“Horwitz recounts chapter and verse demonstrating that comments calling blacks criminally inclined, among other even more vicious things, were not tossed off by some low-level, immature Paul apparatchik who didn’t know any better. Rather, they were part of a concerted and well thought out political strategy by Ron Paul’s intellectual acolytes and handlers, namely Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, to court working class white males by aligning with some of the nastiest strains in the hard-right, paleo thinking.”
I think Shikha (or Steve) said “acolytes” when s/he meant “mentors,” but you get the picture: Damn crackers are prejudiced as hell; fortunately, they’re dumber than dirt as well. If we just talk their language, their minds, their checks, their votes—and America!—will be ours.
So, obviously, it’s Murray (regarded as a libertarian legend in some circles) and Lew (never heard of him) who are the dummies, tenth-rate political strategists living in mom’s basement (figuratively, of course) while laying their plans for world domination. And these are Ron Paul’s soul mates.
Well, it all happened a long time ago, and Ron has spent all the money he made on the newsletter, so he isn’t going to give it back, and the odds are very, very good that he’s never going to tell the truth in the matter, which is kind of a shame, because Ron is the one elected politician in the U.S. who seems to be capable of thinking rationally about U.S. foreign policy. The fact that he isn’t going to tell the truth gives Newt and Mitt the perfect handle for beating Ron about the head with the issue, without having to say that it’s wrong to say that blacks are criminal by nature. That’s only true of poor people.*
I would like to see Ron remain competitive into the South Carolina and Florida primaries, in part because I simply enjoy watching Republicans fight with one another, but more because the longer a potential Republican nominee talks about the fact that Iran is not a threat to us, and wouldn’t be one even if it obtained nuclear weapons, the better.
Afterwords
What I find really unattractive about Paul is that, though not a southerner, he has thoroughly adopted the right-wing southern rap that the North “started” the Civil War, and that the South was fighting for “states’ rights” rather than the “right to enslave.” Reason’s Matt Welch rather politely says that he “disagrees” with this, and “I think his revisionist counter-proposal to have the North buy up the South’s slaves sounds more than a bit naive, but none of that sounds to me like an open preference for ‘the slaveholding cause.’”
“Open preference”? Maybe not. Squishy soft? Definitely.
I have a couple of revisionist counter-proposals of my own, and it would be interesting to get Ron’s reactions on them.
1) The slaves rise up in rebellion against their masters and kill those who enslaved them, stole their children, and raped their wives.
2) The slaves rise up in rebellion against their masters and enslave them, so that the whites pick cotton and the blacks drink mint juleps for say 240 years,† at which time the North buys the freedom of the white folks. Turn about is fair play, right?
All kidding aside, Ron, why isn’t Nat Turner a libertarian hero? And why aren’t you making excuses for John Brown instead of Jefferson Davis?
*Poor kids, according to Newt Gingrich, should be forced to clean toilets in order to teach them the value of the dollar, since, being poor, they obviously don’t know it. This has not been used against him in the Republican primary, because in Republican talk, “poor” means “not us.”
†African slaves were introduced into Virginia in 1619. Only 240 years later, Americans decided that, as Lincoln put it, “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Ron Paul’s response? “Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
