Daily Kos

For months the cheerful, kindly renegade Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has acted like a victim when it comes to attention given the racist newsletters that were published two decades ago under his name. He's chastised reporters for pestering him about them, cut off interviews because, he said, he'd answered all the questions long ago. He put forth stories that he himself would soon punch holes in. He was disconnected from the newsletter operation, he claimed. He didn't read all the newsletters. He didn't approve of everything that went in them ahead of time. He didn't even know who wrote them. When he later would read them, he was appalled.

Such explanations never passed the smell test. Yet some people who should have blasted him did give him a pass because of his stances on a handful of issues, foreign policy, civil liberties and the war on drugs. When confronted with the fact that Paul's philosophy would trade what he considers federal tyranny with state tyranny, he still collected kudos. He got respect from debate moderators, his fellow candidates, audiences and some progressives.

The fact that most of his foreign policy ideas are driven by xenophobic isolationism, that his perspective on civil liberties is a cramped one that doesn't include, for instance, reproductive rights and that he thinks the Civil War and the civil rights movement of a hundred years later should never have happened because both slavery and Jim Crow would have eventually gone away anyway seemed not to give his supporters much pause. The guy's just a little quirky. And the newsletters? Irrelevant and the allegations unfounded.

Jerry Markon and Alice Crites have put the lie to that claim. They report rather than being unengaged and stand-offish, Paul was deeply involved in the operations of the newsletter company, Ron Paul & Associates, signed off on articles and spoke "to staff members virtually every day."

“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman. [...]

Paul “had to walk a very fine line,’’ said Eric Dondero Rittberg, a former longtime Paul aide who says Paul allowed the controversial material in his newsletter as a way to make money. Dondero Rittberg said he witnessed Paul proofing, editing and signing off on his newsletters in the mid-1990s.

Some will no doubt argue, have argued, in fact, that Paul is not personally a racist. That he only inserted the incendiary racist stuff into an already noxiously conspiratorial and loony newsletter to make money, not because he actually believed any of it. This is an old argument. But, even if it's true in Paul's case, a lack of personal bigotry against other people because of their ethnicity or skin color isn't required to make one a racist. Stirring up hatred and pushing philosophies and policies that serve to keep others "in their place" is what matters. That's what Paul engaged in. And that is the epitome of racism.