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The Bible tells us that wise men came to visit the newborn Jesus, but it doesn’t say how many there were. So why is it that we popularly hear of three wise men visiting? Well, it turns out the fourth has been lost to history because his gift was completely unacceptable.

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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.

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It’s been like something from the kind of Christmas movie that doesn’t get made anymore. All over the country, anonymous people have been showing up at Kmart stores (and a couple of other chains) and paying for thousands of dollars worth of Christmas presents for strangers.

Nobody knows what’s going on. Nobody seems to have organized it. As far as anyone can tell, it’s just people voluntarily helping people — without having any politician or bureaucrat force them to.

I’d read about the phenomenon last week, and I saw a story in the Birmingham paper Tuesday about it happening at several local stores. The largest single contributor paid $6,400 at one local Kmart toward other people’s layaways. So what is going on?

I think it’s simple. There are a lot of really good-hearted people who truly want to help others. Maybe you don’t really have to hold a gun to folks’ heads to get them to want to help people. And maybe those folks prefer deciding for themselves what to do with the money they donate — instead of having government bureaucrats decide for them.

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