The Ron Paul Newsletter and His Jeremiah Wright Moment
Posted by Erick Erickson (Diary)
Thursday, December 22nd at 4:45AM EST
If you’ve been under a rock somewhere recently you may not know that Ron Paul published a bunch of crazy, racist newsletters in the late 80′s and early 90′s.
Ron Paul, ten years ago, took responsibility for the content, even admitted at one point that he had written some of them.
Today, Ron Paul claims he knew nothing about them even though they generated around a million dollars in income for him.
The newsletters were the “Ron Paul” newsletters and each was written in the first person as if from Ron Paul, without an author’s byline, conveying that the views expressed were Ron Paul’s.
No one doubts that someone other than Ron Paul wrote them, but they were written as if they were from Paul and he profited handsomely and at one point took responsibility for writing some of them himself.
One of the newsletters claimed that gays were going to donate blood en masse in hopes of infecting the American blood supply with AIDS.
Let’s presume Ron Paul did not write that.
But I know many Ron Paul supporters, including some in my church, who cast aspersions on Barack Obama for attending Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years. They don’t believe Barack Obama didn’t know Rev. Wright believed the CIA invented AIDS to kill black men. They will give Ron Paul a pass, but they will not give Barack Obama a pass.
Why?
I fail to see how Ron Paul’s eponymous newsletter written in the first person as if from Ron Paul claiming gays intended to infect other Americans with AIDS through compromising our blood supply is any different from Reverend Wright claiming the CIA invented AIDS to kill black men.
If you know all these things about Ron Paul, and know he was perfectly fine with Neo-Nazis raising money for his campaign in 2008, and know he was perfectly fine going on Iranian national television to claim Israel keeps concentration camps wherein it routinely kills Palestinians, and you still intend to vote for him, I don’t really see that the Republican tent needs to be big enough to accommodate you.
http://redstate.com/
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