Another One Bites The Dust

[UPDATE: After a lot of research, here's what I've been able to find out: Ron Paul claims that the 1992 article was written by and inserted into the newsletter by a staffer who was promptly fired. Unfortunately, the newsletter had a very narrow distribution and very few copies seem to exist in the public domain... and Dr. Paul has apparently refused to provide copies to the press. So it is essentially his word against others' as to whether this staffer was fired or whether (as has not actually been asserted anywhere that I've found) any retraction was ever printed.

Which leaves me about where I was before: On the one hand, we all have experiences in our lives and in our past which may be completely innocent but which would be hard to explain and/or would cast us in a poor light if they surfaced. On the other hand, the article WAS published, under his name, and there's no real documentation or paper trail proving his version of the events that followed... and if there was an actual retraction posted in his newsletter, you'd think he would at least have provided a copy of that particular issue to the press as evidence. And if he as vehemently disagrees with the sentiment of the article as he now claims, and that article had been posted under his name, one would think he'd have hurried to distance himself from it in the very earliest future edition he possibly could have.

(By the way, one of the bits of information I found was an interview he did with radio host Stephanie Miller on 12/6 of this year. It is unquestionably her and him (I recognize both voices) and he admits to the article existing in the newsletter, so that part, at least, is no longer in question to my mind.)

--Liam]

Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.

Those who have spoken to me about politics recently, or have read this blog, know that I have been flirting with the idea of voting in the Republican primary for Ron Paul. (As I've mentioned, in NH I can, as a registered independent, vote in either of the primaries, just not both of them).

I was going to do this because although I think a lot of his policies go too far (some WAY too far), nevertheless some of his stances on returning to the Constitutional origins of this country are very attractive. I thought that voting for him might help send a message that there is a contingent of voters who honestly believe in returning the balance of power between the Federal government and the States to what it was intended to be (small Federal government, most of the power with the States, Federal government primarily involved in foreign policy, etc). And even if he won, perhaps four years of extreme push back in that direction would set the country back to a better course, and then after four years I'd vote for someone else, before he could get to some of his more extreme, dangerous and (in my view) wrong policies.

But today I saw this article, which asserts (among other things) that in 1992 Ron Paul wrote in his self-published newsletter that 95% of black men in Washington DC were criminal or semi-criminal. And there are other, similarly racist statements he has supposedly made.

Now, my problem... The documentation I can find for these statements is sketchy. Most of it comes from blogs which, like this post you're reading now, may have all gotten the news from the same source. So there is some possibility that the whole thing is made up. I'm going to ask if factcheck.org can find any information on it.

The article goes on to assert that Dr. Paul has responded to this by saying that the article in question was ghost-written, but to me that doesn't excuse it. If you self-publish a newsletter, especially one under your by line, and the best excuse you can come up with is that you didn't bother to read what you were publishing as your own words, even that excuse doesn't say much for your thoroughness or diligence.

And of course even that response might have been part of a made-up smear campaign.

So I'm doing some frantic digging to find out. I don't want to vote for a racist, but I also don't want a political dirty trick, a false smear campaign to work and tarnish what might be a good name with entirely bogus allegations.

Some days I hate politics.

Liam.