New News!

A reader writes:

Today's New York Times has a prominent article essentially transcribing an attack on Ron Paul by James Kirchick (Marty Peretz's boy toy) that just appeared in the Weekly Standard (which was itself a rewrite of an old piece from the New Republic). Funny how publications of the left (the Times), the center (TNR) and the right (the Standard) all find common ground when someone like Paul emerges ...

Here's the News Story that was splashed heavily at the top of NYTimes.com last night: 

New Focus on Incendiary Words in Paul’s Newsletters 

By JIM RUTENBERG and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. 

Emerging as a real Republican contender in Iowa, Representative Ron Paul of Texas is receiving new focus for decades-old unbylined columns in his political newsletters that included racist, anti-gay and anti-Israel passages that he has since disavowed. 

The latest issue of The Weekly Standard, a leading conservative publication, reprised reports of incendiary language in Mr. Paul’s newsletters that were published about 20 years ago. 

A 1992 passage from the Ron Paul Political Report about the Los Angeles riots

which largely stopped on May 1, 1992

read, “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.” 

Disrespect toward looters and race rioters  is beyond the pale!

A passage in another newsletter asserted that people with AIDS should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva”; 

When everybody knows (or at least has been told, over and over) that AIDS can be transmitted by heterosexual sex as easily as by homosexual practices. What, do you think the HIV virus discriminates? To say that would be insensitive toward the HIV virus, libeling it by making it sound like Ron Paul.

in 1990 one of his publications criticized Ronald Reagan for having gone along with the creation of the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which it called “Hate Whitey Day.”

In contrast to December 1st, International AIDS Day, which the press celebrates annually as Hate Ronnie Day because Ronald Reagan caused the AIDS epidemic. (If you have doubts that it was Reagan's fault, then who are you going to blame? Gays? I don't think so.)

Here's the good part of New York Times article:

The magazine article largely matched a similar report in The New Republic in 2008, and it was written by the same author, James Kirchick.

Hey, I've got some four year old articles I'd like to recycle, too! Can I republish them in the Weekly Standard and then get them hyped in the NYT?

The passages were plucked from a variety of newsletters that Mr. Paul’s consulting business published during his years out of Congress, all of them featuring his name: Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Survival Report and Ron Paul Investment Letter. 

Mr. Paul did not respond to an interview request, but repudiated the writings in 2008. Likening himself to a major news publisher, he said he did not vet every article that was featured in his newsletters. “I absolutely, honestly do not know who wrote those things,” Mr. Paul said in an interview on CNN at the time, adding that he did not monitor the publications closely because he was busy with a medical practice and “speeches around the country.”

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer