Like A Blimp, He's Full Of Hot Air, Part 3

The NY Times finally gets around to taking down Ron Paul, something that should have been done years ago.

But a look at the trajectory of Mr. Paul’s career shows that he and his closest political allies either wittingly or unwittingly courted disaffected white voters with extreme views as they sought to forge a movement from the nether region of American politics, where the far right and the far left sometimes converge.

In May, Mr. Paul reiterated in an interview with Chris Matthews of MSNBC that he would not have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing segregation. He said that he supported its intent, but that parts of it violated his longstanding belief that government should not dictate how property owners behave. He has been featured in videos of the John Birch Society, which campaigned against the Civil Rights Act, warning, for instance, that the United Nations threatens American sovereignty.

In the mid-1990s, between his two stints as a Texas congressman, Mr. Paul produced a newsletter called The Ron Paul Survival Report, which only months before the Oklahoma City bombings encouraged militias to seek out and expel federal agents in their midst. That edition was titled “Why Militias Scare the Striped Pants Off Big Government.”

An earlier edition of another newsletter he produced, The Ron Paul Political Report, concluded that the need for citizens to arm themselves was only natural, given carjackings by “urban youth who play whites like pianos.” The report, with no byline but written in the first person, said: “I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self-defense. For the animals are coming.” 

As Dave Weigel points out, this is not news.  Ron Paul has been taking support from white supremacists and various and sundry other assclowns for years now, and mobilizing them as the base of the "new libertarianism" has been the key for a very, very long time.

The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement." Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks," which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an "unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America."

Ding ding ding!  If that sounds like that's exactly what the FOX-ified media and the GOP has been doing ever since Barack Obama burst onto the national political scene as a primary candidate, then congratulations, you've figured out the Republican path to "victory" in 2010 and 2012.  Rothbard's ideas have been turned into the Tea Party of today in direct response to President Obama some 20 years later.

The real question is not "How did Ron Paul get a pass on this" but "How did the entire GOP get a pass on this?"  No matter who the candidate is for the Republicans in 2012, the GOP strategy is corning the white vote through racism, pure and simple.  Ron Paul is too overt for it to work.  Romney on the other hand, well he might be able to sell it.

But either way, it's all the GOP has left, and they're going for broke.  And it's vitally important that we recognize that the Rothbard/Paul/Rockwell "50 State Southern Strategy" is now in full force.