Ron Paul, Racist?

CNN is picking up on the horribly racist content of Ron Paul’s newsletters, a story first broke by The New Republic earlier this week. The content of these newsletters is appalling, and although the Paul campaign is disavowing them, it’s likely that it will only further marginalize Paul as a candidate:

The controversial newsletters include rants against the Israeli lobby, gays, AIDS victims and Martin Luther King Jr. — described as a “pro-Communist philanderer.” One newsletter, from June 1992, right after the LA riots, says “order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.”

Another says, “The criminals who terrorize our cities — in riots and on every non-riot day — are not exclusively young black males, but they largely are. As children, they are trained to hate whites, to believe that white oppression is responsible for all black ills, to ‘fight the power,’ to steal and loot as much money from the white enemy as possible.”

In some excerpts, the reader may be led to believe the words are indeed from Paul, a resident of Lake Jackson, Texas. In the “Ron Paul Political Report” from October 1992, the writer describes carjacking as the “hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos.”

Paul’s excuse is exceedingly lame. On one hand, he wants to argue that he’s not a bigot, racist, or anti-Semite. On the other hand, he wants to argue that that sort of material was published under his own name for over a decade and not once did he bother to see what those newsletters said. In other words, either Ron Paul is a racist, or he’s borrowed his name for racist diatribes for well over 10 years and never bothered to put a stop to it. There’s simply no way to spin this that doesn’t made Paul look bad.

That Paul might have believed what was printed under his name would be horrendous. That he let it be printed is grossly negligent. In either case, it was printed under his name, and he bears responsibility for it.