Ron Paul Talks About Racist Newsletters
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Ron Paul, VideoFrom CNN…
What do you think? Buy it?
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Ron Paul, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 10th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
I can’t help but think he’s lying. He’s very defensive about all this… and he can’t really offer a decent answer to the question.
January 10th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I don’t think he’s a racist but there are a couple of points. One, and there is just no other way to put this, what kind of idiot would pay absolutely no attention for years to what is being written in a newsletter bearing his name? How could he possibly think that people wouldn’t associate Ron Paul with the Ron Paul Newsletter, by whatever title it happened to be going under at the time? Two, the claim that I really question is that he never had any idea who wrote any of it or who was responsible in any way, shape or form for the content of the newsletter. We’re not talking a huge operation here like Time, Newsweek or a large newspaper. For him to claim no knowledge of the staff or writers just doesn’t seem credible. And then there’s his constant harping in the video about how if he really believed any of that he wouldn’t win election in Texas. Let’s be honest, folks. Texas has more than its fair share of people who would vote for someone with those views.
January 10th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
I think he is telling the truth about his own views, that he is not a racist, and that these views do not reflect his beliefs, but he is lying when he says he does not know who actually wrote this crap under his banner. On the Reason magazine Hit&Run blog, there are a couple of threads that are claiming Lew Rockwell of Lewrockwell.com is the primary ghost writer. No idea myself, but it appears to be an open secret among libertarians from that era.
January 11th, 2008 at 12:31 am
Great points, Jim. Do you think this story deserves major coverage, or is it just a minor embarrassment that will get shoved off the stage when the next big election news comes by?
January 11th, 2008 at 2:01 am
More on the ghost writer - The Economist
January 11th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Nope. Don’t buy it. And no matter how much I’d like to, I keep circling back, mentally, to a tape offered for sale in a newsletter, where the subscriber could “charge the tape to your credit card at 1-800-RON-PAUL.”
Somehow, having his name as the phone number takes it to a different level for me. I cannot imagine how anyone that personally invested can claim complete ignorance.
January 11th, 2008 at 10:59 am
No matter how his supporters want to slice it, RP is a racist.
NO ONE with his head on his shoulders would want to be associated with racists or anyone with extremists views, directly or indirectly. The more he plays ignorant, the clearer it becomes he is a fraud.
It would have been better to own up that he did subscribe to those views at one time, and has since made an about-face, but to insist he never has and he “doesn’t know” who used HIS name to spread those viewpoints makes him look a bald-faced liar or totally dumb. Neither is flattering.
January 11th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I agree with Elisabetta… he’s either lying about this or he is just incredibly dense.
His avoidance of the answering the questions and inability to come out and say “sorry…. I/my ghostwriter was totally wrong” makes it worse though.
Senator Robert Byrd and the late Strom Thurmond were undoubtedly racist politicians in their careers… but they managed to repudiate their beliefs and move forward, admittedly regretful of their previous lapses in judgment regarding race.
Ron Paul seems to just want to cover up a murky past and is doing a horrible job pretending to appear dumbfounded in regards to it.
I look at it this way… if somebody was publishing racist, sexist letters under my name for 10+ years, I would probably have been notified about it at some point and would have done everything to stop it as soon as possible. I wouldn’t just wait until a certain point in my career when I’m under scrutiny to address it. So, if Paul is to be believed that he had absolutely nothing to do with it… then he also had no knowledge of it until now and he also did nothing to stop it if he did.
Sorry Ron, I don’t buy it.
January 11th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
He’s an awkward speaker that lacks the ability or desire to obfuscate. Listening to what he says and what is known to be authored by him it’s clear that he’s not a racist. Now if it were Romney or Huckleberry…
That being said, I don’t buy for one second that he doesn’t know who wrote it. Personally, protecting that person is a big deal to me. That doesn’t mean he’s shameless lying slimbebag on the same level as the other candidates, but it definitely is a stain on his character in my book.
He’s still got my primary vote and I hope he sticks around long enough to turn the GOP towards a more conservative fiscal agenda.
January 11th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
You guys are fooling yourself. In this 1991 newsletter, the author wrote: “As a flight surgeon in the airforce…” and “In 1988 when I ran for president on the libertarian party ticket…”
The author is obviously Ron Paul.
In this passage, he refers to MLK as “a world class philanderer” and a “flagrant plagiarist with a phony doctorate”, and agrees with J.Edgar Hoover’s description of MLK as “the most dangerous man in America” particularly after he died.
Ron Paul is full of crap. He is a liar and a fool. He despised MLK, he wasn’t a “hero” to him. What a jerk. F@#k Ron Paul.
January 11th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Rob: “He’s an awkward speaker that lacks the ability or desire to obfuscate… I don’t buy for one second that he doesn’t know who wrote it…That doesn’t mean he’s shameless lying slimbebag on the same level as the other candidates.”
Not at all an attempt to rationalize the unjustifiable. Being a “bad liar” is a virtue when compared with the truly “good liars.” That’s one way to cop-out.
Incidentally, WHAT he is lying about – by most standards - relates to VERY important matters. I can imagine the reaction if the same story came out about one of the other candidates. The same people that shut their eyes to such compelling news would flagellate them.
As for obfuscating RP gets an A.
Maybe I should call him “(H)arpy.” What you say Rob? You are good at tagging people.
January 11th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Yeah, that didn’t sound good. He doesn’t address the problem directly.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
In the end, who cares? The people bringing this up aren’t supporting Paul anyway. They just want to pile on Paul because the candidates they’re supporting stink to low Hell.
Honestly, if all of this were true, then why does he keep getting re-elected time and time again in his district? I suppose the good people of Lake Jackson are all KKK members, right.
The thing that people don’t get about Paul is that he refuses to play the politically-correct game. They want him apologizing like Trent Lott or George Allen did and he’s not going to play that game. Anyone who says Paul’s a racist is completely laughable. I’m an African-American and I support Paul. Or maybe I’m wearing blackface and I’m just a skinhead. Yeah, right.
January 11th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Brian, you are an Arfican American and you support man who called MLK a “world class philanderer“?, that he needed an IQ test, and even referred to him as a criminal?
January 11th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Sorry Jimmy, I’m not buying it. It would have came out already.
January 11th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Well, do you think the document was forged by TNR, or perhaps by an editor of the newsletter who claimed to be Ron Paul when he wrote it? Or perhaps there was another former Airforce flight surgeon who ran for pesident in 1988 under the libertarian party ticket?
I would think, then, that one of those three options must be true. Which one?
January 11th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
I like the Reason magazine strain of Libertarians v. the weird Mises types Ron Paul surrounds himself with. The Republican party is making a mistake by distancing itself from small government / fiscal conservatives. Ron Paul intrigued me by this very traditional interpretation of the party platform. I wish there were another GOP candidate running who came close to these views. This makes me lose any respect for Ron Paul, though. I stood with the campaign on principle when the $500 check came up. I believe in our governments’ responsibility to protect the privacy of all individuals, even if I find their views morally repugnant. There is no argument that can get Paul off the hook on this, though. He’s either incredibly simple, or he does in fact associate with racists. He may even be a racist and a liar. He is crazy here.
January 12th, 2008 at 11:27 am
“Well, do you think the document was forged by TNR”
Uh this is the same TNR that brought up the fake soldier/medals story, so they’re about as credible as Dan Rather.
January 13th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Polrick,
I just now read your post since I’ve been out of town in a hotel with a horrendous excuse for a DSL connection. Yes, it deserves the coverage. Even giving Paul the benefit of the doubt that it does not represent his views it still represents a massive failure of intelligence to have not kept careful track of what was being written in his name over the course of years and then to have done something about it. Not just one momentary failure to check on something but an ongoing lapse of judgment, if not character by putting his desire to protect associates by not admitting who they were. And if he really doesn’t know it just means that the lapse of judgment was even greater.
Brian,
No, they didn’t forge it. TNR is not the only source that has dug them up and provided the complete copies online. Quit trying to pretend you’re something you’re not, too. Which is a human being with a functional brain. The plain truth is that you’ve activated that switch in your head that most hyper-partisans have that just turns off any possibility that you could consider your candidate to have any major flaws. Your mind simply does not function once it hears a criticism of Ron Paul. The truth is that it doesn’t matter if Paul wrote it. He allowed it to be written not simply in a newsletter with his name on the banner, but with his voice. Not simply by a writer in the newsletter but by someone pretending to be him, if you assume that he in fact did not write it. The lapse of judgment in allowing that to happen is so massive that it boggles the imagination even more than Clinton being dumb enough to give into his sexual desires with Monica Lewinski. It was a bigger screw up and went on for much longer.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:19 am
When all the facts, the reasons, the justifications, the unbelief are evaluated and dissected, two possible explanations remain.
1. RP wrote/believed what is written in the newsletters and is lying about it now. On those grounds alone he should be disqualified as a candidate.
2. RP didn’t write/subscribe/know any of this and he is as dumbfounded as his die-hard supporters. Being the greatest idiot would also make him unfitted Lacking the brains to know what goes on with his associates would cause most to wonder HOW could he possibly manage the country?
His supporters’ evidence against the charges comes in the form that “he doesn’t talk that way (of the newsletters) and he evinces a demured comportament.”
But words are cheap and pretending to be someone you are not is second nature to some.