail practically arm in arm with the birther Donald Trump.  Where was the hysterical sounding of the alarm about associating with kookery from Kristol, The Weekly Standard, PJ Media, and Fox News?  Where was the dogged insistence that Romney’s views were necessarily a reflection of Trump’s by association?

Instead we were lectured that Trump’s views were not necessarily Romney’s.  That was rich coming from the same people who told us during the primaries that Ron Paul was responsible for any and all beliefs ever held by any of his supporters.  No doubt more Kristolian moral clarity: le mensonge et l’hypocrisie, il est.