Hey, if Ron Paul wants to be the Iowa frontrunner, then he should be ready to accept the heightened media scrutiny about his past record.
So when I wrote about those racist newsletters put out under his name, some of his supporters took offense. That, I expected to happen. They come out of the woodwork in the comments section of any news article that's even slightly critical of Ron Paul. But when they tried to dismiss all the newsletters by claiming Obama's MORE racist than Paul, well, they were just asking for a smackdown.
lol don't you feel pathetic in the fact that this is ALL you can try and get on him? Obama and all the other candidates are way more racist through their policies than Paul will ever be. BTW if all the pathetic people bashing on Ron Paul about this knew anything about libertarianism, they would know that we don't look at people as groups, but individuals.... the anti drug laws Obama enforces are far more racist than anything Ron could do.
So saying Ron Paul is a racist cuz of this.... again, pathetic.
Yeah policies speak louder than words (especially ones he didn't even write himself). Obama's drug war and sending poor kids to foreign countries to die for his own benefit seems more racist to me than a fucking newsletter published 20 yrs ago.
Smackdown below the fold.
First, here's all I wrote that set off these Ron Paul fans.
Oh, whaddaya know, back in 1995, Ron Paul DID know quite a bit about his newsletters, even bragging about publishing them, that he now pretends to know almost nothing about, that others wrote them, that others published them without his knowledge of what was going out under his name, etc.
Actual quote from one of his newsletters:
"If you live in a major city, you’ve probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play ...unsuspecting whites like pianos. If you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible."
Even if you grant that he didn't personally write that, he certainly knew who DID write that, or at least who approved it for publication under his name. Nice to see him avoid all personal responsibility for it now.
Notice I was very careful NOT to call Ron Paul a racist. Now, let me let Jay Smooth explain why I chose my words the way I did. No matter how strong the evidence, simply calling Ron Paul a racist is a losing argument, because you will inevitably get derailed and off topic, which is exactly what they want.
Got it?
Now, aside from their comments I quoted above claiming Obama's more racist than Paul could ever be, one of them also posted this video showing black people defending Ron Paul, which in their minds proves Ron Paul cannot possibly be racist.
See why I showed y'all the Jay Smooth video? See how easy it is to derail the argument? It's like Stephen Colbert's black friend.
So, here's the smackdown response to Ron Paul fans, if you ever need one.
Gee, let's see, just where did I or that link I provided ever call Ron Paul a racist? Don't put words in my mouth that I never said. The issue here is that he isn't being truthful now when he claims he knew nothing about those newsletters and was simply "negligent", when we have him ON VIDEO from 1995 proudly talking about publishing them. I'm saying he needs to come up with a better explanation when asked about this.
Actually, my opinion is that he didn't actually write most of the pieces in his newsletter. But I also believe he DOES know who wrote them (my money's on Lew Rockwell), and is pretending that he has no clue how those pieces got into his newsletter. Regardless, he still disseminated them and made a nice profit from those pieces. The kindest explanation shows a serious lack of judgment and ability to manage on his part, and does raise doubts about his being fit to be President. I'm being kind here. Others would say that those newsletters were designed to make money off of racism by catering to those who sought to keep black people "in their place" and to gain racists' support at the polls as he tried to return to Congress.
I know you guys desperately want to change the subject and divert it to Obama, but hey, you were complaining earlier about the lack of any media scrutiny about Ron Paul. Part of the media attention means focusing on a candidate's past actions and behaviors. Or how about his CURRENT behavior of siding with the nutjobs at the John Birch Society, founded by the Koch brothers' dad? You know, the group that still opposes the Civil Rights Act, thinks Eisenhower was a Communist spy, and thinks fluoride in our water is also a Communist plot to brainwash us? He just spoke at the Society's 50th anniversary dinner.
Or how about his refusal to disavow the support he's getting from the white supremacist movement? I make no claim as to whether or not he is a racist (none of us can truly know what's in his heart), but he sure is popular with Stormfront and other white supremacist groups. Why is it that they keep gravitating towards him? One of the Stormfront people wrote about Paul: "He promotes agendas and ideas that allow [White] Nationalism to flourish" as the reason they love him so much. It's like this picture from The Simpsons; just replace "Fox News" with "Ron Paul".
Or maybe they like him so much because of his actual floor speech in the House condemning the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for "diminishing individual liberty" that he gave... in 2004. Again, this is not to say he is a racist. I cannot know what's in his heart.
So yes, I'd love to talk about the issues. I've said before that Paul is better than Obama on civil liberties; well, when it applies to males. (BTW, when it comes to war, quick quiz, between Obama and Paul, which one voted to use military force in Afghanistan?) But that doesn't excuse his batshit insane domestic policies, where he's almost exactly like Michele Bachmann. He wants to not just reduce, but eliminate, the corporate tax rate. [OK, upon further research, it seems he wants to lower it from 35% to 15%. But he does want to eliminate the capital gains tax completely.] He wants to repeal the 14th, 16th, and 17th Amendments to our Constitution. (Note: If you say you "love" the Constitution, but simultaneously want to get rid of/eviscerate multiple Amendments to it, then no, you don't actually "love" the Constitution. You instead love a fictionalized version of the Constitution, and not the actual document itself.)
He's OK with Citizens United (he was the frickin' plaintiff on the original Citizens United court case), so corporations can spend UNLIMITED amounts of money to buy politicians and elections, or defeat the ones they don't like in a barrage of negative ads (see what happened to Russ Feingold). He wants to get rid of safety regulations and let corporations police themselves. He's a doctor but doesn't believe in evolution. He not only wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, but wants a FEDERAL BAN on abortion in all 50 states, per the pledge he just signed to Personhood USA. Even in cases of rape and incest.
He wants to get rid of the Voting Rights Act and let those Southern states pass all forms of voter ID laws, which they even admit will affect black people the most. So he's perfectly fine with a systemic racist statewide policy to disenfranchise minorities. He still believes in that loony NAFTA superhighway conspiracy theory, and said at a debate earlier this year that a fence between the U.S. and Mexico would be used to keep Americans from ESCAPING to Mexico. This is flat out tinfoil hat psycho talk.
He doesn't believe climate change is happening. He said he wouldn't have killed bin Laden, and instead worked with Pakistan to arrest him, when we KNOW there were Pakistani officials in cahoots with bin Laden, so that he would've been alerted to any police action and been able to escape before it happened. He wants anyone to be able to print their own money on the gold standard, which shows he has no understanding of the Panic of 1837, or of the boom and bust cycles we used to experience. He wants to abolish the SEC so that the bankers get to police themselves.
He wants to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And he wants to get rid of the EPA and let the 50 states decide their own pollution standards, which is also completely batshit insane because air particles don't care about state borders.
I'm sure there are other examples, but that's what I could think of for now. :-)
For his part, Meteor Blades said:
The fact is that back in 1996, Paul was not denying that he wrote those newsletters. He was saying some of what was in them was taken "out of context," but he wasn't saying somebody else, somebody he didn't know, was writing those words.
Anybody who read them and bought the "out of context" assertion has a screw loose. More recently, he's been not only did he not write them but he also didn't read them. Anybody who believes that assertion has two screws loose.
He may not have actually penned the words, but you can be sure he read them before they were published. And whether he did so to "out-nigger" the white supremacists, as George Corley Wallace said in that most unfelicitous but telling phrase, or because he really believed it, doesn't matter. Ultimately, those newsletters were designed to make money off of racism by catering to those who seek to keep people of color in their place and to gain such racists' support at the polls. No fucking different than a guys who said they weren't racist but catered to racists by making "the coloreds" eat out on the sidewalk instead of at the diner counter.
When you push the line that those newsletters pushed, you're a racist. The Paulturds would dearly love to get him off the hook he's stuck himself on. But he's permanently impaled.
I await the Ron Paul fan's response. It'll probably contain him calling me a traitor to this country for supporting Obama over Paul. :-)
Update: I went back and added links to just about every claim I made in that entire response, in case you want further reading. Careful, some of those links are to Ron Paul's website itself, away from the safe confines of DailyKos. ;-)