The “Racist” Newsletter Gambit, Revisited: The Smearbund Escalates its Assault on Ron Paul
Posted on 23 December 2011 by William Grigg
Brandishing a handful of inconsequential quotes from ancient newsletters, the opinion cartel is pretending that Ron Paul is a covert racist who secretly pines for a “race war” in the United States. In a week that witnessed the death of North Korea’s mass-murdering dictator, and the first tentative but unmistakable steps toward war in Iran, Huge amounts of bandwidth, broadcast time, and column inches have been devoted to affected outrage over the idea that Ron Paul once permitted “insensitive” things to be published in a newsletter bearing his name.
The coordinated assault on Dr. Paul began with Fox “News” media personality Sean Hannity, whose unabashed whorishness would bring down the moral tone of a Tijuana brothel. For several days following Dr. Paul’s emergence as front-runner in the Iowa caucus polls, Hannity – no doubt working from notes written in small words with big, crayon-inscribed letters – tirelessly flogged the supposedly scandalous Ron Paul newsletters on his radio program and TV show.
From there this reheated pseudo-scandal – a casserole of stale, leftover smears from the 2008 campaign – was taken up by the entire corporate media establishment, from the neo-Trotskyite Weekly Standard and the CIA-controlled National Review and CNN.
In apportioning moral outrage, the collectivist left employs a sliding scale. The late Ted Kennedy killed an innocent girl through depraved indifference and lived a life of impenitent debauchery, and yet was hailed as a moral titan because of his devotion to official plunder and regimentation. The same devotion to the holy cause of State-sanctified theft purchased Robert Byrd a plenary indulgence for his membership in the Ku Klux Klan as a young adult – a background he shared with more than a few Democratic Party luminaries.
President Obama is presently slaughtering innocent “people of color” in at least three countries. His administration continues to imprison young black and Hispanic men for drug “offenses.” This is done by way of a “Justice” system riddled with racial profiling and sentencing guidelines that result in wildly disproportionate sentences for black offenders – a system that has been denounced, in detail, by Dr. Paul, who has called for an end to the insane and terminally corrupt exercise called the “War on Drugs.”
Newsweek-affiliated blogger Andrew Sullivan, a self-described conservative who supported Obama in 2008, has been grudgingly impressed by Dr. Paul’s ethical and ideological consistency. Referring to the contrived controversy over the supposedly racist newsletters, Sullivan writes: “[A]sk yourself: you’ve now heard this guy countless times; he’s been in three presidential campaigns; he’s not exactly known for self-editing. And nothing like this [the purportedly shocking quotes from the newsletters] has ever crossed his lips in public. You have to make a call on character. Compared with the rest on offer, compared with the money-grubbing lobbyist, Gingrich, or the say-anything Romney, or that hate-anyone Bachmann, I’ve made my call.”
Nelson Linder, president of the Austin, Texas chapter of the NAACP, has known Dr. Paul for decades. Speaking for himself on the basis of that long and close association, Linder emphatically denies that the mild and avuncular Congressman is a racist or bigot of any kind, and commends him for his repeated denunciation of police repression of black people.
Linder points out that Dr. Paul has made powerful enemies by his public opposition to the Federal Reserve System and its allied War Lobby.
“If you scare the folks that have the money, they’re going to attack you and they’re going to take [your statements] out of context,” Linder points out “What he’s saying is really really threatening the powers that be and that’s what they fear.”
While the collectivist Left is assailing Paul as a secret “racist,” the proto-Fascist Right continues to execrate him as an “appeaser.” Rep. Michelle Bachmann, who has endorsed pre-emptive war on Iran and publicly expressed support for a bizarre Islamo-Communist cult called the MEK – a terrorist group that seeks to seize power in Tehran – recently told a group of schoolchildren that Dr. Paul would permit them to be killed by non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons.
Political consultant and notorious foot fetishist Dick Morris, who made a lucrative living as an adviser to Bill Clinton and then a fortune condemning him on Fox News, insisted on Sean Hannity’s radio show that “no true patriot could be for Ron Paul.” Dorothy Rabbinowitz of the Wall Street Journal , offended by Dr. Paul’s campaign to end Washington’s deranged interventionist foreign policy, traduced the candidate as “the best-known of our homegrown propagandists for our chief enemies in the world.” That description wouldn’t be recognizable to the countless military personnel – both active-duty and veterans – who have donated to Dr. Paul’s presidential campaign. Ron Paul is the uncontested front-runner among military donors in the 2012 presidential election cycle.
“As of the last reporting date, at the end of September, Paul leads all candidates by far in donations from service members,” observed Tim Egan of the New York Times. “This trend has been in place since 2008, when Paul ran for president with a similar stance: calling nonsense at hawk squawk from both parties. This year, Paul has 10 times the individual donations – totaling $113,739 – from the military as does Mitt Romney. And he has a hundred times more than Newt Gingrich, who sat out the Vietnam War with college deferments and now promises he would strike foes at the slightest provocation.”
Bellicose blatherskites like Gingrich and Romney are indecently eager to propagate war and bloodshed. However, those “who actually fought in Iraq know better,” Egan observes.
“They can tell a phony warrior from a real one. And in Ron Paul, the veteran who served as a flight surgeon for the Air Force, the man some call crazy, they hear a voice of sanity – at least in the realm of war and peace.”
For decades, as a private citizen, activist, and elected representative, Ron Paul has espoused and lived by a philosophy of individual liberty protected by law. No public figure in recent memory has more consistently preached and practiced the non-aggression axiom – more properly called the Golden Rule – than Dr. Paul. In political terms, this means the categorical rejection of aggressive violence, including state-licensed coercion.
His fidelity to principle has entailed a considerable degree of personal sacrifice: As a private obstetrician, long before he was dragged reluctantly into politics, Paul refused to accept government subsidies through Medicare or Medicaid. He also refused to have anything to do with abortion – thereby displaying the same unqualified respect for the sanctity of human life that led him to become an outspoken opponent of war, and a proponent of abolishing the death penalty.
During the past two decades, those deemed to be “respectable” have supported more than a half-dozen foreign wars – two in Iraq, as well as one in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya, in addition to low-grade but bloody proxy conflicts in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Columbia, and Mexico – that have slaughtered millions of people. In 1996, at roughly the same time that Ron Paul’s supposedly intolerable newsletters were in circulation, Madeleine Albright, the Clinton administration’s UN representative, blithely said on 60 Minutes that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children through starvation and disease as a result of a U.S.-imposed embargo was “worth it.” Those words resonated in the Muslim world – and their deadly echoes were heard on the morning of 9-11.
Ron Paul, a guileless and principled man, has seen his reputation come under pitiless assault because he has adamantly refused to endorse genocide in Iraq, or aggressive war anywhere. According to the canons of collectivist piety, bombs and drones may break our bones, but only politically incorrect words can hurt us.
http://www.republicmagazine.com/news/the-racist-newsletter-gambit-revisited-the-smearbund-escalates-its-assault-on-ron-paul.html --
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