Previous entries surrounding the Ron Paul Newsletter topic here and here. The first thing I read this morning was Raimondo’s piece, here, which is to date not only the best argued thing on the issue, but finally, finally includes the complete honest context of some of the quotes from the newsletters in question.
If you care about honesty, you should be shocked; and you ought to condemn Kirchick, TNR, Reason, and Cato. The former two, for the dishonest journalism; the latter two, for jumping on the bandwagon before possibly having the time to fully research and reflect. Fuck them all. Here’s a couple of examples…on second thought, no. Dig through it yourselves and then ask yourselves how many of you swallowed that disgrace hook, line, & sinker.
It was TNR. I knew not to trust it.
Problems:
1. Paul himself has denonunced the material.
2. Paul has contradicted himself on the authorship over the years. To put it bluntly: He has lied about the authorship.
Has he "denounced" the material, or denounced anything that might be counted as racist? He did say that he likely had not read them, but given the context Raimondo has provided, it's perhaps plausible that Paul actually did read them, but didn't find anything racist.
When the story broke, he may have figured that it's best just to denounce anything that might be racist, because he was reasonably sure he hadn't read everything over the years, and so he can't really know for sure if there's racist stuff or not.
I'm pretty sure he's not a racist, and I think he answered it as honestly as he could without diverting his campaign to research and respond to every point.
As to #2, I know nothing of that.
1. Paul denounced the material from his newsletters cited by TNR:"The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts."
2. Welch's piece at the same link demonstrates that when this first came up in the mid 90s Paul was admitting authorship. He was lying then or he's lying now. He has in fact defended, as his own, the same material he now denounces.
My point is not that Paul is a racist, but rather that this exemplifies Lopez's point: Paul will run on a lie if it's easier than running on the truth.
1. Was he denouncing the full context as presented by Raimondo, or simply the out-of-context text-bytes published by TNR? For instance, I would denounce what those out-of-context bits seem to imply, but I could see myself making a similar point to the full-context items. This could even lend credence to Paul's assertion that he had never read them. If he's hearing them for the first time and doesn't doubt they exist in black & white on a page bearing his name, but yet doesn't believe that, what else is he to do but denounce?
2. I'll take a look. I suspect you're probably right, but then, so what if Paul wrote those full context items? Big deal. When hearing them in the out-of-context form, and what they clearly imply, I think it's plausible to have the reaction that you didn't write that stuff, i.e., what you mean is that you didn't write anything, ever, that means what that quote means.
As to the final point, you may be right, in which case I'd say that everyone lies, politicians lie at least a little more, and Paul lies less than all of them, by far. It is what it is.
On the other hand, I believe he's an honest man, and if you have any notion of what I'm getting at when I draw distinctions between manipulative truth and unassailable honesty, you know what I mean.