Ron Paul Is Toast

Divided We Stand, United We Fall had a mega-collection of "Ron Paul is Dead" links in this month's Carnival of The Libertarians.

The unflattering Ron Paul picture and logo are from Flapsblog

It's over. Ron Paul is over. Finished. Kaput. In the words of Dennis Miller, we can gas up the dinghy and send him fishing with Fredo.

The most damning evidence against Paul is in the January 30 edition of The New Republic. (Yes, The New Republic....A magazine now more famous for publishing and retracting the journalism of The Baghdad Diarist, plus the fantasies of Stenphen Glass - of the movie Shattered Glass - and serial plagiarist Ruth Shalit. It was supposedly a glorious gotta-read magazine back in the day.)

Addition from Jan 22nd: I've erased the link to The New Republic piece in question. Their website seems to be down as much as up. (And the Progressives wonder why we don't want them to run things....I'll try to add it later.

I want to like Ron Paul. I saw a Tivo'd excerpt from the New Hampshire debate where Paul was explaining THE LOOMING FINANCIAL CRISIS in terms of "well, if you run up mammoth debts, print too much money, get involved in a war with no funding, unhhhh, What Results Are You Expecting?"

When Ron Paul comes out and tells the truth, it's almost perceived as ill-mannered. Everyone acts like he's discussing the true nature of Santa Claus within earshot of the nursery.

But since 1978, according to The New Republic, Ron Paul's organization has been publishing a series of newsletters - Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul's Political Report, and The Ron Paul Survival Report.

James Kirchik, author of The New Republic piece, writes that articles in these newsletters contain very few bylines. In fact, with the exception of a special edition, the articles are written in the first person, which creates the impression that the articles were written by Paul. Here are the main threads that run through The Ron Paul newsletters:

1) "General sympathy for the concept of secession", and that "the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society."

2) According to Kirchik, Paul's newsletters contain some extreme views on race that I've never seen in printed media, except as a collectible. (Heck, you really have to look hard to find these views on the Internet.)

Here's an excerpt, from a piece entitled "King City":

A mob of black demonstrators, led by the "Rev." Al Sharpton, occupied and closed the Statue of Liberty recently, demanding that New York be renamed Martin Luther King City "to reclaim it for our people."

Hmmm. I hate to agree with the Rev. Al, but maybe a name change is in order. Welfaria? Zooville? Rapetown? Dirtburg? Lazyopolis?

But Al, the Statue of Liberty? Next time, hold that demonstration at a food stamp bureau or a crack house.

3) The newsletters contain excessive anti-gay rhetoric, and display an obsession with AIDS.

4) There's a sprinkling of Anti-Semitism.

5) There's the usual anti-government paranoia associated with small fringe groups. (You could make an argument that my entire site is devoted to anti-government paranoia, and run by a very small fringe group.)

But these newsletters are devoted to Militias, opposition to The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, conspiracies of The Trilateral Commission & The Bilderberg Group, and the idea that AIDS was created in a World Health Organization lab.

Jesse Benton, one of Paul's spokesmen, claims that Paul didn't even see some of the newsletters, and that there were "various levels of approval" to what appeared in his publications, and only some of these levels involved Ron Paul.

Here's more from James Kirchik:

"In other words, Paul's campaign wants to depitct its candidate as a naive, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically.....whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point - over the course of decades - he would have done something about it."

So here's a reluctant link to The Poliblog of Dr. Steven Taylor: Ron Paul is probably Toast.