12/24/2011
The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney wrote a piece saying GOP will take off the gloves if Ron Paul wins Iowa, (“Just like they did to Pat Buchanan in 1996” as buchanan.org points out.) And The New York Times and The Weekly Standard opened the ball with a revival of attacks based on the Ron Paul Letters of the 1980s, an attack that was made in 2008 by the New Republic.
We covered the Kirchick attacks when they happened during the last election. The Ron Paul letters would not be a big deal in a society that actually believed in political debate. What’s going on now is simply rampant Politically Correct hysteria.
But, apparently, we at VDARE.com are the only ones who were and are willing to defend what was in the original letters — see
The first time I saw the Kirchick story, I said:
“The New Republic wants to police the ‘boundaries of respectable debate’ — that’s what this is about. See how many ‘conservatives’ pile on to help them. “
Piling on now, needless to say, is National Review editor Rich Lowry, who is taking the same “unpatriotic conservatives” line David Frum took in the run-up to the Iraq War:
And more at National Review Online.
Amazingly, the Beltway Conservative panic at the idea of a Ron Paul Victory has them not only attacking Ron Paul, but attacking Iowa itself!
Lowry’s NY Post article concludes with
“Iowa caucus-goers are protective of their pre-eminent place in the nominating process. If they deliver victory to a history-making Ron Paul, no one should take them as seriously again. “
And Canadian Colby Cosh writes in Maclean’s Magazine that Iowa Republicans are worrying in Politico that a Ron Paul victory will “kill the caucuses”.
This reminds Cosh of a Bertolt Brecht line that’s very familiar to VDARE.com readers:
“Maybe it should be taken seriously; it would be hard to argue, at any rate, that Ron Paul is doing well in Iowa just because he’s so friendly to federal ethanol subsidies. Iowans have taken a good look at Paul, with his anti-Drug-War stance and his isolationist foreign policy and his constitutional literalism, and they appear to have tentatively decided that they like what they see. The response from the ‘elites’–specifically described as such in Jonathan Burns and Alexander Martin’s story for Politico — seems very much like Brecht’s line about dissolving the people and electing a new one.[Will Ron Paul kill the caucuses? December 20, 2011]
You say the party’s insanely elaborate nominating procedure is threatening to deliver a frontrunner who doesn’t want to bung dope-smokers into jail or garrison the lunar surface? In that case, the governor of Iowa warns, ‘People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third.’ This is not, I hasten to add, how Iowa chooses a governor.”[The doge of Des Moines, December 21, 2011]
Iowa is hated because it’s too white, and thus representative of an older America which is supposed to be dying. (This actually makes it more representative of the Republican electorate than more multicultural states.)
This is the point of Professor Stephen Bloom’s much denounced Atlantic piece Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life, which says “Rural America has always been homogenous, as white as the milk the millions of Holstein cows here produce.”
It was the point of the late Christopher Hitchens’s remark about the Senate, in his anti-Bill Clinton book No One Left to Lie To, that, owing to the Constitution’s Article V,
“unpopulous white and rural states such as Montana and Wyoming have the same representations as do vast and all-American and ethnically diverse state like New York and California."
I remarked, back around the turn of the century, that by “all-American” Hitch meant un-American.
But of course, Ron Paul is hated for the same reason — he’s too white. And left and right are colluding in attacking him on that basis.
A typical example is Michael Tomasky’s article in the Daily Beast: Time for Ron Paul to Fully Answer Racism Charges, [December 23, 2011]
“If you’re unfamiliar with the particulars, you should read James Kirchick’s original New Republic piece from 2008. These are not your run-of-the-mill euphemisms. These are blatantly racist comments by, I would hope, nearly any measure. Jews and gays get their moment in the sun, and there are code-word comments of the sort we’ve come to expect about matters like secession, the right of which ‘should be ingrained in a free society’; but all those are just warm-up acts for the race stuff. The ‘Special Issue on Racial Terrorism,’ produced after the Los Angeles riots, offers many gems, including this advice: ‘I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.’I invoke this quote because the ‘I’ in the above sentence is problematic. It would seem, in the pages of something called the Ron Paul Political Report, that that ‘I’ would represent, well, Ron Paul. But he denies authorship — and more. As he said to Borger: ‘I never read that stuff. I was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written and it’s been going on 20 years that people have pestered me about this … ’”
It’s “Calling a group of people — identifiable only by their race — ‘animals’” that Tomasky finds hateful. I’d remind Tomasky that (a) it describes rioters, not blacks in general, and (b) he’s writing for the Daily Beast.
However, while you can probably find things in the newsletter that are wrong, or indefensible, that’s true of most mainstream media publications — especially the Daily Beast, which features attacks on us by Max Blumenthal.
What Tomasky would like Ron Paul to do is reveal the name of the actual author of the newsletters, and “give a speech, or at least an informal talk, about his actual racial views.”
Tomasky says that if Ron Paul’s views are as conventional — Tomasky’s word is “advanced” — as Paul assures the public they are, “there can be no downside.”
Tomasky doesn’t actually expectPaul to do that, because he presumably still has some kind of relationship with the actual author.
And Tomasky doesn’t expectPaul to make the racial speech because
“Among Republicans and conservatives, there simply aren’t enough people who care whether he’s a racist or not. If there were a demand for an explanation, he would supply one. But there is not.”
Well, for one thing, no one in American wants any politician to be frank on what he actually feels about race.
Thus Obama’s famous speech on race didn’t tell what he really thought about race — the only people who know that are people who read Dreams From My Father, A Story Of Race And Inheritance, and those who’ve read Steve Sailer’s book America’s Half-Blood Prince. No one who listened to the speeches has a clue.
And if Ron Paul actually made a speech trumpeting “advanced” racial views, saying that for example
I think he would lose support. Those are all things that all politicians profess to believe, but few voters do.
What I would like to see Paul do is make a speech defending some of the things that the anonymous, I-can’t-prove-it-was-Lew-Rockwell, author of the Ron Paul Report said, and see how Republican voters liked that.
Ron Paul’s candidacy is more or less of a protest candidacy — I don’t expect him to become president. (But who knows in this crazy system?)
Maybe he doesn’t either. His personal investments are based on the expectation of economic catastrophe — which I assume means he’s also expecting that the next President will not be Ron Paul.
Thus, the Wall Street Journal showed his stock portfolio, based on disclosures he’s required to make, to an investment manager. The manager, noting that Paul is not holding any ordinary stocks or bonds, but has 64% of his assets in gold and silver mining stocks said
“ … he has never seen such an extreme bet on economic catastrophe.'This portfolio is a half-step away from a cellar-full of canned goods and nine-millimeter rounds,' he says…
A spokeswoman for Rep. Paul didn’t respond to requests for comment. But you can say this for Ron Paul: In investing, as in politics, he has the courage of his convictions.
[The Ron Paul Portfolio, By Jason Zweig, WSJ, December 21, 2011]
Well, if Paul does have the courage of his convictions, perhaps he should make a speech showing that his views on these questions, as expressed in The Ron Paul Report, are not "advanced”, but rather normal, similar to the views of regular Americans.
And if Republican insiders don’t like it, maybe this time they’ll allow Iowa to secede without bloodshed.
James Fulford is a writer and editor at VDARE.com
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.