I haven't concerned myself much with the Ron Paul campaign to this point, other than to note the way he attracts "9/11 Truthers" and more recently, his unwillingness to disavow the support of some neo-Nazi type groups along with their money. And his appeal to young people has been disturbing to me because I find his brand of isolationism to be often dangerously irresponsible, however principled it may sound to young idealists.
Now a report by James Kirchick in The New Republic rips off Paul's libertarian mask by revealing excerpts from Paul's old newsletter, and what's beneath that mask is truly ugly. The excerpt below from Kirchick is copied as is from Allahpundit's post at Hot Air, which has other worthwhile links, including an interview of Kerchick by John Gibson.
[W]hoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics…---
...Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically–or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point–over the course of decades–he would have done something about it.
In these post-Beauchamp days, unfortunately, anything carrying the TNR brand has to be viewed with a certain amount of skepticism, (especially when they promise that some documentation will be appearing on their web site 'soon'.) And Allahpundit wonders how a guy could have served 30-some years in Congress with this kind of stuff in his background, but I suppose we won't have to wait long to sort it all out.
Here is Ron Paul's statement on the TNR story, claiming it is "old news" and that he was not editing the newsletter called the "Ron Paul Political Report", and he doesn't agree with the views expressed in it. I'm thinking maybe he didn't subscribe to his own newsletter. Yeah, that's the ticket.
If that's the case, I suppose he should tell all of his white supremacist supporters that they've got it all wrong, that there's been a terrible mistake, and that he's not their guy after all. I can see the time coming (if it's not past time already) for the GOP to give this guy the John Bircher treatment, and read him out of the party altogether. Talk about a tainted brand.
Posted by dan at January 8, 2008 11:50 PM