I was going to do a diary on this earlier but got busy. I decided to do this diary because I have something to say about Ron Paul. I find it amazing that so many people actually take this guy seriously and I'm not talking about the usual nut cases, conspiracy theorists and racial purists. I've known about Paul's 'past' for years now. Whenever it comes up, his defenders always want to say that it somehow isn't true or doesn't matter. I'm sure they will do so now.
If society collectively flips out over a sound bite of some public person saying something inappropriate, why wouldn't a whole series of newsletters saying all sorts of vile, racist and just plain nutty things under your name of which you profited from should get a pass?
More over the fold...
James Kirchick's December 26th piece in The Weekly Standard titled The Company Ron Paul Keeps resurrected Paul's bizarre and disturbing past. Kirchick reported that the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) had decided not to invite Paul to a GOP Presidental Candidates Forum because his viewpoints were too far outside of the mainsteam of the GOP.
I didn't think that was possible, but the RJC doesn't want to touch Paul with a ten foot pole.
The now frontrunner in the Iowa caucuses.
Kirchick reasoned that the RJC's decision had more to do with Paul's pattern of past behavior than just his stance on Israeli policy:
While Paul’s views on Israel certainly place him outside the American, never mind Republican, mainstream, there is an even more elementary reason the RJC was right to exclude him from its event. It is Paul’s lucrative and decades-long promotion of bigotry and conspiracy theories, for which he has yet to account fully, and his continuing espousal of extremist views, that should make him unwelcome at any respectable forum, not only those hosted by Jewish organizations. (emphasis mine)
The mainstream media is starting to pick up on Kirchick's piece and I imagine by the first of the year and just in time for the first primary of the 2012 Presidental campaign season, the GOP's newest flavor of the month will begin to sour in the mouths of those desparately seeking an alternative to President Obama. Paul's libertarian views on war and government may have struck a chord with many, but it's his past that will become a question mark for those who had really begun to take him seriously, and I'm not referring to the legions of nut cases, conspiracy tin foilers and Neo-Nazi apologists who are always at the core of candidates like these.
At the heart of this latest controversy are newsletters published under Ron Paul's name in the 1980's and 1990's that said that blacks in LA (presumedly during the 1992 riots) would stop rioting to pick up their welfare checks, newsletters decrying the coming 'Race War', and Dr. Martin Luther King really being a pedophile who got a holiday in his honor that was really a code for black people to 'hate whitey' on that day.
The tin foil writings are equally beyond the pale.
Many news outlets think it's a matter of when, not if the Paul candidacy will implode and drift off. On Morning Joe this morning, the panelists where speculating on how a Ron Paul win in Iowa would actually help either Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney.
Even the Christian Science Monitor says that Paul's extreme viewpoints is a turn off to Republican voters:
Congressman Ron Paul is one of the favorites to win the Iowa caucuses vote on Jan. 3 but his libertarian and isolationist message may to be too much for Republican voters and party grandees as the nomination process moves to other states.
"What he could do is turn a victory in Iowa into a heart attack for the Republican establishment. They see him as someone they really can't relate to very much," said Tobe Berkowitz, a communications professor at Boston University.
When asked about these newsletters, Paul says that he has disawowed those writings, that those writings were not his, but others who contributed to the newsletters, that he has taken 'moral responsibility' over the years when asked about this because he didn't take the time to 'edit' these newsletters. Think Progress may have even narrowed down the real culprit:
In a partial defense of Paul, David Weigel offers a perfectly plausible explanation of how these bigoted rants against science and reality came to appear under the name of a medical doctor who now argues that the War on Drugs should end because it is inherently racist. As Weigel explains in a piece he co-authored with Julian Sanchez, the likely author of Paul’s racist rants wasn’t Ron Paul, it was a repulsive libertarian activist named Lew Rockwell.
Rockwell, who now runs a far right think tank that publishes articles with titles like “How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare,” believed in the 1980s and 1990s that libertarians had become a “party of the stoned” that needed to be “de-loused.” His solution, according to Weigel and Sanchez, was to try to expand the libertarian tent to include overt racists who could be attracted to libertarians’ opposition to “State-enforced integration.” It was likely Rockwell, and not the libertarian Congressman Ron Paul, who drafted the racist rants published in Paul’s name.
The problem here is that this is all kinda hard to believe or to defend. Especially when Paul made a million bucks or more off of those newsletters in his name saying all of those things. Reason magazine once reported that the now defunct 'Ron Paul & Associates' reportedly earned $1 million in 1993 alone, with Paul and his wife listed as officers.
Somehow, this is worse than the bigotry and tin foil apocalyptic revelations going on in those newsletters. What is worse is that one would actually profit off of hate (although it's not a new phenomenon).
And this man wants to be President?
Or does he?
A Ron Paul win in Iowa was said to give him a big chip in the game -- a brokered GOP convention, or maybe a route to a strong third party challenge.
Or is he like all of the rest -- Sarah Palin, Herman Cain and the like who is using the spotlight to personally profit?
It would seem that Paul has had a leg up on the new comers in that department for sure.
However there will be his supporters who will vigorously defend Paul, saying that this should not be held against him.
But before they go there, they may want to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' illuminating Atlantic ed op piece that reveals a clearer picture of Mr. Paul. I wish I could quote the whole piece, but I will simply leave you with his conclusion:
...It is an ideology of "not my fault." It is not Ron Paul's fault that people with an NAACP view of the world would twist his words. It is not Ron Paul's fault that his newsletter trafficked in racism. It is not Ron Paul's fault that he allowed people to author that racism in his name. It is anonymous political aids and writers, who now cowardly refuse to own their words. There's always someone else to blame--as long as it isn't Ron Paul, if only because it never was Ron Paul.
This is not a particular tragedy for black people. The kind of racism which Paul trafficked is neither innovative nor original. Even his denials recall the obfuscations of Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens. But some pity should be reserved for the young and disgruntled, for those who dimly perceive that something is wrong in this country, for those who are earnestly appalled by the madness of our criminal justice policy, for those who have watched a steady erosion of our civil liberties, and have seen their concerns met with an appalling silence on the national stage. That their champion should be, virtually by default, a man of mixed motives and selective courage, is sad.