(Reuters) - A direct-mail solicitation for Ron Paul's political and investment newsletters two decades ago warned of a "coming race war in our big cities" and of a "federal-homosexual cover-up" to play down the impact of AIDS.
The eight-page letter, which appears to carry Paul's signature at the end, also warns that the U.S. government's redesign of currency to include different colors - a move aimed at thwarting counterfeiters - actually was part of a plot to allow the government to track Americans using the "new money."
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If you go on any sights dedicated to politics you will usually find someone extolling the virtues of uber-libertarian Congressman Ron Paul (R- Someplace Weird, Texas). Paul is the current Republican Party flavor of the week in the upcoming Iowa Caucus on January 3. One of his sons, Rand, (as in Ayn Rand) is a Senator from Kentucky.
Now it has been revealed, not for the first time, that Ron Paul's News-Letter, published in the late 1980's and early 1990's when he was out of office, contained some amazingly racist and other off-the-beam inflammatory statements, harnessing old stereotypes of African-Americans, the unemployed, AIDS victims, et al. This material has all the charm you'd expect to hear from some angry drunkard in a dive bar next to the bus station that you unwisely went in to against your better judgement to check the football scores in a strange part of town.
I have to say that Ron Paul has quite a personality cult going for him on many websites, particularly You Tube. They must all be high in testosterone and anger. After remarks like the ones below, they still defend him.
I wish I had friends like this guy has.
You'd think the guy was that old boiler-suit big-shot, Chairman Mao, who had followers galore holding up his "Little Red Book" when it was hoedown time back at the 1966 Cultural Revolution/Forbidden Palace Country Jamboree.
Personally I don't get the fervor of Mr. Paul's appeal, but I've been "flamed" enough on other sites for my thoughts on similar matters, so off I go to the trenches of "doug's Site" and bring you some of the material.
If any die-hard Paul fans stop by, be aware! My squad of yeoman wage-slaves all have 1917-issue United States Expeditonary Force "doughboy" tin-hats on their heads, super-keen barbed wire and anti-tank defenses, quality mud and sandbags, and enough canned food and machine squirt guns to withstand any advance on our position!
Judge for yourself:
I saw that stuff on Paul discussed all evening on Msnbc by all the hosts..funny they showed him being interviewed by CNN and he was so pissed off he took his mic off and scuttled out of there so no more questions were asked about all that stuff he said but yet didnt read....what a jerk and a liar. All of those R's are liars if you ask me...not a one has said one intelligant thing in all this time they have out there spouting to their people of the R persuasion. I wouldnt put my money on any of them they are all a bunch of A holes and not even worth talking about. I think Obama has a clear and beautiful trip to be our president again and I am glad...he seems to care about all the people in this country not just the rich white folk.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Marty. This guy had a newsletter going out under his name and he should own up to what was put in it-I guess he did in the past, according to the Dallas Morning News---and not pretend that it had nothing to do with him, or to "scuttle off" when Gloria Bolger at CNN asks him some serious questions.
ReplyDeleteLiberalists (our NZ equivalent would be the Act party and some of the most right wing of our governing National party incl our flash prime minister) can often be seen to use the "equality" rhetoric so that the unthinking and gullible get hooked but really they are parties whose goals are focused entirely on making the rich richer and their views on ordinary folk are judgemental and biased. We are all the great unwashed to them.
ReplyDeleteA bit of unscripted homophobia is seen in the staged reality comedy documentary BRUNO, where Ron Paul is tricked by Sasha Cohen/Bruno into thinking he is going to get campaign donations in a plush hotel room with drinks and food, turns out it is a comic come on by Bruno to Ron Paul. Paul explodes and lashes out "he's a fucking queer!". Old school bigotries are very much Ron Paul's style. The nation of Israel nor AIPAC will back him in the mass media as ending foreign aide for all nations alarms them.
ReplyDeleteI have criticised Dr Paul for being a neo-fascist bigot on occasion in the past myself Doug....he is clearly a bit of a nutter, a eugenicist and a medic, an especially dangerous breed of sociopath in my experience.
ReplyDeleteBut despite the adoration of his personality cult followers, especially amongst the disappointed ultra-patriotic constituency, whose doublethink has now become so troubling to them its unbearable) I don't think Ron Paul presents any serious political challenge to Obama, although I may live to regret those words of course.
I don't think the cabal of bumbling lunatics that have been carefully crafted into a no-hope opposition will prevail against the African president, for perfectly good geopolitical reasons related to full spectrum dominance and the enslavement of the entire population of the earth.
Dr Paul is the fascist-decoy, the exception that proves the rule, a sponge to soak up the ire of belligerent backwoodsmen, who hate themselves for hating America, but who can't help it all the same.
He is salvation to the suicidal, but the remedy he promotes is euthanasia. Ron Paul got used to playing God as a doctor and now he wants all of America for his operating theatre, where he can cut out (what to Ron is) the 'infected' tissue of the US body-politic blacks, gays, communists etc (sound at all familiar?).
Like I said above, he's a nutter, but he has a part to play in the soap opera called Democracy.
The Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group would never allow him to actually succeed, but the good doctor remains useful because he is the never-to-be- fulfilled promise to the survivalist right-wing, white supremacist anarcho-individualist that are the very embodiment of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny.
His job is I think to channel the grief of the fly-over states and give them something to hope for, while the empire continues to push its borders and big money gets ever bigger at our expense.
Thanks for exposing the mad doctor here Doug, his racist, eugenicist, isolationist dreams and his great intellectual gift to the nation and to the world, - The Tea Party! Thanks a lot Ron we'll call you.
LOL!!!
ReplyDelete(Doug, we've never quite gotten 'round to discussing what you do or did for a living, but you do turn a phrase! I'll be laughing about this one all day long....)
As to Mr. Paul:
I voted for the man in 1988 when he ran as the Libertarian candidate for President. He presented himself well, and was four-square for getting out of the business of other countries, beginning with the Middle East - something which appealed to me greatly then, as now.
He was for cutting funding for a lot of Federal inanity, beginning with the DoD. That, too, appealed greatly.
I never saw a newsletter from the man - this was, (I know; a time hard to remember now) not the age of the Internet; cable TV was still a novelty for most of us, and MS-DOS 4.0 was new-issue then, along with Windows 3.01. If I had, I'd've been far less likely to have supported his efforts in '04 and wouldn't have considered him at all in '08.
Now, I suppose I'm as close to a Social Democrat as it gets. Saddens me that we don't have an SD party as an alternative.
This political "shadow work" by groups in the Act and right-Nationals sound all too familiar indeed, Iri Ani.
ReplyDeleteIn America, of course, you have to look behind all the red-white-blue bunting and rah-rah to get at what the core message is---with all conservatives and some right-libertarians, and that is, "making the rich richer" and playing "the great unwashed" against one another.
I hope NZ isn't plagued with politicos playing up social "wedge" issues against gay marriage or women's reproductive issues to mask their endless reverse class-warfare. Libertarians of Dr. Paul's ilk claim that the government is the only "bad guy" on the block, all the more reason to trust multi-national bankers and hedge-fund sharpies who destroy people's pensions for fun and profit.
It never seems to get old for some working/middle class people who, especially after the shock effects of the Great Recession, ought to know better.
I haven't seen more than some clips from the "Bruno" movie, Jay Mal, but that sounds like a priceless scene, one I had not heard about before.
ReplyDeleteGiven the times that Dr. Paul was raised in--the 40's and 50's-- when being gay was considered some kind of mental malady, I suppose one should allow the old fellow some "transition time" to get to modern tolerance. But that time has now long past I think, especially for a medical doctor.
Thanks for sharing that "unscripted homophobia".
"Nutter, eugenicist and medic"---all the qualities and qualifications to put the fear of God for on-lookers into the phrase, "Don't worry everybody---I'm a doctor." ;-)
ReplyDelete"The Island of Doctor Paul"--one that HG Wells himself would have shuddered to write--would not be a destination resort for me after catching up on his past forays in racist/homophobic fear journalism. Or those of his acolytes--it hardly matters when your name is on the masthead.
No, AA, I doubt Congressman Paul is a threat to anything that songwriter Paul Simon once called "a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires", or the Fraternity, or Trilateralists, care dearly about.
He is, as you imply, he is a seemingly amiable and articulate "country doctor"; that's his facade. His manias are carefully hidden--or were carefully-- behind the facade of a twisted idea of "freedom".
The freedom to be exploited without benefit of a union or public pension schemes.
The freedom to keep a cache of assault weapons on hand which will only lead to a prison cell when the sheriff comes to kick you out of your foreclosed home.
The freedom to fear your peaceful neighbors, the better to break the Social Contract, and listen to hate radio and television scare mongers on the news channels, broadcasts coming from some mansion or ivory tower of luxury and insular indifference.
I agree with with Dr. Paul for saying America needs to stop being the mad constable of the world. Trouble is, all this other baggage goes with him. All that goes into the Tea Party really. I guess he's as good a Godfather as any for that movement. And yes, LOL, "we'll call you".
I'm just scrambling to keep to the near-level of writing others here, Will, yourself included, bring to your own blogs.
ReplyDeleteYes, when I first became aware of the Libertarians back in the late 70's I was happy to see they opposed the Carter/Reagan military build up, the latter with tax breaks thrown in! George W turned it into a science, especially this "back-door draft "were poor kids were to join the service to get into a college. If we had had a REAL "no-exemption for rich kids already in college" draft, for the Iraq War, I'm convinced it never would gone on this long, if at all.
I used to throw newsletters about "the coming bad times" out with reckless abandon. I was college student and part-timer in various low-pay gigs.Why bother? If I ever got a newsletter like this through the post office, I probably would have chucked it without even looking. They just want to sell us stuff, right?
It's interesting that all this stuff about Herman Cain, Rick Perry and now Paul hits the mainstream media only after they cross some electoral treshold. One might be forgiven for thinking this whole business--a long primary campaign--only benefits the radio and televison stations that sell add time.
Parlimentary democracy, however imperfect, looks better every day--six weeks of campaigning with a ready "shadow government" and some smaller parties in the mix to make it interesrting...political nirvana compared to what we got....but you gotta play the game on the field you're given I guess.
Yeah, I've been a Social Democrat without party for quite some time. Couldn't we import part of the SD party from Canada?