Jack & Jill Politics

I didn’t realize that white supremacist groups were actually backing Ron Paul.

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (AP) – Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has received a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist, and the Texas congressman doesn’t plan to return it, an aide said Wednesday.

Don Black, of West Palm Beach, recently made the donation, according to campaign filings. He runs a Web site called Stormfront with the motto, “White Pride World Wide.” The site welcomes postings to the “Stormfront White Nationalist Community.”

“Dr. Paul stands for freedom, peace, prosperity and inalienable rights. If someone with small ideologies happens to contribute money to Ron, thinking he can influence Ron in any way, he’s wasted his money,” Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said. “Ron is going to take the money and try to spread the message of freedom.”

That’s something all right. Just in case you’re not clear on Ron “We shouldn’t have fought the Civil War” Paul’s message of “Freedom”:

To which Earl Ofari Hutchinson says:

But the Civil war and the Lincoln jibe needs a response for two reasons. The first is for its idiot read of history. Lincoln as an Illinois Congressman in 1849 proposed a bill for voluntary and gradual emancipation of the slaves in the District of Columbia. Lincoln toyed with the idea of offering compensation to get the slavemasters to go along with it. Congress dominated by Southerners and the slave owners showed absolutely no interest in tqking a government bribe to give up their slaves in D.C. Lincoln didn’t give up the idea. In 1861, Lincoln, now president, dangled the carrot of federal dollars in front of the slave owners in the Border States. He’d pay them $400 per slave to free them. There were no takers. The next year, Lincoln, even arm twisted Congress to pass a resolution providing for payment to the slave owners in the Border States and elsewhere. That went nowhere too.

The slave masters understood something that Paul doesn’t. Slavery was not an aberrant, patchwork system that consigned a few million luckless blacks to hard, unpaid labor. Slavery was a cornerstone of the Southern economy. It wove personal lifestyle, custom, and comfort together for the benefit of the slave owners. Slavery was slyly encoded in articles in the Constitution, protected by court decisions, and bolstered by the full force of federal law (the enforcement of the fugitive slave law). Lincoln had a better chance of dismantling slavery with dollars than Paul has of winning the White House.

The other more compelling reason to take on Paul’s dumb crack is that while the North may have won the war, the South won the peace. No other region has so dominated national politics–the military, the courts, Congress, the White House–as the South. It retooled slavery into a iron clad system of Jim Crow segregation, economic domination, and state government sanctioned violence to maintain power. No amount of money could have changed that.

Why would they want to? When that kind of domination is exactly what they mean when they say “Freedom.”

All I know is, they’re not talking about my freedom.