Ron Paul: Reactionary Racist Leprechaun

With Herman Cain in the jaws of defeat from trying to indulge in so much victory snatch, and Ron Paul turning his knives on Newt Gingrich^[1], it's time to ask who's the new GOP flavor of the week. Everyone else had the chance to hove into view on this carousel of social and moral failure, so, since he took the initiative, why not Ron?

Because Ron Paul is apocalyptically insane.

It's easy to see his appeal to independents. Just like in 2008, people who think both parties are crooked like to hear new voices. His Middle East policy^[2] —his unwillingness to slobber about Iran or uncritically submit American interests to Israel's—makes him the only reasonable candidate on the issue^[3] in either party. The good news ends there.

Liberals cheer his opposition to America's wars, but his isn't a moral choice so much as it is an echo of George Washington's injunction against "foreign entanglements." Further, while Ronald isn’t down with wars that cost money and expand federal power, he’s totally fine with the government making a buck from other people’s wars: He was the only member of congress to vote against the Darfur Divestment Act^[4], which proposed the radical idea of prohibiting the American government from investing in businesses fueling a fucking genocide.

The biggest strikes against him are ones that existed in 2008, over which the struggling, oppressed Paulestinian masses stick their fingers in their ears and say "Lalalalalala, that's not true! Gandhi quotes!"^[5] I’m talking about the Ron Paul newsletters.

Published under various names—"The Ron Paul Survival Report," "The Ron Paul Political Report" etc.—the Ron Paul Newsletters provided a buffet of white racial paranoia, militia advice, communist conspiracy, and Bircherite offal. The best resource for excerpts is an article by The New Republic’s James Kirchick^[6] It's under a pay wall, but, in one of life's great ironies, you can read his rundown of white racial hatemongering^[7] on FreeRepublic.com. I know, right? Who knew?

It's an open secret that many newsletters were written by bigoted shitswine Lew Rockwell^[8], which the Paulestinian crowd considers exculpatory. But that doesn't cut it in a presidential election. Paul's responses were inconsistent with someone finding out that someone wrote horrible things in his name. Reason, the libertarian magazine, even has a timeline^[9] that shows him owning the newsletter content, then handwaving it away, then playing dumb. There's no way Paul could have been ignorant of the content in an 8-12 page newsletters published under his name for over ten years. Paul supporters face three losing propositions:

-He lacks the competency to control content published under his own name for over a decade, and is thus unfit to lead a country.

-He doesn't believe these things but considers them a useful political tool to motivate racist whites, which makes him fit to be a GOP candidate^[10], but too obvious about it to win.

-He's actually a racist^[11], which makes him unfit to be a human being.

The hits keep coming. Independents sick of the government’s invasions of privacy celebrate Paul's veneration of the Constitution, but that veneration is as convenient as Bush and Obama's. Paul has repeatedly submitted the "We the People Act"^[12] to Congress, whose provisions remove Supreme Court review of First Amendment cases. If a state chose to criminalize being Muslim, citizens would have no federal redress. If a state chose to criminalize birth control, the penumbras of individual protections of privacy as explicated by William O. Douglas would disappear.

His Constitution would also be a lot slimmer. He subscribes to the notion that the Fourteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth amendments are invalid or must be repealed. So long, income tax, but also so long to voting for senators yourselves. And if you don't like foreign brown people, Paul's opposition to the Civil Rights Act^[13] means you won't have to share a dinner table with them for their last meal before they join 10 million other human beings in railcars, calling at all points south.

But nobody wants to hear that stuff. Government non-interference is sexy when it's sold to you as, "Ron Paul opposes the War on Drugs." What isn't mentioned is that he has no problem with the concept of 50 individual state wars on drugs, and deregulating evidently stops when it comes to uterine production—he's OK with voting for federal partial birth abortion bans, for instance.

Then there’s Paul’s dreamed-of return to the Gold Standard, which would replace our "valueless" paper currency, backed by economic confidence, with currency backed by gold. We'd replace a collective assumption of value with... the collective assumption of value. You see, gold has intrinsic value, because we've said it does for a lot longer than we've said that about paper. It makes pretty shiny things and improves your speakers' performance.

This is basic economics for Paul. Any time you have the chance to contract the global economy by tying it to a commodity whose total worldwide value is probably insufficient to represent even America's wealth, you've gotta take it. You gotta zip along in a car at 70 MPH and put that fucker in "park." It's not like there could be any ulterior motive to immediately increasing the value of gold by orders of magnitude—like, say, being heavily invested in gold mines.^[14]

The way to fix the 21st century is to return to the values and socioeconomic order of the 14th. After you gut the FDA^[15], you can even literally bring back the plague, which shouldn’t affect the rich people in Congress. They’ll be able to afford all the colloidal silver they can drink.

Source: http://www.vice.com/read/ron-paul-is-a-racist-leprechaun

References

1. . http://www.salon.com/2011/11/30/ron_paul_skewers_newt_gingrich/singleton/
2. . http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/ron-paul-booed-during-debate/
3. . http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/11/foreign-policy-experts-agree-with-ron-pauls-controversial-foreign-policy/
4. . http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2007-764
5. . http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1597571/pg1
6. . http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/angry-white-man
7. . http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1950362/posts
8. . http://reason.com/archives/2008/01/16/who-wrote-ron-pauls-newsletter
9. . http://reason.com/blog/2008/01/11/old-news-rehashed-for-over-a-d
10. . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
11. . http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/ron-paul-vs-new-world-order.html
12. . http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2011/08/five-reasons-why-ron-paul-should-never.html
13. . http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/05/ron-paul-would-have-opposed-civil-rights-act-1964/37726/
14. . http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052702303822904576516114289723344.html
15. . http://www.ronpaul.com/2011-08-12/ron-paul-reform-the-fda/