Bird’s Eye: Some song music needed here, perhaps a cross between Send in the Clowns, and Send in the Clones. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has an excellent article about the farcical nature of the current US election process. This one is essential reading, folks. Begala looks at Romney’s “victory” and finds it exceedingly unconvincing, and Juan Cole looks at the three top finishers in Iowa, and finds them all lacking.

* Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow BeginsMatt Taibbi   Rolling Stone

This caucus, let’s face it, marks the beginning of a long, rigidly-controlled, carefully choreographed process that is really designed to do two things: weed out dangerous minority opinions, and award power to the candidate who least offends the public while he goes about his primary job of energetically representing establishment interests. If that sounds like a glib take on a free election system that allows the public to choose whichever candidate it likes best without any censorship or overt state interference, so be it. But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America. That damning statistic just confirms what everyone who spends any time on the campaign trail knows, which is that the presidential race is not at all about ideas, but entirely about raising money.

…The 1% donors are remarkably tolerant. They’ll give to just about anyone who polls well, provided they fall within certain parameters. What they won’t do is give to anyone who is even a remote threat to make significant structural changes, i.e. a Dennis Kucinich, an Elizabeth Warren, or a Ron Paul (hell will freeze over before Wall Street gives heavily to a candidate in favor of abolishing their piggy bank, the Fed). So basically what that means is that voters are free to choose anyone they want, provided it isn’t Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or some other such unacceptable personage…. There are obvious, even significant differences between Obama and someone like Mitt Romney, particularly on social issues, but no matter how Obama markets himself this time around, a choice between these two will not in any way represent a choice between “change” and the status quo. This is a choice between two different versions of the status quo, and everyone knows it.

* Romney’s Real WeaknessPaul Begala The Daily Beast

Perhaps Romney takes some solace in the fact that he barely edged out Ron Paul, the cranky septuagenarian who thinks the Federal Reserve is a greater threat than Iran. Ron Paul, who got just 10 percent of the vote in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, more than doubled his support this time around, despite news coverage of his racist newsletters.

Romney, who has to my knowledge never published any racist newsletters, did not show similar improvement. Four years ago, Romney received 25 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses. Unencumbered by the need for gainful employment, Romney has been running nonstop ever since, and, along with a pro-Romney super PAC, spent at least $4 million in Iowa in 2012. Yet he garnered—wait for it—25 percent. I’m not a Harvard Business School grad like Mitt; in fact, I’ve never even laid anyone off, but it seems to me that spending $4 million to gain zero points is a bad return on investment. That is one expensive treadmill. I’ve seen Astroturf with stronger growth.

* Three Republican Bears and None Just RightJuan ColeInformed Comment

The Republican Party is a coalition of numerous groups, but the big three as things now stand are the wealthy 1%, the religious absolutists, and the suburban and prairie libertarians. The Iowa caucasus split between candidates representing each of the three. Romney is the darling of Wall Street among the colorful Republican field. Rick Santorum has emerged as the voice of religious absolutists, mostly evangelical Protestants but including Ultramontane Catholics like himself. (He beat out Michelle Bachmann for this honor in part because religious absolutists are patriarchal and wouldn’t want to be led by a woman.) And Ron Paul is the standard bearer of the libertarians.

In the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, there was one ursine character whose utensils, furniture, and other accoutrements were just right. For Republicans, none of these three is the Golden Mean.

Libertarians suspect Romney of believing in big government. Evangelicals see Romney, a Mormon, as a cultist who believes that Satan is the brother of Jesus. Wall Street fears Ron Paul’s fundamentalist Libertarianism, his antagonism to the Federal Reserve and to TARP and other bailouts. Now that Rick Santorum has announced that his foreign policy plan is to bomb Iran, the more level-headed elements in New York’s financial community are surely scared to death of him, as are the libertarians who are weary of perpetual war (which always benefits big government).

Bird’s Eye: Here’s how a recent Salon article started: “Let’s start at the starting place. Rep. Ron Paul has no chance whatsoever of securing the Republican nomination, nor of being elected president under any imaginable circumstances. Ain’t gonna happen. Even Newt Gingrich has basically said he’d vote for President Obama over Paul.” This is clearly true. But Paul is unelectable not because of his views (I side with Greenwald: he is comparable to Obama – much better in some areas, and much worse in others) but because he would take power away from those who have it, and that will not be allowed to happen. in Iowa, Ron Paul won 50 percent of voters 17 to 24, 45 percent of voters 25 to 29, and 34 percent of voters 30 to 39.  So it is very interesting, as Chomsky often points out, to look at what lies outside the allowed areas of acceptable discourse. Here are three writers, all generally liberal or further left, who find much in Ron Paul worth admiring. Challenge yourself, and read them.

* Progressives and the Ron Paul fallaciesGlen Greenwald- Salon 

Paul scrambles the comfortable ideological and partisan categories and forces progressives to confront and account for the policies they are working to protect. His nomination would mean that it is the Republican candidate — not the Democrat — who would be the anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate (which is why some neocons are expressly arguing they’d vote for Obama over Paul). Is it really hard to see why Democrats hate his candidacy and anyone who touts its benefits?

It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:

“Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.”

Without my adopting it, that is at least an honest, candid, and rational way to defend one’s choice. It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest. But that is not the discussion that takes place because few progressives want to acknowledge that the candidate they are supporting — again — is someone who will continue to do these evil things with their blessing. Instead, we hear only a dishonest one-sided argument that emphasizes Paul’s evils while ignoring Obama’s (progressives frequently ask: how can any progressive consider an anti-choice candidate but don’t ask themselves: how can any progressive support a child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior?).

* Ron Paul Hysteria  Ian Welsh

The reason Ron Paul causes hysterics is he pits interest group against interest group, morality vs. morality. He’s a different kind of lesser evil.  If Afghans got to vote in the US election, who would they vote for?  How important is Habeas Corpus to you really?  What about pot legalization?  Etc…  Ron Paul is awful on some issues, and very good on others.  Are abortion rights more important than dead Afghans and Pakistanis at weddings?  (I don’t claim they are, or aren’t, I simply note Paul forces you to make that choice.)  And Paul would end all bank bailouts.  Hate the banksters?  Think they’re the key problem?  Paul’s your man.

Obama is objectively awful.  Paul is objectively awful.  But unlike Romney, Paul is objectively awful in different ways than Obama.  Romney would just be Obama, but slightly worse.  If you’re going to choose a lesser evil, you might as well choose Obama.  But when it comes to Paul vs. Obama the equation changes.

And that’s why many progressives are attacking any other progressive who says anything good about Paul, because Paul threatens to split the left, and because Paul makes progressives decide what they value most.

*The Greatness of Ron PaulRobert Wright The Atlantic

 Paul is making one contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value.

It doesn’t lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I’m largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them. Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.

This is such a radical departure from the prevailing American mindset that some of Paul’s critics see it as more evidence of his weirdness. A video montage meant to discredit him shows him taking the perspective of Iran. After observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about Iranians, “Why wouldn’t it be natural that they’d want a weapon? Internationally they’d be given more respect.”

Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about Iranian motivation? Wouldn’t it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment? Paul’s error is clear: He’s departed from approved Republican-presidential-candidate talking points, according to which the only explanation for an Iranian nuclear program is a desire to destroy Israel….