Thirty seconds on Google at any time in the past several months would have revealed to any interested party the gist of James Kirchick’s Jan. 8 TNR story. Posting it the day of the New Hampshire primaries was undoubtedly meant to do the most damage: it would hit before the Paul campaign explained this is an old, old story that won’t die.
That the establishment feels threatened enough to attack Paul is a good sign. It means they take him seriously. Did they ever feel threatened enough to dig through Badnarik’s past? Or Browne’s? Only Liberty, the “inreach journal” of the libertarian movement, bothered to give those gentlemen a through investigation. They were Libertarian Party candidates, and Paul is not the LP candidate for 2008, but surely he is lithe lib- ertarian candidate.”
Last year, a debate moderator asked Paul, “Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?” Paul had said no such thing, but he didn’t even have the presence of mind to say “no” before pressing on with this point! Rudy Giuliani followed up: “That’s an extraordinary statement that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.” After a lot of applause from the audience, Paul simply continued to make his point. Not even a denial that “we invited 9/11”; he just didn’t have enough ego caught up in it to bother. He was concerned with what was right for the country and would not be derailed.
The man is an open book. Ron Paul is, at best, a mediocre politician because he is honest to a fault. If he hated blacks, Jews, gays, and whoever else he’s accused of hating, we would know it. It would slip out on stage at every public appearance.
Some awful things were written, and Ron Paul’s name was on the newsletter. I doubt he personally penned the more vicious writings; I believe him when he says it was poor over- sight of other writers, for which he accepts blame. That means he is a bad manager, and, perhaps, therefore unfit to be president. Fine; he’s not going to be the next president. He’s still the only candidate saying what libertarians want to be said, and doing it loudly, and doing it so that the mainstream press have to cover it. That’s the best, and the only realistic reason to support him – and that’s why he still deserves our support.
More representative of Paul’s character than the things that appeared in old newsletters, I suspect, is something Tucker Carlson wrote – also in TNR – just a few weeks ago, after spending a couple of days with the Paul campaign:
On board the campaign’s tiny chartered jet one night … Paul and his staff engaged in an unintentionally hilarious exchange about the cabin lights. The staff wanted to know whether Paul preferred the lights on or off. Not wanting to be bossy, Paul wouldn’t say. Ultimately, the staff had to guess. It was a long three minutes.
This is the hateful, spiteful, antisemitic, gay-bashing monster Ron Paul. Well, okay. This laissez-fairy isn’t scraping the Paul bumper sticker off his car anytime soon.
