Posted under Election 2012 & Race & Ron Paul
Being a journalist I’m not going to argue with a collegue for persistence. I just wish Gloria Borger was just as persistent in finding out whether there were WMD’s in Iraq as she was asking whether Ron Paul wrote his little fan newsletters or not. The latter is just politics. Actual lives were at stake when it came to Iraq. Apparently to Borger, one was more important than the other. It’s too late to play “journalist” now and ask the “really tough questions.”
To their credit, people like Connor Friesdorf and Andrew Sullivan and Reason magazine (which went the the opposite way four years ago) realize the bigger picture at stake. Others will take their pot-shots to stop a man whom they view as a mortal threat. But what the whole newsletters issue really comes down to, whether these words which even a scumbag like Eric Dondero said Paul never wrote are as important as what’s going on right now in the world where brown children in Afghanistan and Pakistan are being blown away from Obama’s killer drones as collateral damage or whether Iranian children might have the same done to them if Iran is attacked by the U.S. and or Israel.
If being the PC police, pleasing the SPLC and being clear of conscious of the taint of “racism” is more important than what’s being done in their name and their tax money in southwest Asia which Ron Paul wishes to stop. We’ll find out what’s more important to people, trivialities or human life.
RedPhillips on 22 Dec 2011 at 3:58 pm #
This is why Paul should not have let the charge that the newsletters were racist stand to begin with. Now he is stuck just running from the things.
Aaron on 22 Dec 2011 at 7:00 pm #
Agreed, this is a pretty trivial issue. I would describe the newsletter stuff I read (in context) as racist, though, without the scare quotes.
Ron Paul is in an impossible situation now, because he’s already changed his story once. In 1996, he defended the newsletters against the charge of racism. Now he’s saying he didn’t know anything about them and repudiates their content.
He says he doesn’t agree with the racist content, which is probably the truth. Paul is clearly not a racist, and it’s pretty obvious he didn’t write the stuff. Most likely, he was in on the decision with Rothbard and Rockwell to go the with that racist (again, no scare quotes here) strategy. It’s practically inconceivable that he didn’t know about it, at least in general. He’s almost certainly lying to protect the author, which is a noble thing to do, but not very helpful for a presidential campaign.
Conor Friedersdorf wrote a good, balanced article on the whole thing.
Aaron on 22 Dec 2011 at 7:08 pm #
Another slimy thing Paul did about this: he says he bears “moral responsibility” for the newsletters that he repudiates. What the hell does that mean? Nothing, of course, when a politician says it. If it meant anything at all, Ron Paul would have said, “Yes, I did write every word, in effect. Not literally, but I take moral responsibility, which means that I expect to be judged exactly as if I had written each newsletter myself.”
“I take full moral responsibility” is one of the slimiest sentences in the English language.
Not Libertarian on 22 Dec 2011 at 11:34 pm #
No one wants to say it, but my guess is Rothbard wrote the things and Paul won’t out him because he’s dead
Sean Scallon on 23 Dec 2011 at 4:57 am #
It would be even worse if having taken “moral responsibility” he would then reveal the author (or most likely authors) like throwing a piece of meat to howl media jackels.
Aaron on 23 Dec 2011 at 5:36 am #
Agreed that true moral responsibility means not outing the author(s), assuming that Ron Paul knew at the time the general content of the newsletters. And it’s very probable that he did know. This was a conscious strategic political decision involving Rothbard and Paul’s campaign chief of staff Lew Rockwell; Rothbard openly described the racist strategy back then, in an article that still gets reprinted at lewrockwell.com. It’s almost inconceivable that Ron Paul let them do it under his name without knowing about the strategy. In this case, moral responsibility means telling the truth about one’s own involvement (while possibly lying to protect others), whereas Ron Paul is almost certainly lying about his own involvement as well.
On the off chance that he didn’t know anything about it, moral responsibility could mean outing the author(s) and telling the whole truth. This was one of Friedersdorf’s points.
By the way, unnamed sources close to the newsletter reportedly said that it was mostly written by Lew Rockwell.
Aaron on 23 Dec 2011 at 7:16 am #
Sorry for dominating this thread, but a last point: I think Ta-Nehisi Coates gets the newsletter thing pretty much right. He agrees that Ron Paul is not racist, but says that that does not mitigate his conscious use of a racist strategy. Coates compares Ron Paul to George Wallace, who had been a racial moderate, even being endorsed by the NAACP, but then consciously chose arch-segregationism as a political strategy. I think that’s a good comparison.
Not Libertarian on 23 Dec 2011 at 9:51 pm #
The language is much closer to Rothbard than it is to Rockwell
Patroon on 25 Dec 2011 at 10:45 pm #
I’m glad Coates feels the way he does, that’s at least half the argument won. And if he’s going to use Wallace as a comparison, Wallace himself changed his tune when he ran for the governor’s chair again in 1982. Why is Paul not given the same consideration?
To be fair to Lew, he has denied writing anything in the newsletters (although he was an editor) and in reality RP may very well not know who wrote what. They used a team a 6-8 writers he says and as Jesse Walker of Reason magazine says many persons in libertarian circles ghostwrote articles or claim to have (well before the days of internet blogs). Why blame someone when he really don’t know? He’s much better off taking responsibility.
And as for strategy, saying you’re trying to expand your political reach beyond pro-drug hippie vote to the white working class or middle class (MARs as Sam Francis would say) is not the same as saying your going after the racist vote nor does it mean that’s the kind of language they’re going to employ. I can’t image they had a planning session like this. It only becomes a racist strategy when the language plays to people’s fears and base instinct rather than uplift.