Ron Paul and those newsletters

WOLF BLITZER today, speaking in gerund phrases, examining the Ron Paul newsletter controversy, interviewing the Republican presidential candidate, who claims not only that he had no hand in writing numerous racist and homophobic items that appeared under his name over a period of years, but that he does not know—or care—who did write them.

Mr Paul is probably not himself a racist, and many of the sentiments he expresses in his CNN interview are admirable. It is equally plausible that the hateful items published in his newsletter, so different in style from the congressman's own speech and writing, are not his handiwork. But his protestations of ignorance, both about what was being disseminated on his behalf and who was responsible, are much harder to credit...

...[A]ccording to numerous veterans of the libertarian movement, it was an open secret during the late-80s and early-90s who was ghostwriting the portions of Mr Paul's newsletters not penned by the congressman himself: Lew Rockwell, founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and members of his staff, among them Jeffrey Tucker, now editorial vice president of the Institute...

...[I]f the person responsible for spreading venom under his name for many years remains a close associate, it suggests that Mr Paul is at least prepared to countenance pandering to racists, however respectable his own views. The candidate owes his supporters a far more complete explanation than he has thus far provided.

Democracy In America blog - The Rockwell Files - 11 Jan 2008

Indeed.

When the best-case scenario is "I didn't know what was going out under my name," and the worst-case scenario is somewhere on the spectrum from Dr. Paul being a passive enabler of racists to cynically pandering to racists to actively holding and espousing racist beliefs...

Ugh.

I've defended Dr. Paul in the past from accusations of extremism--including on this blog--and I still maintain that a certain percentage of nutty supporters do not, of necessity, a nutty candidate make.

But a much fuller and much more transparent explanation for this sordid business of the newsletters is called for. What we've heard so far are nothing but credulity-straining evasions, particularly repellent coming from a man who claims to espouse a philosophy that values personal responsibility.

I am disappointed, and embarrassed, to learn this evident truth about a man I thought I admired.

Rejecting the soft consensus on authoritarianism

lib•er•tar•ian
n. 1. a person who believes in the doctrine of the freedom of the will
2. a person who believes in full individual freedom of thought, expression and action
3. a freewheeling rebel who hates wiretaps, loves Ron Paul and is redirecting politics

[...]

When a fierce Republican foe of the wars on drugs and terrorism is able, without really trying, to pull in a record haul of campaign cash on a day dedicated to an attempted regicide, it's clear that a new and potentially transformative force is growing in American politics.

That force is less about [Ron] Paul than about the movement that has erupted around him -- and the much larger subset of Americans who are increasingly disillusioned with the two major political parties' soft consensus on making government ever more intrusive at all levels, whether it's listening to phone calls without a warrant, imposing fines of half a million dollars for broadcast "obscenities" or jailing grandmothers for buying prescribed marijuana from legal dispensaries.

[...]

...Paul's success has mostly left the mainstream media and pundits flustered, if not openly hostile. The Associated Press recently treated the Paul phenomenon like an alien life form: "The Texas libertarian's rise in the polls and in fundraising proves that a small but passionate number of Americans can be drawn to an advocate of unorthodox proposals." Republican pollster Frank Luntz has denounced Paul's supporters as "the equivalent of crabgrass . . . not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff." And conservative syndicated columnist Mona Charen said out loud what many campaign reporters have no doubt been thinking all along: "He might make a dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians."

When conservatives feel comfortable mocking the victims gunned down by Clinton-era attorney general Janet Reno's FBI in Waco, Tex., in 1993, it suggests that a complacent and increasingly authoritarian establishment feels threatened.

lib•er•tar•ian (The Washington Post, November 25, 2007)

Ron Paul profiled in the NYT

Paul represents a different Republican Party from the one that Iraq, deficits and corruption have soured the country on. In late June, despite a life of antitax agitation and churchgoing, he was excluded from a Republican forum sponsored by Iowa antitax and Christian groups. His school of Republicanism, which had its last serious national airing in the Goldwater campaign of 1964, stands for a certain idea of the Constitution — the idea that much of the power asserted by modern presidents has been usurped from Congress, and that much of the power asserted by Congress has been usurped from the states. Though Paul acknowledges flaws in both the Constitution (it included slavery) and the Bill of Rights (it doesn’t go far enough), he still thinks a comprehensive array of positions can be drawn from them: Against gun control. For the sovereignty of states. And against foreign-policy adventures. Paul was the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 1988. But his is a less exuberant libertarianism than you find, say, in the pages of Reason magazine.

The Antiwar, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Drug-Enforcement-Administration, Anti-Medicare Candidacy of Dr. Ron Paul (New York Times, 22 July 2007)

Techcrunch: Ron Paul's Web 2.0 Campaign

A funny thing has happened on the way to the 2008 US Presidential Elections, and it’s all got to do with Web 2.0.

Ron Paul is a name many will immediately recognize, but for those who don’t, Ron Paul wants to be the next President of the United States of America. Paul’s platform is very, very different to most (if not all) of the other candidates, both from his own Republican Party and the Democrats. Paul is a classic conservative, a believer in small Government and a believer that the individual is more important than the State. He’s also anti-Iraq war, and in a historical sense broadly anti-interventionist as well; Paul is a candidate who believes the Monroe Doctrine is simply wrong.

Paul is also the underdog in the Presidential race, dismissed by the mainstream media and political pundits as nothing more than a kook with no hope at all. And yet if you believe online polls and surveys, Paul will be the next President of the United States.

Techcrunch: Ron Paul: A Distributed Web 2.0 Campaign (16 July 2007)