Alan Keyes Loses Again
Jesse Walker | April 26, 2008, 1:40pm
The Permanent Candidate has failed to win the nomination of the paleoconservative Constitution Party. Eric Garris
reports:
Last night, CP founder Howard Phillips strongly denounced [Alan] Keyes as a warmonger, neocon, and egomaniac. Phillips was subsequently attacked by Jim Clymer, the CP national chairman.
In spite of Keyes bringing in a lot of delegates, the CP remained true to their anti-interventionist views and rejected Keyes.
The nomination instead went to the antiwar conservative Chuck Baldwin, by a
vote of 383.8 to 125.7. It's a small but satisfying victory for two noble though possibly lost causes: the movement to end the occupation of Iraq and the transideological coalition to get Alan Keyes to shut up.
I
pointed out a while back that the California affiliate of the Constitution Party is the old American Independent Party, a group formed as a political vehicle for the segregationist George Wallace. Jim Antle of
The American Spectator, who has done the best reporting I've seen on the CP race, tells me that the California delegation backed Keyes, a black man -- while the party's two black state chairs were Keyes' leading opponents. It's a complicated world, innit?
Mad Max | April 27, 2008, 3:16pm | #
Naturally, from skimming this thread, it seems that a discussion of Keyes' candidacy has logically and inevitably evolved into an examination of the rights and wrongs of the Israel/Palestinian situation.
From the standpoint of pure justice, it would seem that the Palestinians who fled in 1948-49, never expecting their exile to be permanent, cannot be said to have abandoned their right to their real property in what is now the state of Israel, nor to have abandoned their right to live on such property as their forebears had done for generations.
The question is, what would be the cost, today, of enforcing that right? Would it *create* more injustices than it would remedy? I suspect so, given the attitudes of the Arab countries of the region, the putative enforcers of the Palestinians' rights. No way the Israelis are going to consent to a nonviolent solution, so it's either compensate the exiles and tell them to suck it up, or allow even greater violence and injustice.
As to the Occupied Terrotories, taken in 1967, that's a different situation. While the Israelis have never been willing to allow the 1948-49 exiles to return, they have often shown a willingness to compromise as to the territories taken in 1967. The Arab/Muslim powers, and the Palestinian (mis)leaders, have persistently refused to exploit this willingness (thought the Egyptians took advantage of the Israelis' compromising spirit to get back the Sinai).
We can fairly say that, whatever the sympathetic situation of the Pals, their leaders, and their putative friends in the Arab/Muslim world, have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. That is, assuming that a negotiated peace is their sincere aspiration, which seems doubtful.
This is not to say that the U.S. should be in the business of pulling the Isralis' chestnuts out of the fire. But if we're going to yak about the issue, let's be realistic about where matters stand.
