After reading this, I'm convinced that Ron Paul is....

Post Reply New Topic

An IRS agent with an AK47?

The suggestion that the new paper money designs are somehow nefarious?

A National Finance Guard?

Tag agents in the dye?

The coming race war?

What I want Paul detractors to confront is that he alone, among viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies, including policies that explicitly target ethnic and religious minorities. And that, appalling as it is, every candidate in 2012 who has polled above 10 percent is complicit in some heinous policy or action or association. Paul's association with racist newsletters is a serious moral failing, and even so, it doesn't save us from making a fraught moral judgment about whether or not to support his candidacy, even if we're judging by the single metric of protecting racial or ethnic minority groups, because when it comes to America's most racist or racially fraught policies, Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them.

His opponents are often on the wrong side, at least if you're someone who thinks that it's wrong to lock people up without due process or kill them in drone strikes or destabilize their countries by forcing a war on drug cartels even as American consumers ensure the strength of those cartels.

Even Obama, who has spoken so eloquently about the harm done by the drug war and lost civil liberties, is now on the wrong side of those issues, and shows no signs of reversing himself. As bad as the Paul newsletters are -- let me emphasize again that they are awful -- I can't persuade myself that they should carry more weight than war, or civil liberties, unless Paul in fact wrote them, which would mean that he is lying about his core philosophy of individualism, equality, pluralism, and opposition to bigoted laws. In that case, there would be no reason to trust him.

Figuring out what flaws to accept in a candidate is a brutal calculus. I wouldn't begrudge someone who, having pondered the matter, decided that as best as they could tell -- we're all guessing about character judgments -- the racist newsletters are reason enough to refrain from supporting Paul. In some ways, it would be easiest for me to reach that conclusion: to establish as a litmus test that I'll never vote for anyone even remotely associated with what is poisonous drivel.

What I find harder, but compulsory, by my code, is at least comparing candidates all of whom stand for something poisonous, immoral or idiotic. Should I stay home? Does that not make me complicit in a different way? These quandaries are inescapable in a large democracy, especially one that is a global hegemon. My tentative conclusion: among the candidates who could win, Paul is least complicit in needlessly killing innocents abroad; he is least likely to deprive innocent foreigners of their God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; he is most committed to civil liberties and drug legalization at home. The contrary policies, which I regard as abhorrent, are easily ignored by most voters, because they are the status quo.

It is easiest to evade the moral implications of policies already in place.

Should Paul continue to perform well in the polls, or even win the Iowa caucuses, national media attention is going to focus intensely on his newsletters as never before, and it won't represent a double-standard: published racism under any candidate's name would rightly attract press attention! Paul ought to stop acting aggrieved. He is not a victim here. Voters ought to do their best to understand the controversy, gauge Paul's character, and render judgment about his likely behavior were he elected to the presidency, relative to his competitors.

The racist newsletters should in fact be part of the calculus.

So should the uncomfortable fact that bygone complicity in racist newsletters doesn't necessarily make Paul the candidate most complicit in human depravity (sad as that is), or tell us whose policies, which candidate, would do the most to square American government with the highest ideals of our polity. Support for Paul is grounded for many in the judgment that he is that candidate. That his policies, the ones he would champion in general election debates and pursue if elected, are the most moral on offer among the GOP contenders. I remain sympathetic to that argument.

When they have features that can be used against you, I'd consider that nefarious. I'm all for people paying off their debt, but giving IRS agents and other collection agencies the ability to scan your house to see what currencies you have doesn't seem all to friendly, especially when they kick down your door and shoot your dog and maybe shooting you dead, because someone is breaking in your house and you tried to defend yourself. What about when you go and purchase something with the cash? I'm sure that the reading devices will be expensive. Will the guy that runs the gas station down the street be able to afford something like that? Who do you think will ultimately be paying for the cost?

Today’s best tweet comes from Fire Tom Friedman (@firetomfriedman), who says: “I agree that racist newsletters & sexual harassment should disqualify candidates. But so should killing kids with drones.”

No such technology exists.

Ron had no control of these newsletters, he had nothing to do with them. Clearly if you know anything about Ron Paul, you'll know this sounds nothing like him.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/76280303/Paul ... rsFaq-Tunk

here's a FAQ on it

Too bad for you that his signature appears on the solicitation letter!

It could easily have been photocopied. But suppose it wasn‟t. So what? Why wouldn‟t Ron Paul‟s name appear on the solicitation letter? It doesn‟t follow that therefore he wrote it, oranything else in the newsletters. He‟s someone for whom it is routine to draft and sign hundreds of bills that never see the light of day. A request to ink one more piece of paper probably would not strike him as way out of left field. Why is it so unthinkable that a full-timepolitician would have signed a letter encouraging people to subscribe to his politicalnewsletters while remaining aloof of the actual production process? You might also find Arianna Huffington‟s signature on solicitation letters for the Huffington Post. Does that make her personally responsible for everything inside?

Really, there are only a few options.

1: They are forgeries. Ron Paul has not made this claim.

2: Ron Paul is as crazy as a back-woods redneck, and awfully racist.

3: Ron Paul is a clever manipulator who knows how to get crazy rednecks to vote for him and give him money.

4: Ron Paul is a presidential candidate with a track record of not really caring what his staffers do in his name.

Why he picked option 4 is beyond my understanding. I don't see how it is better than any of the above.

Because the choices are really:

1. Ron Paul is a racist dingbat.

2. Ron Paul is a fool.

The American people will not tolerate a racist dingbat as president.

They tolerate one that sat in church for 20 years with a racist minister, one that preformed his wedding and baptized his kids.

They tolerate someone that launched his political career from the living room of a known terrorist.

Who was that senate leader who said Obama was electable because of "light skin" and "lack of negro dialect".

Our recently departed President pro tempore that was an 'Exalted Cyclops' in the Klu Klux Klan.

What's worse now these 20 year old newsletters that weren't even written by Ron or the War on Drugs that imprisons 700,000 Americans, a disproportionate amount being minorities? The death penalty? Mandatory minimum sentencing? 3 strike laws? Racial profiling?

These newsletters are garbage and the people who are propagating it are garbage.

Ron didn't endorse anything. He has rejected the offending statements and has

Paul claimed that he'd never written the offending dispatches and didn't know who was besmirching his good name by putting them out, but then TPM dug up a 1995 interview with Paul wherein he talks about publishing the newsletters. So, uh, he's obviously lying.

What does this mean to the Ron Paul campaign? Well, it means that for awhile, the other Republicans are going to pretend that they care about racism. The news media is going to act Very Concerned about this, too, and ask Hard Hitting Questions, even though we all know the answer ("Does this mean that unless Ron Paul underwent some sort of vast personality transformation, chances are one of the leading Republican candidates is an old fashioned style racist?" Yes.). Ron Paul's going to continue to storm out of interviews like your grandpa after your uncle told him to stop using negative slurs for Italians at Thanksgiving. And die hard Paulites are going to continue to claim that a vast conspiracy of mainstream media and freedom-haters are trying to keep their hero down. Meanwhile, the fact that a white male candidate and his supporters who are also overwhelmingly white males claim that they are oppressed by society will continue to be ironic.

Did you even watch the video? He didn't say anything that contradicted that he didn't write the offending statements.

And die hard Paulites are going to continue to claim that a vast conspiracy of mainstream media and freedom-haters are trying to keep their hero down.

So no, you didn't watch it. He said nothing "incriminating" in the video you posted. Stop copying and pasting smears from other websites please.

And die hard Paulites are going to continue to claim that a vast conspiracy of mainstream media and freedom-haters are trying to keep their hero down.