Listen to Matt Welch Debate Katha Pollitt About Ron Paul on San Francisco Public Radio!

Today at 10 AM Pacific Time, I'll be on Your Call with Rose Aguilar, on 91.7 KALW San Francisco, tussling with The Nation's Katha Pollitt for an hour over "Who Is Ron Paul?" You can listen live at this link, and please call in & send your comments/questions using the Internet buttons.

Katha Pollitt made some waves last week with a piece entitled "Ron Paul's Strange Bedfellows." Excerpt from that:

I, too, would love to see the end of the "war on drugs" and our other wars. I, too, am shocked by the curtailment of civil liberties in pursuit of the "war on terror," most recently the provision in the NDAA permitting the indefinite detention, without charge, of US citizens suspected of involvement in terrorism. But these are a handful of cherries on a blighted tree. In a Ron Paul America, there would be no environmental protection, no Social Security, no Medicaid or Medicare, no help for the poor, no public education, no civil rights laws, no anti-discrimination law, no Americans With Disabilities Act, no laws ensuring the safety of food or drugs or consumer products, no workers' rights. How far does Paul take his war against Washington? He wants to abolish the Federal Aviation Authority and its pesky air traffic controllers. He has one magic answer to every problem—including how to land an airplane safely: let the market handle it. […]

Add in his opposition to basic civil rights law—he maintains his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and opposes restrictions on the "freedom" of business owners to refuse service to blacks—and his hostility to the federal government starts looking more and more like old-fashioned Southern-style states' rights. No wonder they love him over at Stormfront, a white-supremacist website with neo-Nazi tendencies. […]

If Ron Paul was interested in peace, he wouldn't be a Republican—that party has even more enthusiasm for the military-industrial complex than the Democrats.

See you on the radio!