Infonaut's Journal: Ron Paul's Racist Past

It's been touched on before in various Slashdot discussions, but the mainstream media is starting to pay more attention to Ron Paul, darling of the Internet libertarian set, and the attention isn't very flattering. An article in The New Republic, "Angry White Man" lays out in detail how Paul's newsletters have over the years published a wide variety of paranoid and racist material. As Cato Institute scholar Tim Lee points out, it's not really important whether Paul wrote the statements or someone else did. His name is on the publication. What sort of an executive doesn't take responsibility for statements made under his name?

It's a shame. Voters are looking for a third way, and for a time Ron Paul seemed a breath of fresh air. But when you get into the rough-and-tumble of presidential politics, everything is scrutinized. I'm thankful that the press is finally investigating Paul in more detail, but I suspect that many Paul supporters will try to pretend that he's still a worthy candidate. They'll ignore his "extensive interviews to the magazine of the John Birch Society" and they'll pretend his newsletters never contained headlines like this one about racial disturbances in the Adams Morgan district in Washington, D.C.: "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo."

That's not confronting political correctness. That's racism. I don't want a president who tolerates crap like this to be written under his name, whether by him or by someone else.

Not only that but..

[PopeRatzo]

He also does not believe in evolution. He's been asked about it several times publicly and has always answered, "Evolution is a theory, and it's not one that I happen to accept."

The guy is a little nuts, but I hope he stays in the race, if only to poison the GOP primaries.

I get worried when otherwise intelligent people, many of them around the Internets, buy into his lunacy.