Greenwald On Ron Paul

Glenn Greenwald has another excellent post on Ron Paul:

And — as the above-cited efforts to compel Congress to actually adhere to the Constitution demonstrate — few people have been as vigorous in defense of Constitutional principles as those principles have been mangled and trampled upon by this administration while most of our establishment stood by meekly. That’s just true.

Paul’s efforts in that regard may be “odd” in the sense that virtually nobody else seemed to care all that much about systematic unconstitutional actions, but that hardly makes him a “weirdo.” Sometimes — as the debate over the Iraq War should have demonstrated once and for all — the actual “fruitcake” positions are the ones that are held by the people who are welcome in our most respectable institutions and magazines, both conservative and liberal [bold mine-DL].

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This whole concept of singling out and labelling as “weirdos” and “fruitcakes” political figures because they espouse views that are held only by a small number of people is nothing more than an attempt to discredit someone without having to do the work to engage their arguments. It’s actually a tactic right out of the seventh grade cafeteria. It’s just a slothful mechanism for enforcing norms.

Alex Massie answers another tactic employed by some liberal critics of Rep. Paul here.