Ron Paul, part two (even if nobody reads my blog)

My friend Dave Healy came to my apartment last night, and he was critical of my Ron Paul post because it makes an unsupported allegation of racism. He said such is irresponsible! My response is simple: nobody reads my blog, and I don't do this as serious commentary - but more as an outlet for my own political and cultural ideas. I type them as I have them, usually in rush because I' very busy. If anything, I make my posts so that my friends can read my ideas and engage me on them - and to date, hardly anybody has even read them.

But there was one lesson to be learned: Rather than effectively make my point that Ron Paul's campaign siphons independent votes from pro-withdrawal candidates who actually have a chance of beating Hillary Clinton and Benito Guiliani, the message was mired in technicality.

Well, to be more responsible, here is my source:

Greg Saunders, on a post at Tom Tomorrow's blog, said this (http://www.thismodernworld.com/3892):

And let’s not forget that he’s a racist too. DailyKos diarist phenry found this choice nugget from the “Ron Paul Political Report” :

Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficultly avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists — and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.

Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action…. Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the “criminal justice system,” I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

If similar in-depth studies were conducted in other major cities, who doubts that similar results would be produced? We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.

Oddly enough, Paul’s excuse for this stuff now is that his offensive articles were ghost-written. Don’t worry folks, Ron Paul just outsourced his racist rants.

Following the link to dkos, we find (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/15/124912/740):

The only complete article from the Ron Paul Political Report on the Internet that I am aware of is a 1992 piece titled "LOS ANGELES RACIAL TERRORISM," on the subject of the so-called Rodney King riots in South Central Los Angeles in 1991. It is available to us today because it was posted to the talk.politics.misc newsgroup on July 30, 1993 by Dan Gannon, a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier, and archived by the Nizkor Project, an anti-revisionism organization that was active in cataloging hate speech on the early public Internet. You can read Nizkor's copy of the article here, and see a reposted version on Google Groups here. Some relevant passages from the article (emphasis mine):

The diarist then quotes what Saunder's quotes, but goes on to attribute this statement to the Ron Paul Political Report:

Perhaps the L.A. experience should not be surprising. The riots, burning, looting, and murders are only a continuation of 30 years of racial politics.The looting in L.A. was the welfare state without the voting booth. The elite have sent one message to black America for 30 years: you are entitled to something for nothing. That's what blacks got on the streets of L.A. for three days in April. Only they didn't ask their Congressmen to arrange the transfer.

He then continues:

During Paul's 1996 Congressional run, the Houston Chronicle unearthed some additional racial comments from his newsletter (emphasis mine):

Texas congressional candidate Ron Paul's 1992 political newsletter highlighted portrayals of blacks as inclined toward crime and lacking sense about top political issues.

Under the headline of "Terrorist Update," for instance, Paul reported on gang crime in Los Angeles and commented, "If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."

and concludes:

Years later, in an interview printed in the October 2001 issue of Texas Monthly, Paul changed his story about these and other racist comments: "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me," he said. "It wasn't my language at all." Unfortunately, this explanation doesn't really withstand scrutiny. The Ron Paul Political Report was an eight-page newsletter, not a 200-page magazine; whether he employed other writers or not, it beggars belief that Paul would not have had full control and approval over its contents. Moreover, the L.A. riots article does in fact bear some evidence of having been written by Paul, at least in part. (For example, the article relates the observations of one Burt Blumert, who is labeled "expert Burt Blumert" but who is actually just a gold coin and bullion dealer in San Francisco who happens to be a longtime personal friend of... Ron Paul.) Regardless, the fact remains that Paul suffered these words to be published under his name in his newsletter as a representation of his views, and his efforts to distance himself from them are more than a little bit disingenuous.

Did I follow every link in the kos article? No - at this point i think i've met my burden of showing i'm not jut making shit up. Maybe somebody else is, but the world can do it own research to prove that.

Now, it can be argued that these quotes are not racists, etc. However, these statements can be taken as racist or quasi-racist by reasonable persons, whether theoretically correct or not. At the point, whether or not Ron Paul is on the record saying racist things depends on what you take to be racist.

The bottom line is that Ron Paul is a great candidate to support if you are a disaffected republican who is willing to sink your money or vote into a loser who stands for what you believe in than support a mainstream candidate who merely pays lip service to "the base". I did the same with Ralph Nader when Gore promised four more years of Clinton's brand of globalization and interventionalism under liberal auspices.

But if you are just against the war, Ron Paul's insurgency may be attractive because he is well principled on the issue - but beware: he stands for a lot more than just puling out of Iraq and there are rivals to Hillary Clinton who are in favor of a withdrawal who need independent support if they are to have any chance to unseat the media's chosen candidate. I would suggest supporting one of them (Edwards or Obama).