At a rally yesterday I asked Ron Paul, “How confident were you at the time, that the Ron Paul newsletters from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s accurately portrayed your views on monetary policy, the 2nd Amendment, the 10th Amendment, personal liberty, limited government, lower taxes, and staying out of needless wars?”
He refused to answer. He cannot answer. He has painted himself into a corner. If he answers that he was confident, then it contradicts his statements that he neither authored nor approved the content in the newsletters. If he claims that he trusted the writers, it shows that he is a very bad judge of character. Either way this would be a bad answer.
He would appear silly if he claims, however, that he had no more knowledge of the content about taxes than he knew about the race-baiting (One newsletter called the proposed Martin Luther King. Jr. holiday “Hate Whitey Day”). What kind of person allows a newsletter to go out in his name for 10 years and doesn’t give a hoot if it shares his viewpoint or not. Can you imagine a talk show host like Jan Mickelson of WHO-Radio in Des Moines, Iowa having a show in his name for that long and not knowing the contents. Paul’s view is beyond belief. I don’t believe him. He seems to be making it up as he goes.
A second question is relevant: “Did you ever get any complaints about the content in the newsletters?”. If he did not, it certainly shows that the followers of Ron Paul have come to expect the crazy, conspiracy theories he is apt to serve up, usually in the context of selling more newsletters for big bucks. Maybe he never really believed that the government was conspiring to gain total surveillance of us by forcing us to turn in our old money and use “traceable” pink money. But that is the kind of spooky stuff that filled his newsletters.
The old newsletter even has the current Ron Paul toll-free number (1-800-766-7285). You might want to call and ask for archived copies of the newsletter, but you can find the one about pink money, here.
Lastly, Ron Paul could clear this up today. He should be asked to name the authors of his newsletter. Let them defend what they wrote, if it wasn’t Paul himself. If he hired “ghost writers” he is responsible for what they wrote, and knows their names. Come on Dr. Paul, show that political courage we keep hearing about. NAME NAMES.
Many supporters of Paul suggest that the contents of controversial newsletters that contain Paul’s letterhead and which he used to raise huge sums of money were not racist or anti-Semitic, but simply politically incorrect satire or commentary on the welfare state or the economy in general. If this is true, and the judgment of charity might lend one to believe some of that, then that begs the question: Why does Ron Paul deny writing or approving newsletters that sound just like his voice and his stump speeches today?
I am much more concerned about his fear-mongering about the government and conspiracy theories about AIDS and apparently 9/11. What is too bad, is that many of his actual policies would be right and good. I support slashing the size of government by a trillion a year. It would be great to abolish 80% of what the government does which is unconstitutional. I think we could bring many of the troops home. But please don’t vote to put a paranoid nut in the White House.
