Oh dear.

The blogosphere (or at least the parts of it that bother themselves with the US Primaries) has recently been set alight by this story about Ron Paul and his (offensive) newsletters. Other stories about his support amongst white supremacists had surfaced before, but had usually been dismissed by the line that all campaigns, especially anti-government and anti-surveillance ones, tended to attract cranks, and that this didn't necessarily say much about the people running them (a line I always felt was pretty reasonable).

This is a little different. James Kirchik bothered to dig up many of Ron Paul's old newsletters:

Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

Whilst I'd always considered the fact that Ron Paul and pals "are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute" to be something of an asset, this stuff is really pretty unpleasant. As Kirchik mentions, its impossible to know how much of this stuff was written by Paul as opposed to ghostwriters, but the fact that it was going out regularly under his name seems pretty damning:

...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.

This of course doesn't make him that much more objectionable than the rest of the Republican crowd (albeit somewhat less sophisticated), and he's not going to win the nomination anyway, but I am feeling a little silly for getting so worked up.

Local Republican Backlash Against Ron Paul

Just as Ron Paul gathers momentum nationally among grassroots Republicans, at local level in his own home district the populist Texan presidential and Congressional candidate is beginning to suffer a backlash from the usual cast of unrepentant warmongers and religious fanatics who make up the GOP core in the nation's Bible Belt. The reason? His criticism of the conduct of the Iraq War, which apparently "undermines the troops", of course.

Information Landmine's favourite part of the article illuminates GOP extremism quite succinctly:

"[One of Paul's local opponents] is gathering endorsements of local officials, embarking on a fundraising effort and hoping his record on the Friendswood council makes an impression with GOP primary voters. At the city level, he pressed for property tax refunds and advocated stopping the funding of water conservation education kits for fourth-graders so the money could instead go to a Pearland pastor for sexual abstinence education for junior high school students."

We do indeed live, as per the traditional Chinese curse, "in interesting times".

Ron Paul Gathering "The Big 'M'"

As in "Momentum", judging by his unexpected ability to fundraise. This deluge of funds is, it's claimed, largely coming from the growing base of grass-roots Republicans and other conservatives who, having got the US into the political, economic and military tar pit that is Iraq, now want to get out.

Ron Paul accuses Federal Reserve of Theft

Populist libertarian Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex) has accused the US Federal Reserve of the "theft" of ordinary people's money via the dollar's sharp decline on world currency markets. Whether the free-falling greenback is a result of the Fed's thievery, gross incompetence or both, this is yet another example of the growing jitters amongst Americans at the inability of the supposedly Olympian god-like financial collossi of Washington and Wall Street to stabilize an economy teetering on the precipice of the kind of out-and-out disaster unseen in the western industrialized world for the past 75+ years.

All more evidence that the Bacchinalian orgy of laissez-faire conservative capitalism and e-z credit consumerism is coming to an end and, as can be expected following all such exercises in hedonistic excess, the mess left behind afterwards is going to take a hell of a lot of time and effort to clean up.

Ron Paul

This is the guy who makes the Republican debates worth watching, for me at least. He's basically a Libertarian who's running with the Republicans on a tax-cutting basis, and his answer to more or less everything (except, apparently, immigration and abortion) is to get rid of government and let the market deal with it. The difference is that he walks the walk on this policy, and understands that things like the military industrial complex also constitute a big intrusion of government into the economy. While I obviously don't agree with everything he says, the guy's been something of a hero of mine since he spoke on the House floor about the Eurodollar theory of the Iraq war. You can read the full speech here, but this pretty much gives you the flavour of it:

"Our whole economic system depends on continuing the current monetary arrangement, which means recycling the dollar is crucial. Currently, we borrow over $700 billion every year from our gracious benefactors, who work hard and take our paper for their goods. Then we borrow all the money we need to secure the empire (DOD budget $450 billion) plus more. The military might we enjoy becomes the 'backing' of our currency. There are no other countries that can challenge our military superiority, and therefore they have little choice but to accept the dollars we declare are today’s 'gold.' This is why countries that challenge the system-- like Iraq, Iran and Venezuela-- become targets of our plans for regime change."

Quite.