RON PAUL: DISENGAGED OR CLOSET BIGOT?

By H. N. Burdett

Over her far too brief lifetime, Molly Ivins proved time and again that she had more bite in her inkwell than a pack of hounds chasing the scent of a nearby sausage factory. During the reign of Bush the Younger, she dropped this stunning pearl: "Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be President of the United States, please pay attention."

Never mind that the advice of this heir to American iconoclasts Twain and Mencken would have disqualified her friend Ann Richards, the onetime Lone Star state governor some of us felt was most worthy of one day occupying the White House. The point is that two Texans are vying for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. And, despite their denials, they are both vulnerable to the charge of racism.

First it was the revelation about the name painted on a big old rock at the entrance of Texas Governor Rick Perry's hunting camp. That name - "Niggerhead" - was so off-putting that it all but negated the accomplishments Governor Perry has managed in order to either prove that he is genuinely color blind, or is interested in attracting African American voters. These include appointing Wallace Jefferson, the state's first black state supreme court justice and later appointing him chief justice, and appointing more minorities to statewide positions than any governor in Texas history.

Perry claimed that the racial epithet had been painted on the boulder before his family acquired the property. Besides, he insists, he had the offensive title of the camp removed. Much later, his detractors retort.

Now it is libertarian Ron Paul's turn to get his buns singed - by the light shed on all of those newsletters bearing his name when the voters in his congressional district temporarily retired him from Congress. He allows as how he was just too busy making a living practicing medicine to read, much less edit, those bile-filled publications.

But, according to Reason magazine, Paul and his wife were not too busy to serve as officers of Ron Paul and Associates, the corporation that published the newsletters and which earned an income of nearly $1 million in 1993 alone. James Kirchick, writing in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, said, "If this figure is reliable, Paul must have earned multiple millions of dollars over the two decades plus of the publication's existence. . ."

By this time, millions of potential voters in next year's presidential election have read excerpts from the unmitigated tripe contained in the Ron Paul publications he was too preoccupied to write, edit, or even read:

EXHIBIT 1: "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for blacks to pick up their welfare checks."

EXHIBIT 2: "Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 per cent of all black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

EXHIBIT 3: An article on disturbances in Washington's Adams Morgan neighborhood was entitled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo."

EXHIBIT 4: Martin Luther King Jr. was characterized as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours" and "seduced underage boys and girls."

EXHIBIT 5: After Ronald Reagan signed legislation to declare Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, the newsletter said: "We can thank him (Reagan) for our annual Hate Whitey Day."

EXHIBIT 6: One of the Paul newsletter's reported that "gangs of black girls between the ages 12 and 14" roamed the streets of New York injecting white women with syringes that were possibly HIV-infected. Another argued that AIDS patients should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because "AIDS can be transmitted through saliva." (Editor's Note: It cannot.)

EXHIBIT 7: A 1990 newsletter speaks of "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to work for the Mossad (the Israeli secret service) in their area of expertise."

EXHIBIT 8: Commenting on the World Trade Center attack, a Paul newsletter said: "Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad. . .or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little."

In response, Ron Paul has stated: "The quotations. . .are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. 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."

A response to an article on the Paul publications in Washington Monthly had it on target by noting: Three choices: (1) Ron Paul is or was a racist; (2) Ron Paul published racist rants which he didn't believe for political or financial advantage; (3) Ron Paul published a newsletter named after himself for decades, but didn't bother to find out what was in it.

Paul's defense is not much helped by the fact that he was the only member of Congress in 1999 to oppose the issuance of a Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks, and only last May said in an interview that he opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Ron Paul is now running third in the national polls of GOP presidential candidates. Whether he sinks or rises in these snapshots of Republican opinion in the wake of the exposure of what appeared in his newsletters may expose the dark underside of the nation.

A shameful segment of American society still does indeed exhale what Gerald White Johnson some 70 years ago called "the moldy breath of bigotry." Just how large this portion is cannot be known. Nor can it be reasonably argued that everyone casting a vote for either Ron Paul or Rick Perry is a bigot. What can be said without fear of contradiction is that if either Paul or Perry is the Republican nominee running against an incumbent African American president, it will be the ugliest, most chilling election in the history of the United States.
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