Actually I was surprised that it took so long. Ron Paul has become an existential threat to an establishment that has been living high by using government force to steal trillions from productive Americans. The list of those on the government gravy train is a long one that includes some very powerful groups such as the banking industry, the Military industry, the drug war industry, the green energy industry, and the big unions.
In this light it should surprise no one that this newsletter issue was recently re-publicized (after being examined by several publications back in 2007) not by any civil-rights group but by James Kirchick of National Review, an establishment neo-con publication that never met a war it didn’t like. It has not shown (until now) any particular interest in civil-rights or issues of importance for minorities. Like so many other bad actors, they and the rest of the establishment media are exploiting the blacks in order to advance their own agendas which have nothing to do with helping black people. Kirchick’s recent article is basically a re-hash of a story he wrote for The New Republic in 2008. He apparently got his information from a 1996 story in Texas Monthly. Paul was running for a second stint in Congress at the time. Despite the Texas Monthly story, he beat the incumbent Republican in the primary and went on to win the general election. He has been re-elected by wide margins ever since.
When I called in to the Mark Simone radio show Saturday morning one objection that I had was that Simone insisted on referring to them as “racist newsletters”. The newsletters in question were published in one form or another from 1976, when Paul retired from Congress* to concentrate on his medical practice, until 1996 when he decided to go back to Washington. There were thousands of pages written (by several different authors) over that 20 year period, mostly about finance, investment, and economics. The reason why the newsletter was able to be profitable for Paul is that investors are willing to pay good money for sound financial advice. Not many people would pay to read a journal based on promoting racism. Only someone who believes America is a racist country would believe that Paul could make a million dollars, as Gloria Borger of CNN claims, publishing a newsletter based on hating blacks, gays, and Jews.
Unfortunately for Paul, and perhaps tragically for America’s future, some inartful and somewhat offensive language did find it’s way into some issues published between 1990 and 1994. This was a period of hightened racial tension in the United States with the images of the Rodney King beating and the brutal Los Angeles riots that followed still fresh in everybody’s memory. Understand that nobody is claiming that Ron Paul wrote the passages in question. Even the New York Times, which did a writing style analysis on them, said the author was not Paul. So the question becomes: did Paul know about them?
He says he didn’t. Since he has a well-deserved reputation for being the most honest politician in Washington, his denial should carry a lot of weight. This is actually the first time I’ve ever heard anyone accuse him of lying. And if one examines his history as a congressman going back to 1976, in all the thousands of speeches, interviews, legislative proposals, and votes there is not the slightest hint that he holds views like the some of the disturbing ones ones gleaned from the newsletters. In fact he has complained continuously about the racial aspect of the drug war and wants to pardon all non-violent drug offenders, more than half of whom are black. He also places great emphasis on treating all people as individuals, one reason why he has more support from minorities, including blacks and gays, than any other Republican candidate. Even in his medical practice we find evidence that dispels the idea that Paul is some kind of racist. He refused to take Medicare or Medicaid and instead treated poor women and delivered their babies for free. Plenty of them were black and Hispanic. Would someone who hates minorities do that?
In his National Review piece, Kirchick states: “Another newsletter warned that “the AIDS patient” should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva,” a strange claim for a physician to make.” Kirchick should realize that this is evidence that physician Paul not only didn’t write that, but never read it. So it’s not strange at all. In the 1995 interview below, Paul, who was announcing his intention to run again for congress, promotes his newsletters. He discuses them starting at about the 1:53 mark.
“It covered a lot about what was going on in Washington, and financial events, and especially some of the monetary events. Since I had been especially interested in monetary policy, had been on the banking committee, and still very interested in, in that subject, that this newsletter dealt with it. This had to do with the value of the dollar, the pros and cons of the gold standard, and of course the disadvantages of all the high taxes and spending that our government seems to continue to do.”
Does anyone think he would have brought them up and said what he said had he known about some of the unsavory things that appeared in some issues of the newsletter? It’s impossible to believe. And what doctor trying to build his practice up, especially one where all of his customers were women, would knowingly publish stuff like that under his name? I am convinced that Paul didn’t know about it until the Texas Monthly story came out the next year.
Should Paul have known about it? Sure. He has said repeatedly that he deserves criticism for neglecting to read everything that was published under his name. And certainly the Democrats will get a lot of mileage out of this controversy if Paul gets the Republican nomination. But like I said, the reason this firestorm was created has nothing to do with racism and nothing to do with Paul’s management skills. He has done a fantastic job managing his congressional office, returning part of his expense allotment back to the Treasury every year. And everyone says he is running the most professional and efficient campaign of any of the candidates this year.
No, this has everything to do with ending the Fed, ending the wars, ending the subsidies, ending the destruction of our civil liberties, and stopping the massive wholesale robbery of working Americans by the totally corrupt political establishment in this country. The people pushing this story have only darkness in their hearts and must not be allowed to succeed in their goal of derailing the campaign. Not for Ron Paul’s sake, but for America’s.
*Correction: Paul entered Congress in 1976 and retired from his seat in 1984. The early newsletters were published while Paul was still a congressman.
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