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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Ron Paul isn’t a racist, but the old newsletters need a credible response

By David McElroy · December 23, 2011

Ron Paul isn’t a racist, but he’s shown remarkably poor judgment so far related to his old newsletters containing racially charged language. If you’re going to play in the Big Leagues, you have to play by Big League rules. His response to the newsletter issue so far has been completely Bush League.

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, here’s the issue. Back in the late ’80s and ’90s, Paul published a series of political newsletters as a moneymaking venture. They were written in his name, but he obviously didn’t write them. (I’ve ghost-written hundreds of pieces for clients in the past. It’s perfectly acceptable.) But some of the newsletters have racial language in them that I don’t find acceptable, and it’s hard for me to believe anybody else would.

The newsletters are aimed at a strongly conservative white audience. They paint the world in terms of good Christian white folks vs. the black “thugs” and gays who “hate Euro-American civilization and everything it stands for.” The framing of the issues is repugnant. In a direct mail piece advertising the newsletter, it goes far enough to forecast a “race war.” You just can’t come up with a good enough excuse to justify the content.

I think I understand what happened, at least from a political point of view. The people running the newsletter — which might or might not have actually included Paul — were targeting an audience of the Old Right, trying to build bridges between libertarian economic ideas and what those unreconstructed old-time conservatives already believed. Ever since the ’60s, various people have tried to build some sort of fusion between libertarians and existing groups. I see this as a misguided attempt to do that with the Old Right conservatives it was obviously written to appeal to.

The fact that I understand the political motivation of the newsletters isn’t enough to justify them — and it’s not enough to make reporters and others stop asking questions about them. In part, that’s because the response that Paul has given to the newsletters in the past has been clumsy and shifting. It hasn’t been the sort of response I would have preferred from someone who I see as principled as Paul is. I think it’s been a serious moral and political failing.

Now that Paul has come to be considered a serious presidential candidate in Iowa, it’s natural — and legitimate — for reporters to ask him harder questions and expect him to deal with them. So far, he hasn’t. Earlier this week, he walked out of a CNN interview when a reporter asked about the newsletters and didn’t let the question go when he wouldn’t talk about it. His supporters cheered his walking out, but it made it look as though he wasn’t willing to be up-front about something that’s going to concern a lot of right-thinking people.

Paul’s response to the issue has changed over the years. In 1996, he didn’t disavow them, but said the comments needed to be seen “in context.” (No, context doesn’t help.) Starting in 2001, he said he didn’t write the articles, but he explained that his staff told him not to explain that, because it was “confusing.” A campaign spokesman today says Paul was practicing medicine and didn’t write or approve the content of his newsletter.

I suspect the story from the campaign spokesman today is largely correct, but it doesn’t explain the issue away. It doesn’t explain why he allowed this to go on for years before eventually claiming he didn’t agree with the content. It was a complete moral failure that doesn’t line up with anything else about his public or private life, as far as I can tell. He needs to say exactly that.

If Paul does well in Iowa in about 10 days, this is going to become an even bigger issue. He needs to stop it now. He should have forcefully dealt with it years ago, but since he didn’t he needs to step up and deal with it as soon as possible. He needs to say something like this — as sincerely as he knows how:

“When those newsletters were written in my name, I was busy practicing medicine, so I didn’t actually write them,” he would say in my version of his statement. “Even though I didn’t write the articles and didn’t approve the content, it was still my moral responsibility because they were written in my name. I’m ashamed that I didn’t step up quickly and put a stop to it when I realized what was being said in my name, but I allowed it to continue instead. The things in there were an attempt to build bridges to a very conservative audience that believes many of those things, but I shouldn’t have allowed political considerations to get in the way of doing the right thing. I should have stopped it when I realized what was being said. I didn’t do that. I should have taken full responsibility for it more quickly, and I didn’t do that. The attitudes displayed there go against everything else in my public career and my private life. Being associated with those words is the worst thing that’s happened to me in public life. I want to apologize to my supporters for putting them in the position of having to deal with this issue. I want to apologize to the black people and the gay people who were smeared by some of those words. There’s nothing else I can say about it other than to say it was wrong. I’d like to put it behind me.”

That statement wouldn’t end things, but it would give people more respect for him and it would be a starting point for making the issue die. As it is right now, he’s going to spend every moment that he’s a serious candidate having to evade these questions. It’s time to deal with it.

And here’s the biggest irony in all of this. The biggest appeal that Ron Paul has is that he is the principled candidate. He’s the knight in shining armor who’s spent all these years in Congress doing the right thing and sticking to his principles. The other candidate are shameless liars and opportunists who’d say or do anything to be elected. Every other candidate is responsible for death and coercion in ways that “Dr. No” never will be. It’s ironic that he’s done such a poor job of dealing with this that a very obvious moral difference between Paul and the other serious contenders is getting lost.

Ron Paul isn’t a racist. I don’t see any evidence that he’s a bigot of any sort. I do see evidence that he’s taken some pathetically bad political advice about how to handle this issue. That’s what happens when you spend years as an also-ran and you suddenly find people taking you seriously. You’re not ready for the scrutiny that comes with being an actual contender.

I’ve made it very clear that I don’t believe Paul has a chance in the world of winning, but I’ve also made it clear that I’d be delighted if I were wrong. The inept way that this story has been handled by his political advisors tells me that there’s even more reason to doubt that has has any chance of being taken seriously by the time the convention rolls around.

The whole thing makes me truly sad, because he’s just about the only politician on the national stage who I’ve consistently had respect for over the years. I hope he’ll still step up and handle the issue better right now.

Note: After this article was written, I noticed that Reason magazine had a story offering detailed and balanced coverage Thursday of the newsletter controversy. More more from a publication that’s very sympathetic to Paul’s libertarian positions, take a look here.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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