Ron Paul: Yeah, I Wrote Some of the Newsletters, Just Not the Bad Stuff That's Causing Me Problems Now

Ron Paul morphs into the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s former parishioner right before our eyes.

In 1995-96 Ron Paul actively promoted the newsletters that bear his name as representing his views. In 2008 and again this year, as the racist language in them drags his presidential campaign, he has disavowed them. And earlier this week, he claimed in a CNN interview not to have even read much of them for a good 10 years after they were published.

Well, on a radio show today he changed the story again, admitting to having written some of them. Just not the most racist stuff, which by the way he minimized to “about 10 sentences out of 10,000 pages for all I know.” Here’s the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH0QHNulxP0

PAUL: Well, the newsletters were written, you know, a long time ago. And I wrote a certain portion of them. I would write the economics. So a lot of what you just mentioned… his would be material that I would turn in, and it would become part of the letter. But there were many times when I didn’t edit the whole letter, and things got put in. And I didn’t even really become aware of the details of that until many years later when somebody else called and said, you know what was in it? But these were sentences that were put in, a total of eight or ten sentences, and it was bad stuff. It wasn’t a reflection of my views at all. So it got in the letter, I thought it was terrible, it was tragic, you know and I had some responsibility for it, because name went on the letter. But I was not an editor. I’m like a publisher. And if you think of publishers of newspapers, once in a while they get pretty junky stuff in newspapers. And they have to say that this is not the position of that newspaper, and this is certainly the case. But I actually put a type of a newsletter out, it was a freedom report, investment, survival report — every month since 1976. So this is probably ten sentences out of 10,000 pages, for all I know. I think it’s bad that happened but I disavowed all these views, and people who know me best, people of my district, have heard these stories for years and years, and they know they weren’t a reflection of anything I believed in, and it never hurt me politically. Right now, I think it’s the same case, too. People are desperate to find something.

Is anybody buying this? The newsletter wasn’t a “newspaper,” it was staffed by at most three or four people beyond Paul, and he hired them all. If he didn’t write the worst stuff, he incompetently managed the enterprise in ways that suggest he is not capable of managing the executive branch of the government.

The newsletters included a lot more than 10 sentences of offensive material. A whole lot more. They included a theory that the US government created AIDS at a secret Army lab. They included a theory that the $50 bill was being engineered to allow the government to track all of us. And more.

We don’t even have to go back to the newsletters to find Ron Paul saying batty things. Here’s an interview he did with Iran’s English-language propaganda channel in 2009. He compares Israel’s handling of the Gaza Strip to a “concentration camp,” using those exact words. And he blames all of the ills of the Middle East on the US and Israel, not the genocidal jihadists who have tried to destroy Israel more than once and continue to desire that end.

Relevant? Ron Paul just picked up some vital support…from Klanner David Duke. That goes along with the love he gets from Truther Alex Jones and the folks at Stormfront.

Frankly, I’m sick of writing about Ron Paul. In Congress he has been a mostly harmless backbencher, with no evidence of having productively led or done anything. He passed one bill in two decades, and otherwise brought home the bacon to his district. If he remained there or retired he would be of no interest. As long as he’s in the campaign and a factor crowding out better candidates, though, there isn’t much choice but to continuing to expose his record. The mainstream won’t do it until he is actually the nominee. And by then, it will be too late.