Interesting Ron Paul Ad

Excellent ad!

Here, a writer tries to reconcile Ron Paul's racist newsletters with his evident respect for the guy. Too much agonizing here.

Myself, I am not so bothered by the content of the newsletters. The kind of post-60's racism evident in them was quite common in conservative circles back in the 1970's through 1980's. At that time, I lived in Arizona, and rented from a fellow, who, like Ron Paul, was a physician, and who uttered lots of very similar sentiments. In addition, my landlord hailed from Alabama and kept a surreptitious segregationist library, so, if anything, he was even more racist than Paul. Opposition to celebrating MLK's birthday was common in conservative circles in Arizona, and briefly even made part of state policy by Governor Evan Mecham. That opposition was rooted, in part, in scorn for supposed communist influence, but racism was always the (usually unspoken) subtext. Today, that particular racism has withered, replaced by growing fear of illegals crossing the border. Times changed, and conservatives changed with them.

I prefer to have racism out in the open and not buried under strictures of political correctness. Today, Paul is denying he wrote his newsletters, which is an unfortunate response to modern-day political pressure. I'm sure most of his readers in the 80's were similarly racist and would have read the newsletters hardly noticing the racist elements.

But time moves on.

Ron Paul's miserliness would be a catastrophe for the domestic economy, but it would be a breath of fresh air for foreign policy. The Pentagon and its allies have made Al Qaeda the successor to the USSR in its quest for huge budgets, but they might well meet their match with Ron Paul. It might be well worth the sacrifice to have U.S. imperial overreach finally brought to heel.