...Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, 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--or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, 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.I don't know if his politics are right vis: smaller government, Federal Reserve, etc. (I tend to think they're untenable). What I don't like is the promulgation of the myth that he's some sort of force of freedom. He's a lunatic.
That said, I don't have a blimp, so who am I to judge? Learn to love, Joe. Learn to love.
2 comments:
I'll go ahead and state my opinions here, just because you know we disagree.
It really bothers me that you would question someone's devotion to freedom by laying moral judgement on their personal beliefs. There's nothing to say that just because Ron Paul is a racist that he won't hold to the essentials of libertarian doctrine. Bringing up these issues is slander on what we have no reason to disbelieve will be a perfectly sound libertarian presidential campaign.
Well, Erick...
It actually is a big deal. See, even the best shine of these events is that Paul, uninvolved in politics for several years while pursuing his medical career, allowed a ghostwriter to publish inflammatory, racist rhetoric under Paul's name. If this is the true nature of these events, as apologists have claimed, then Paul made a serious error in judgment by permitting these publications at all - under his letterhead, with his signature.
The biggest problem is that we're not voting for ideas, we're voting for people. I agree with Paul's ideas very strongly - even in a few positions that I recognize as looking crazy - but I'd still not be entirely happy with him as President.
On the other, other hand, the charismatic, wise, and strongly-libertarian avatar I'd like to vote for probably won't ever exist. I dislike every other candidate on rather stronger political grounds than decades-past inadvisable political activities, so I'll have to make do with voting for Ron Paul.
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