Will It Be Anybody But Huckabee In NH? What’s Going On With Ron Paul?
I hope so! I’ve made myself clear about how I won’t support him. I have not said anything about Ron Paul, but I will now. I get that the man appeals to people and I think that is wonderful, but I can’t help but think that he is a half-wit. By that I mean that half of what he says makes sense, it’s the other half that scares me. TNR has a report out today, and it is an eye opener. Maybe the man has changed, I hope so, but this is the dangerous stuff that I refer to..like say secession, and after Russia broke up into smaller ’states’, he advocated that the United States do so as well:
Paul’s newsletters have carried different titles over the years–Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report–but they generally seem to have been published on a monthly basis since at least 1978. (Paul, an OB-GYN and former U.S. Army surgeon, was first elected to Congress in 1976.) During some periods, the newsletters were published by the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, a nonprofit Paul founded in 1976; at other times, they were published by Ron Paul & Associates, a now-defunct entity in which Paul owned a minority stake, according to his campaign spokesman. The Freedom Report claimed to have over 100,000 readers in 1984. At one point, Ron Paul & Associates also put out a monthly publication called The Ron Paul Investment Letter.
The Freedom Report’s online archives only go back to 1999, but I was curious to see older editions of Paul’s newsletters, in part because of a controversy dating to 1996, when Charles “Lefty” Morris, a Democrat running against Paul for a House seat, released excerpts stating that “opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions,” that “if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be,” and that black representative Barbara Jordan is “the archetypical half-educated victimologist” whose “race and sex protect her from criticism.” At the time, Paul’s campaign said that Morris had quoted the newsletter out of context. Later, in 2001, Paul would claim that someone else had written the controversial passages. (Few of the newsletters contain actual bylines.) Caldwell, writing in the Times Magazine last year, said he found Paul’s explanation believable, “since the style diverges widely from his own.”
Even if one accepts that as the truth, it serves as a damning indictment of Paul. How can he be so out of touch that he doesn’t notice the hateful writings published in his own newsletter for so long? Doesn’t anyone on his staff read their own publications? Either Paul is a complete incompetent, or the truth is in another, more unpleasant explanation.
Ron Paul released his own statement:
“The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.
“In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.’
“This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It’s once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.
“When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.”
So is he just incompetent?
H/T to Memeorandum
January 8, 2008 - 11:40 PM on January 8th, 2008
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]