Via Der Spiegel on Twitter comes an ad apparently currently on air in New Hampshire that's also gone viral on the internet. The title is 'Jon Huntsman's Values'.
Huntsman, of course, is the one horse in the republican race the White House is seriously worried about, and the only contender who could even conceivably govern the country. Before he entered the race, he was the Obama administration's ambassador to China. He is, in short, not quite the batshit insane hellspawn of the Gingrich/Bachman variety, or as lamentably dim as Rick Perry.
Too bad for him, because these qualities attract the crazies. Take a look at the ad.
Got that? The man speaks Chinese - Mandarin, to be exact - and has several adopted children who are distressingly neither Caucasian or even Christian - distressingly, that is, if you're the video editor for a group called NHLiberty4Paul.
The message is clear: if you have brown-ish, heathen kids or the poor taste to speak a foreign language, you're not the right kind of American, certainly not for the Presidency. You're different, and dangerous. Nor is this video all that unrepresentative of the universe of supporters that gravitate to the Texas Congressman, or of his own views.
Allow me to suggest that this is a problem, no matter what Glenn Greenwald may say. Or Katrina van den Heuvel, for that matter. Or anyone else. Because there is a pattern here. And it's not a pretty one.
Now, to be fair, it's worth noting that the Paul campaign has denounced this ad. But again, it's the underlying pattern that's disturbing.
The week doesn't go by when Paul doesn't need to disavow something or someone that any reasonable person would not consider to be either xenophobic or deranged or outright, in your face racist. Even more troublesome are the supporters and ideas he does not distance himself from.
So let's take a look at some of the details.
Stormfront endorsement? Check. To quote:
[Stormfront founder Don] Black said he supports Paul's stance on ending the war in Iraq, securing U.S. borders and his opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants.
The Stormfront web site itself has any number of outbound links to Paul's campaign site; given that every campaign tracks where their traffic comes from, and has Google alerts, they know about this awkward fact. It's completely inconceivable they do not.
Moving on, 9/11 Truth? Check. The main truther web site states:
It is not too late to act. Vote out the incumbent congressmen and vote in Ron Paul no matter what scare tactics the pundits on CNN, FOX News or MSNBC attempt to use on you. Ron Paul CAN get 38% of the vote and win the presidency. This is not an opinion; it's mathematical fact.
An endorsement from Ex-KKK Grand Wizard David Duke? Check. From his site:
After a couple days of semi-impartial coverage, the mainstream media shifted into attack mode against Paul. Article after article has appeared falsely accusing Paul of racist beliefs. The most hysterical attacks always seem to come from Zionists and their stooges with maybe a little hatred coming from ACORN.
Duke is in good company; another Ron Paul fan is Alex Jones. Media Matters describes Jones as
[...] "one of the very first founding fathers of the 9-11 Truth Movement." Jones also subscribes to a wide assortment of conspiracy theories about global elites enacting one-world government; secret FEMA camps; weather control; mass sterilization; the Oklahoma City bombing; the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; vaccines; and the government using products like juice boxes to "encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don't have children."
The radio host has declared that Obama's birth certificate is a fraud. Jones also wrote, produced and directed the DVD The Obama Deception, which purports to show that the "Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order. He is being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American people into accepting global slavery."
Despite Jones' radical conspiracy theories, Paul has appeared on Jones' program since 1996. In 2007, Jones donated $1,000 to Paul's 2007 presidential campaign. New York magazine reported that Jones is a "longtime friend" of Paul and he "takes some credit for Paul's rise to prominence, calling his radio show 'part of the concrete slab that the Ron Paul rocket is fueling on.'"
Bilderberg Group conspiracy theories? Oh, absolutely. Bilderberg, if you haven't heard of it, is a yearly conclave of the great and the good, which people like Ron Paul and, oh, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, believe secretly - and mailiciously - governs the world. In reality, Bilderberg is not unlike the yearly Davos forum, with the single difference that its records are private. It's catnip for conspiracy theorists.
Then there was the ad in the Austin Chronicle offering cash to anyone - especially, of course, men, wink wink - who would admit to having slept with Rick Perry. Right here, by a Paul 'supporter', per the Chronicle.
Another David endorsement, this time from one David Icke? Check. Mr. Icke, just by the way, is a British former sportscaster who has argued that Queen Elizabeth II is, in fact, a giant extraterrestrial lizard, as is Barack Obama, while we're on the subject. No, really. As an aside, HMQ is also, according to Icke, at the center of the international drug trade. And a secret member of the House of Rothschild. Fascinating stuff.
Now to Paul himself: a book blaming the victims of AIDS and sexual harassment for their own little problems? Oops, that's still on his web site as of this writing. This is not something Paul can even tenuously blame on a ghostwriter, which is presumably we he hasn't even tried. Of course, that mythical ghostwriter might have decided to upload the .pdf file to the Paul campaign site as a free download; which is obviously a bit cheaper than having to buy the slop on Amazon.
Moving on, racist and/or homophobic newsletters? Check. It's worth pointing out that Paul made almost a million dollars off these things he now claims to have been entirely unaware of. Great work if you can get it, I suppose, and if you ignore that the story has changed over the years and depending on the audience. Or the idea that a million dollars can land in your account and you have no idea why.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that he wrote his video contribution to the John Birch Society all by his lonesome; some horseshit about the UN and an incipient world dictatorship. The point was the Birchers' support for legislation that Paul has introduced repeatedly, most recently in 2009, which would take this country out of the UN.
No word yet, unfortunately, on how Paul or his campaign feel about supporters who seriously blame the Huntsman ad fiasco on a false-flag operation by Huntsman's campaign itself; then again, once you speculate in print on how exactly the Mossad was behind the JFK assassination and both World Trade Center attacks (and that the Council on Foreign Relations secretly runs the world, but that's gravy) the bar is set remarkably low.
Some people even think that Paul voted against the recent NDAA, when in fact, he did not. Paul certainly casts votes, to be sure; in fact, he has the most rightwing record of any member of either chamber of Congress.
To again be fair, you can't really blame Paul for getting endorsed by the white power crowd or by someone who believes the late Princess of Wales was assassinated by the lizard aliens of British Intelligence. You also can't really blame him for being the candidate of choice on Stormfront, Jew Watch, Rense, Mondoweiss, Aryan Nations, and God alone knows what other fringe sites. He takes - and keeps - donations and support from those quarters, but that's, again, a different subject. You might want to ask what these people see in Paul that you're missing, perhaps.
But the real question is simply this: what the fuck are some few people on the left smoking these days to think that Paul is anything but a barking rightwing nutbag?