Ron Paul lackeys forgot a cardinal rule of politics: It’s always the cover-up that gets you in the end.
That was the case when Roger L. Simon called attention to a blog post on the Campaign for Liberty’s (C4L) website promoting the sale of the viciously anti-Jewish The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The item was apparently first noted by Adam Holland earlier this month, and then picked up by Adam Taxin of the NY Jewish Culture Examiner.
The Wikipedia entry for C4L states:
Campaign for Liberty is a political organization founded by twelve-term United States Congressman Ron Paul. The Campaign for Liberty focuses on educating elected officials and the general public about constitutional issues, and currently provides a membership program. Its legal status is that of a 501(c)(4) nonprofit.[2] It is also known as C4L.
The Campaign for Liberty was announced on June 12, 2008 as a way of continuing the grassroots support involved in Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential run, and corresponded with the suspension of that campaign. Paul formally announced during the Texas Republican Convention that he had created this new organization known as the “Campaign for Liberty”.[3]
But no sooner did the story get traction than C4L began to take action.
The first response was to scrub the offending blog post from the C4L website. Commenter JoshInHB accused Roger L. Simon of slander for not verifying the information. But not only was the offending C4L blog post still available in Google cache, but I had taken a screenshot of the entire page, which we promptly added as an update to Roger’s post. The post is also available on the Internet Archive.
Over at Taxin’s Examiner post, commenter TJ Riordan claimed that while the campaignforlibery.com URL had previously belonged to Ron Paul’s C4L, they had moved to a new domain. But a quick check of the WHOIS database showed that campaignforliberty.com is still owned and maintained by C4L, which I noted in the comments of Roger’s post:
Registrant:
Campaign for Liberty5211 Port Royal Road, Suite 310
Springfield, Virginia 22151
United StatesRegistered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: CAMPAIGNFORLIBERTY.COM
Created on: 30-May-08
Expires on: 30-May-13
Last Updated on: 16-May-11Administrative Contact:
Administrator, Site [email protected]
Campaign for Liberty
5211 Port Royal Road, Suite 310
Springfield, Virginia 22151
United States
+1.7038657162Technical Contact:
Administrator, Site [email protected]
Campaign for Liberty
5211 Port Royal Road, Suite 310
Springfield, Virginia 22151
United States
+1.7038657162Domain servers in listed order:
DNS1.STABLETRANSIT.COM
DNS2.STABLETRANSIT.COMRegistry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Status: clientRenewProhibited
Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited
And then more information related to the offending blog post began to disappear.
Again, commenter JoshInHB made the claim that it was just some random kook who had made the post on an unmoderated forum. But when the Examiner’s article first appeared, the page for the author of the C4L blog post, “freeamerican,” identified him as a C4L “local coordinator” in Tucson (Google cache, Internet Archive).
However, a few hours later that author’s page on the C4L website had been changed to show that he was now just a “regular member,” as the screenshot below shows (click to enlarge):
No sooner had we noted that change in the comments to Roger’s original post, than the author’s page and all his corresponding posts disappeared altogether. Needless to say, all of the detractors in the comments to Roger’s post have grown strangely quiet.
Admittedly, there are several reasonable responses that could have been offered by C4L. First, they could have just come clean and posted an announcement saying, “Hey, thanks for letting us know about this troubling material. We’ve now removed it.” Even here at PJM, while we try to be vigilant in moderating comments, we might miss something that is racist or outrageous, but we’ll gladly take it down if someone brings it to our attention. In light of the recent media scrutiny of anti-Semitic and other troubling statements from Ron Paul’s newsletters, that would have been the smart bet. Or they could have removed everything and said nothing at all.
However, that’s not what they did. They first changed the blog author’s information to try to give themselves distance from “freeamerican” and set up their denial. But when we caught them in the act, only then did they go for the full website scrub. Regardless of what the reality is, it sure makes them look guilty.
As I said earlier, one of the cardinal rules of politics is that it’s always the cover-up that gets you in the end — a lesson that Ron Paul’s people at C4L clearly need to take to heart.
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