Paul’s Defense
Paul’s defense, while understandably unsatisfying to some, seems entirely plausible to me: “When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.”
When those issues were published, Paul was a full-time medical doctor and a busy family man, as well as an in-demand speaker and a student of politics and current events -- in short, a man with tremendous demands on his time and energy. He had recently ended an exhaustive presidential race, returned to private practice, and was not in Congress or involved in electoral politics. He had given up control of his newsletter business; he kept only a minority share in the newsletter that bore his name. He made an ill-advised decision to turn the newsletter over to others, to let others write it and edit it and publish unsigned articles in this newsletter with his name in the title. He apparently failed to closely monitor it.
That turned out to be a ghastly error. His good name was dragged in the mud by the newsletter ghostwriters he entrusted.
This is consistent with the observations of long-time libertarian writer Jesse Walker: “The race- and gay-baiting quotes in the New Republic piece -- and, even more so, the documents' general gestalt of an impending apocalypse -- sound like the sort of material that often appeared in far-right direct-mail packages in that era. My suspicion is that someone who wrote such packages also picked up a job writing the Ron Paul Survival Report.”
Ironically, The New Republic article itself makes Paul’s argument believable. TNR claims the newsletters published offensive material “over the course of decades” -- even though this is false; the genuinely offensive material TNR presents dates only from very late 1989 to 1993.Then TNR says that Paul’s claim -- that he did not write the material and is guilty only of poor oversight -- “might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically -- or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time.” Well… that is exactly the point. It was a fairly short time period (judging from what TNR shows us), and the articles were short pieces in only some of those issues, certainly not the focus of the publication. This backs up what Paul is claiming. By TNR’s own argument, that boosts Paul’s believability.
Why Didn’t He Denounce Them At Once?
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