RON PAUL AND RACISM PART 2

The Ron Paul as racist corporate news meme has picked up steam with two new talking points.

As I’ve said before, I can fully understand how Paul’s inaction here could offend a potential voter and that this would preclude that voter from supporting him.

However, these two new talking points still fail to do what the news media (and the puppet masters of both the Republican and Democratic parties) are attempting which is to directly tie him to the newsletters’ content.

The first talking point is the two interviews (two I’ve seen there may be more) one of which stems from the early 1990’s where Paul acknowledges these newsletters.  Okay just to be clear there is no smoking gun in those interviews.  No one’s disputing the fact Paul was aware that he had a newsletter with his name on it.  What is being debated is how much he knew about the newsletter’s contents.  Those interviews simply show he knew of the newsletter’s not he was intimately aware of what his ghostwriters were writing under his name.  This in no way contradicts what he has already said.

I still find it not believable that a man without a shred of public racist beliefs expressed in over 40 years of public life would somehow put them in writing in vulgar and crude language he never uses in any of his interactions in the public sphere.  It does not make any sense at all.  It still seems much more likely that a busy man in and out of congress, a practicing Ob-Gyn running several other businesses would turn over the running of his newsletter to others without any oversight.  Paul himself admits this managerial mistake.

And it also explains the second talking point which is the newly minted elaborate conspiracy theory connecting libertarians with white supremacists through the libertarians courting of the paleo-conservatives in the early 90’s days of militias and Ruby Ridge and Pat Buchanan’s insurgency candidacy against the Republican Party establishment.

Well again this might all very be true but what it does have to do with Ron Paul?  He is not tied to this operation in any way.  Instead, I think it bolsters his story on the newsletter.  The same man, Lew Rockwell, who publicly admitted writing some of the editorials in his newsletter under Paul’s name is the same man who was spearheading this effort.  He has on and off connections with Paul over the years but that’s guilt by association to automatically assume they agree on everything.

In any event, Paul has publicly disassociated himself from these beliefs every time he’s been interviewed but that doesn’t seem to be enough.

Unfair or double standard?  Let me tell you a story.  

In 1984, a democrat running for the senate in Tennessee spoke out against legislation outlawing discrimination  based on sexuality and said that homosexuality is not something “society should affirm”.  He also took campaign donations from the Westboro Baptist Church (yes the people that picket soldier’s funerals).  Fred Phelps, leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, even had his son serve as a delegate for this senator when he ran for his party’s nomination for president in 1988.

 

I am of course talking about Al Gore. 

Gore was never seriously questioned on any of this both in 1988 or more importantly when he was Bill Clinton’s running mate in 92 or 96 or when he was the party nominee in 2000.  You see he “changed” but he had to change because he had taken stands and directly consorted with unsavory homophobes.

In the case of Paul, he never affirmed the views in the newsletter and in fact spoke the opposite.  That’s the truth!  The double standard news coverage likely emanating from the political establishment of both parties is scared to death of Paul and in their desperation this is what they came up with to blunt his rising poll numbers in Iowa and everywhere else.