OPINION
On foreign policy, Rand Paul makes sense
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hen Senator Rand Paul owns the most sensible voice on a foreign crisis and still captures the blessings of the far right, you know things have gotten overheated. While everyone else in his party seized on the Russian incursion in Crimea as more evidence of President Obama’s weakness and of Russian imperialism, Paul addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference presidential cattle show and didn’t mention Vladimir Putin or the Russians. The day before, he cautioned against committing ourselves in Ukraine in a way that could lead to military intervention and said the United States should seek “respectful” relations with Putin. Meantime, other Republicans, a few Democrats and herds of columnists and editorialists resurrected Hitler and Stalin and compared Putin’s meddling in Crimea to all their butcheries and ethnic cleansings. Hillary Clinton, her shadow campaign for the presidency flowering everywhere, got into the act with a scary analogy to Hitler’s forays in eastern Europe to “protect” ethnic Germans.
The historical material is so abundant and so easy to mine and the arrogant little tyrant who runs Russia so unlikERNEST able that you can DUMAS hardly blame them. But Rand Paul didn’t succumb to the lure, and he deserves some credit because his party’s establishment was already after him for his isolationist approach to foreign affairs, which stands in contrast to the Republican Party generally. He opposed efforts to block accords with Iran over nuclear development and dared to say that, contrary to Israel’s policy, arms are not necessarily the solution to Middle East problems. He sued the president over the collection of phone records and filibustered the president’s use of drones to kill militant Muslims, the one Obama policy Republicans love. By the way, CPAC did a straw poll after all the Republican presidential maybes had made their pitches and 31 percent favored Paul, three times the votes of the runner-up, Sen. Ted Cruz. Our man Mike Huckabee,
Ron Paul had a clear-eyed grasp of hisif you are interested, finished in a four-way tie for 10th place. tory and of how America went wrong in Let’s not misunderstand Paul’s stance as the Middle East, with such morbid conneutrality. While he cautioned against the sequences, starting with President EisenCold War rhetoric, he condemned Putin’s hower’s decision to overthrow the demoinvasion of Crimea as a violation of inter- cratically elected government of Iran in national law, as it clearly is, not unlike our 1953 to please Winston Churchill, London own invasions of tiny Grenada, Panama, banks and the British petroleum companies. Iraq and Afghanistan, which three presiAnd Rand seems to have the same capacdents undertook because they thought our ity to view events with a little dispassion, grievances outweighed international law. even while recognizing the United States’ To counter his statesmanlike pro- competitive need to promote our interests nouncements Paul went on to identify steps to the detriment of Russia’s. The events in he would take to isolate Russia and punish Ukraine are not so one-sided as American Putin — generally steps that Obama had politicians, including the president and Hillalready taken, except for letting oil compa- ary Clinton, make them appear. nies build the Keystone XL pipeline, which The Crimean peninsula is made up he thought would terrify Putin by offer- largely of Russians who view themselves ing expensive Canadian oil to China and historically, through many wars, as the most Europe. heroic Russians of all. Crimea was part of You can overstate Rand Paul’s qualifi- Russia from 1783 until Nikita Khrushchev, cations to be president. He holds the same who stoked American fears by vowing to pure but nonsensical ideas about economics “bury” us, signed an order in 1954 detaching and the role of government as his old man, it from Russia and assigning it to his native Ron Paul, the thoroughly admirable old lib- Ukraine. Most Crimeans have resented it ertarian who stood his ground through all for 60 years. the jeering Republican presidential debates Obama’s sanctions will make Putin’s and wound up with the votes of the ideo- violation of international law costly to Ruslogues and no one else. But the son has a sians, though not so costly as were our own. presence that the whiny dad didn’t have. For the last two invasions, George W. Bush He may be a presidential contender, at least at the end bore those costs personally. The for the nomination, when you put him up tyrant Vladimir Putin, not so much, though against Chris Christie and Ted Cruz. he’s not Hitler or Stalin.
more important, the human expressions of poverty persist. This goes all the way down to the reality that some of JAY the same homeless BARTH and under-housed men that I saw several years back continue to wander the streets of the neighborhood. Two different writers have written in national publications in recent weeks about the persistence of poverty in Little Rock’s capital city that I experience on my runs, coming to diametrically opposed explanations for it. Conservative writer Jason Epstein, who directed a Great Society era antipoverty program centered in eastern Little Rock, writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal blames government programs for creating a culture of dependency in these neighborhoods where he once worked. In dramatic contrast, long-time Little Rock writer Ed Gray, in an essay for Salon, targets conservatives like Paul Ryan (and Epstein) for bullying the War on Poverty out of existence before it had a chance to succeed in places like east Little Rock.
In my view, neither have it quite right. Blame for the persistence of poverty — with all its human costs — in these neighborhoods is not solely that of the political left (as Epstein would have it) or the right (as would Gray). It is the willing disregard of elected officials from across the political spectrum at all levels — national, state and city — for the mere existence of such troubled neighborhoods and their equally troubled and increasingly disconnected residents. As just one example, with the exception of a resurfacing of a portion of Ninth Street, not a single capital project from the initial round of spending of the city’s heralded one-cent sales tax is for work in east Little Rock. The city government of Little Rock is not alone in its ignoring of the challenges of neighborhoods like this; its ignoring of their plight is simply the easiest to track. The constantly unmet needs of much of these swaths of our community is reminiscent of the central message of what is perhaps the most gorgeous piece of political rhetoric of the last century that I recently heard once again: Louisiana Gov. Huey Long’s 1928 election eve speech delivered in St. Martinville, La., under the mythical Evangeline Oak. There, Evangeline longingly waited for her lover Gabriel in the poem by Henry
Bitter tears
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s I try to get back into some semblance of running shape, I’m now doing longer runs on weekends. Hills being a bane of my running, I typically seek the flattest possible option. That sends me to the most eastern parts of Little Rock to the neighborhoods surrounding the Clinton National Airport. These are neighborhoods I came to know pretty well campaigning door to door while running for office four years ago. But, in the years since that campaign, while I’ve driven through them fairly regularly, I’ve not paid as close attention to what’s going on in these neighborhoods east of I-30 as one does when seeking out distractions from the aches in 47-year-old knees. Unfortunately, the images I see today are exactly what I saw several years ago: the same potholed streets, the same cracked and uneven sidewalks, the same vacant lots, and the same distressed housing. Despite the genuine signs of progress along the Main Street corridor just a mile or so to the west (and the occasional home being restored in the Hanger Hill neighborhood that borders I-30), slow, continued deterioration of block after block is the reality in the bulk of these neighborhoods. Even
Wadsworth Longfellow. Long concluded his speech, “... but Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment. Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have, that have never come? Where are the roads and the highways that you send your money to build that are no nearer now than ever before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted only through one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations. Give me the chance to dry the eyes of those who still weep here.” Huey Long was a deeply flawed public official whose actions were decidedly less elegant than his rhetoric. However, he recognized the existence of citizens like those living the city blocks on my runs and understood their pain and frustration, borne from generations of inaction on the problems most pressing to them. As such, he was unlike all but a handful of those elected to serve the people of east Little Rock in recent decades. A start toward solving the problems of our poorest neighborhoods, crucial to the long-term health of the city as a whole, is for public officials to face up to the challenges found on some of the city’s oldest blocks. www.arktimes.com
MARCH 13, 2014
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