Ron Paul (Never) Made Money from and Used Hate

Today, thanks to an article in the Washington Post entitled "Ron Paul signed off on racist newsletters in the 1990s, associates say," people can finally affirm, with confidence, the exact same things most people have been claiming for months:

[People] close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the [racist] newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.

“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman.

The Paulite rationalization has always been that he didn't mean these things published under his own name. And, more importantly, he didn't know.

Yet a review of his enterprises reveals a sharp-eyed businessman who for nearly two decades oversaw the company and a nonprofit foundation, intertwining them with his political career. The newsletters, which were launched in the mid-1980s and bore such names as the Ron Paul Survival Report, were produced by a company Paul dissolved in 2001.

The company shared offices with his campaigns and foundation at various points, according to those familiar with the operation. Public records show Paul’s wife and daughter were officers of the newsletter company and foundation; his daughter also served as his campaign treasurer.

Tampa GOP Debate: Deleted Scenes, Despicable Whores

Yesterday, GQ ran an article I wrote on NBC's Republican Presidential Debate, which was conducted at the University of South Florida in Tampa. If you haven't read it, please go check it out. Otherwise most of this won't make sense.

I tried to rationalize not going. I deeply dislike these people, and their fans sometimes seem even worse. After all, they could choose leaders from among the great teeming possibilities of humanity in this country, and they instead chose Newt, Mittens, the Butt-Lube Guy and the Paranoid Race Goblin with a publishing problem. It's like the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, only the thing that crumbles is America, and choosing poorly doesn't have any direct punishment for them.

I broke down and went. After all, if I was willing to drive to see Rays games back when their starters were so bad that they posted 14.00 ERAs, I am already accustomed to commuting for failure. Besides, maybe something fun would come of it. When GQ said they were interested in some local color, that sealed the deal.

It went a bit long, and their blog format accommodates only one graphic per article. What that means, of course, is deleted scenes—and many pictures! My friend and local director Jonathan Wolding was nice enough to come with me at the last minute and take pictures of the spectacle. (You may remember him from the photos for the "Awake the State" anti-Rick Scott rally.) As always, click to embiggen.

GQ: Obama Dumb!

As part of their DEATHRACE 2012 coverage, the good people at GQ.com asked me to talk about the frequent Republican refrain — and sometimes dog-whistle racist appeal — that Barack Obama is essentially stupid.

Even when they don't have the stones to make the case directly, GOP candidates run to old lines about "the teleprompter" (a device every politician uses), or echo the sighing smug-fuck paternalism of someone like Mitt Romney, who says that Obama is a "nice man" who's just "in over his head." Barack Obama's being dumb is an empty claim that explains everything and requires no actual intellect or analysis.


Click the aw-geez Obama to be taken to GQ.

World War Newt

Years ago Newt Gingrich stumbled on a pretty good idea: garnish any policy proposal with multiple historical analogies or references to significant events and hope that one resonates with the audience.

History moves us; it bestows on us the sense that the mundane moments we endure are part of an as-yet unperceived grand narrative. Newt's schtick is that he alone perceives this narrative, and it works for two reasons.

One, as I said in a piece at Vice:

We Americans don't read as much as we ought, and our self-consciousness about this tends to make us reflexively credit anyone who claims he does. Gingrich tendentiously delivers policy banalities while citing books he's read or written, and it's easy to think, "Ah, a learned observation." It's the political equivalent of going to someone's house, seeing his 2,000-book library, and feeling uncomfortable about correcting him, even if everything he says makes him sound like Cliff Clavin.

Two, critics and historians are busy people. They don't have time to correct Gingrich on every point, because corrections require examining his statement, then having to explain where he and history parted ways.

Gingrich himself games this process by invoking history constantly, as if in a kind of endless filibuster against an authentic record of America that he dearly hopes to eliminate through repetition. Not only does he throw facts at the American people to see which ones stick, he also throws so many at intellectuals that eventually their exhaustion, disgust or crowded schedules will permit him to get away with one. He did this again last night, at CNN's South Carolina Republican Debate.

VICE: The GOP's Seemingly Never-Ending Debates

My editor at Vice asked me to say something about the interminable Republican debate schedule. He's a nice person, and worth following on Twitter, so I can't bring myself to hold this request against him.

If one thing leaps out at anyone watching more than a few of them, it's the homogeneity of the ideas and approaches presented. Click the Bachmann to read more:


Due to space constraints, one thing that I wished I could have talked about more was this: if you confine people to a tiny ideological sphere and then demand they differ from one another, all you can expect are marginal conflicts born more out of personal testiness than significant engagement with concepts.

Thus you have those moments when Romney and Gingrich — or any pair (last night it was Santorum and Gingrich) — turn to face each other, conflate minor quibbles into massive ideological breaches and bitchily try to undermine each other via forgettable clauses. When you see this, you're seeing the political equivalent of two clone-stamped 1980s valley girls arguing over whether Corey Feldman or Corey Haim is the hottest person on the planet. It only matters because the people involved are this fucking emptyheaded, and they only came to blows on this issue because they insanely both accept the underlying thesis that, "The most beautiful person on the planet is named Corey." This is The Lost Boys as politics, only substitute interpretations of "Reagan" for "Corey," make a drinking game out of it, and you will die soon.

'The General's Fiction': A Military Internment of Literature — No. 1

Note: For discussion of Muslim figures in literature, we turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. His multi-part series on Libya, Slouching from Benghazi, resumes later this year.


Amazing Gaze: The Western Eyes of Soulful Scribbler Caleb Powell
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"'Algonquian women in New England,' wrote William Wood in 1634, were 'more loving, pitiful, and modest, mild, provident, and laborious than their lazy husbands.' Wood imagined that oppressed Indian women would gladly embrace European gender roles with their presumably lighter burdens of female domesticity."
— Kirsten Fischer

The holidays are long over. Liquor sales have stabilized; few of the year-end suicides remain undiscovered, and, if you are like me, you have a major haul of gifted books. Stacked on my bedside table, towering over my bloated, holly-jolly frame, the books are a leering accusation: "You're like all the others," sniffs The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. "Just direct me to the bookshelf best situated to intimidate your landlord."

As I limply cast aside the hose of my opium huqqa, ash sprinkling the datemaki sash of my authentic silken Nipponese kimono, I despair: literature is dead. Then suddenly, there is a change. There is a Powellful discovery. Who is Caleb Powell? A question I pondered not two weeks ago — now I have some sense of the answer, of an author who asserted himself in my mind's eye. Thus far, his vision has been inscribed only within a few brave avant garde presses, like Prick of the Spindle, Yankee Pot Roast, and Zyzzyva. I aim to change this.

In this special inaugural issue of "The General's Fiction," I invite you to imbibe deeply of the rose-colored drippings of Caleb Powell — author, stay-at-home father, poet. Let us, in the words of the late, great Christopher Hitchens, "let in daylight upon the magic."

VICE: Settle Down About Mitt Romney

I meant to post this last week, but illness got in the way.

The head of steam Mittens generated from New Hampshire and his early polling data in South Carolina inspired a lot of easy predictions and overreach from the punditocracy. The word "inevitable" creeped in overnight, despite the conditions that attended his New Hampshire victory and the possible responses that other candidates might have.

Click Mitt to read the rest on Vice:


This Saturday's vote looks like it will go to him as well, but thankfully the results are not in yet, which makes the above-linked column still somewhat relevant. Read it now, before it withers on the vine!

Shantytown on the Fourth Estate

I think we were very deferential because in the East Room press conference it's live. It's very intense. It's frightening to stand up there. Think about it. You're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.
— Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times writer, March 20, 2003

Yesterday, New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane solicited reader input with an opening sentence so viscerally and efficiently dumb that it's almost sublime: "I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about." Essentially, the ombudsman of the most important newspaper in America crowdsourced the idea that reporters might do their jobs.

The response was electric, and a majority of it featured the word "stupid," all of it deserving. Brisbane managed to pull off a stupid trifecta even before moving on from the lede:

1. He asked a question whose reply — YES — was almost guaranteed, making the asking a waste of everyone's time.
2. He asked a question whose obvious reply the Times might not embrace, trolling its readership with the illusion of valuing its voice in the discourse.
3. He showed the world that he was a person who had thoughts this simple and that the New York Times is willing to pay a person like this to head up its public accountability department.

Then, after provoking a giant readership on a topic this compelling and distressing, either Brisbane or someone else closed the comments section on his piece. Instantly, it evinced to critics that reader input — which was almost uniformly critical — would not be needed if it continued to fall on the undesirable side of the issue.

Still, as easy as it is to dismiss this as the unsupervised elementary thought experiment of a hack shunted to the reader complaint bureau, it's hard to shake the notion that the experiment was cannily structured. It's worth taking a look at how much work all its stupidity manages to accomplish in its favor.

CNN Sucks Really Bad

This article is part two in our Sucks Really Bad series. For part one, please see, "Newsweek Sucks Really Bad."

Unless you've spent a lot of time lately sitting in airports or being over 60 and scared to death of Mexicans, you probably haven't been watching CNN at all. Good.

The Daily Show and our national weariness with 24-hour news has made mocking CNN fashionable, but that doesn't mean that it isn't also reasonable. As tired and easy as it is to pause at a cocktail party to inveigh against the spackled shallowness of Snooki, it doesn't change the fact that Snooki is cultural garbage.

If you watched CNN's coverage of Tuesday night's Iowa Caucus results, you saw something of almost zero informational value being wasted at great expense. To achieve the same effect in your own home, take 20 singles, station a dog in front of your toilet, then make it watch you flush them one by one. It doesn't understand what you're doing, and what you're doing is essentially meaningless, but, hey: MONEY TOILET.

CNN doesn't settle for merely one MONEY TOILET. On Tuesday, it had both the MAGIC SCREEN, the SOCIAL MEDIA SCREEN, and, of course, Wolf Blitzer.

Kim Jong-il: Welcome to Godhood

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article comes from a real, live person: Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, former Supreme Leader of North Korea and General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, who evades foreign intelligence agencies by pretending to work the finance beat for the press in another Asian country. He last wrote about North Korea to debunk entertaining myths about the DPRK. He joins us today for his funeral.


Dear Leader
by KIM JONG-IL

If you're reading this, Jong-un, my spirit has already departed my totally ripped bod and is now soaring with the Manchurian cranes above the sacred peaks of Mt. Paektu. I probably expired after a lifetime of on-the-spot field guidance and direction finally depleted my physical resources.

This is more exhausting than most people think. I mean, your average Kim Joe-Blow might believe that a nuclear physicist is capable of splitting atoms without the Leader's input, or that a seventh-generation pig farmer has a suitable degree of animal husbandry knowledge without the Leader weighing in. Well let me tell you, we did not crack the top 200 nations in terms of GDP per capita (suck my chubby, Lesotho and Bangladesh!) by delegation.

It's an unfortunate truth, but our peoples are really, really shit stupid, and they need to be shown how to do everything. I swear, I don't know how many times I had to tell Jo Jae-yong, manager of the Huichon Ryonha General Machinery Plant in Jagang Province, to keep on making some machines.

"Faster, Jae-yong!" I'd say, "I don't care that you don't have any more sheet metal because we reneged on paying our Chinese suppliers. Use Juche!"

Conlin

by JONATHAN BERNHARDT

Perhaps we never liked him anyway.

The baseball writers of my age and generation have found former Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin's fall from grace easier than most to deal with, though not comfortable. Given almost any other impetus, comfort we would have found; before this week, I knew Conlin almost wholly as a wide, pompous ass of the institution, the moron who vomited forth the line, "The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler's time on earth: I'm sure he would have eliminated all bloggers."

He was as an obnoxious intellectual nothing of Philadelphia sports thought, a man emblematic of ways of thinking left behind in real time, similar in many respects to Murray Chass, the former New York Times baseball reporter who to this day insists his online column is not a "blog" because of the gulf he believes yawns between his and bloggers' professionalism.

That is the only way in which the two men are similar. I apologize to Murray Chass for putting his name alongside Conlin's, and that should say all that needs be said about the severity of the accusations leveled against the Daily News columnist. When a man casually opines that Hitler should have murdered you and yours, there's a fair few things he can do to make you uncomfortable about his undoing; Conlin did possibly the worst.

Last Tuesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Nancy Phillips published a story alleging that Conlin molested four children between the ages of seven and twelve during the 1970's, among them his own niece. The other victims were friends of his children. Since then, another three have come forth to allege abuse at Conlin's hands.

It is impossible to feel any satisfaction over this. The concept itself is sickening.

Burn in Hell, Christopher Hitchens

Note: For discussion of Middle Eastern affairs, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part III: Killing the Bastard Bin Laden, Stage IV of the American Fever Dream.


Reflections in a Gimlet Eye
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
— Voltaire

Hitchens was human trash, and his corpse should be interred in a grave worthy of his towering legacy, an eternally burning garbage fire, rising as high as a Baghdad sunrise, a smoky immolation of all the worthlessness that could be crammed in his "contrarian" paunch.

Even this dream, of the phoenix never rising from the ashes, preserves that peasant’s megalomania more powerfully than any embalming fluids currently coursing through his veins. Formaldehyde's more potable than his lifeblood's cocktail of lies and booze, a tincture only the diseased imbibe. Hitchens was strictly for suckers, a mouse that roared, a VH1 I Love the 80s panelist with a fancy accent, a rap sheet and cirrhosis. "Rationalist," "skeptic," "contrarian," "public intellectual" — court jester. He plied that ancient trade for the deadliest predators on Earth; his was the reflexive, suck-up, kick-down cruelty of the British madding crowd. That’s all, folks.

To cite an author he hamfistedly emulated (more or less successfully), Hitchens was Squealer the pig, a silver-tongued correspondent to the middlebrow, flattering of power, contemptuous of the weak, the bashful, the foreign — the sincere. He was a kept man to the bitter end, the part-time iconoclast. As Norman Finklestein recalled, "'The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat,' Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler's seizure of power. 'You always wore it the 'right' way around.'" Hitchens afflicted the weak and comforted the powerful, an abnegation of any public service a gadfly could perform. Though his Oxbridge accent and erudition were crucial in fleecing the provincials he knew the USA was composed of, it was his more American qualities that endeared him to the terminal-stage Republic.

The multiple comparisons to Lord Byron that Hitchens received are so disturbing as to deserve no response. I'll try anyway. Byron — a superhuman defender of the voiceless, an impossibly good-looking sex machine, the noble son of "Mad Jack" Byron and sole voice in excoriating the destruction of Ireland, a Bengal tiger capable of ripping apart any of Wordsworth's reactionaries in verse or in person, a man disgusted by the fatuous, self-satisfied corruption of the Tory elite and the once-radical Lake poets (who should "change their lakes for oceans"), a man contemptuous of an imperial masculinity defined by cruelty and weakness, fled that stinking island — died a hero's death in Greece, fighting empire.

Hitchens died in Houston, Texas, headquarters of Halliburton.

Game Over: Scans of Over 50 Ron Paul Newsletters

For a certain segment of the Ron Paul fanbase, no evidence of his disseminating hateful, paranoid material will ever be enough. Citing James Kirchick's piece in The New Republic wasn't sufficient, because Kirchick could have just been "making everything up." Then, when I and others posted copies of "The Ron Paul Political Report Special Issue on Race Terrorism," that too wasn't convincing.

"Proof that he said/endorsed racist things? Hardly. Doing it repeatedly in one document isn't enough to prove that he did it. Now, if there were many documents..."

Well, now there are many documents. Over fifty. Right here.

As I said in my rundown on the Paul platform over at Vice, reasonable fans of Dr. Paul now must accept that

there's no way Paul could have been ignorant of the content [of] 8-12 page newsletters published under his name for over ten years. Paul supporters face three losing propositions:

• He lacks the competency to control content published under his own name for over a decade, and is thus unfit to lead a country.
• He doesn't believe these things but considers them a useful political tool to motivate racist whites, which makes him fit to be a GOP candidate, but too obvious about it to win.
• He's actually a racist, which makes him unfit to be a human being.

Further, you can't dismiss this in the name of higher political or socioeconomic aspirations. Since Paul has no chance of winning — seriously, no chance at all — his only value is as a voice, a conduit for principles. And if your only hope is to change the discourse by amplifying ideas, you can do that via many voices and avenues. As I said in my Vice follow-up, acknowledging some of Paul's good ideas,

when you opt to support anti-imperialist and civil liberties ideals by supporting Paul the Candidate, you end up supporting everything else about him. That includes those newsletters and the unambiguous message to those who enjoy them: You can write these things and succeed; this works. The other good ideas to which he's signatory can't erase the fact that he put his name to those words printed above. The moral weight of those newsletters drags down even the most high-minded aspirations he has about civil liberties, and everything crashes down on all of us.

It's fine to have convictions about things he believes in. But when you voluntarily whitewash his record or choose to ignore it and champion him anyway, you are complicit in supporting the idea that racism and homophobia are morally inconsequential to the process of running for President of the United States. And, while many Paul supporters consider racism a social injury subordinate to extra-legal military conflict, there are just as many who disgustingly handwave at racism because it's an inconsequential burp on the way to more tax cuts, Free Markets, Free Money, Free Black Peop — stuff for me!

And still, for the faithful, this will not be enough.

Below, I've tried to give helpful general (bold) titles to each excerpt of the various Ron Paul newsletters available. These come courtesy of a zipfile of scans sent to me by reader Heresiarch, who, along with others, compiled it from various sources — although the lion's share, if not all, come from James Kirchick, who wrote the original, big Ron Paul story in The New Republic, in 2008. (You can see many of his highlights on the scans.) I have omitted the over 65 pages of scanned federal earmarks Ron Paul requested for his district, in a fit of States' Wants pique. I have also omitted the scans of Von Mises Institute brochures about a Secession Conference at which Paul spoke.

No attempt has been made to organize these via topic, since pages of each newsletter are apt to feature mini-articles on multiple topics, making organization futile. (My summaries don't indicate all that go on in the scans, so please click away.) Finally, below some of the scans, I've offered some comments in plain text. Those within quotation marks are direct quotes from the text appearing in the newsletter scans. Those without quotation marks are my own observations.

VICE: Nobody Likes You, Jon Huntsman

Beaten down by years of feckless centrist candidates with no interest in the working class, Democratic voters turn to increasingly bizarre outlets for signs of rescue. Seemingly since 2000, they've annually flirted with some new Republican hopeful — a mythic, "Reasonable One" — whose bipartisan appeal will somehow unite the country and deliver... the same sort of feckless centrist anti-working-class policies they despise from their own candidates. Maybe it's the bad-boy stigma of it all. "Sure, he's going to fuck me, but he's so cool. He won't even pretend like he was that interested in it afterward!"

Jon Hunstman stands ahead of the other candidates as this election's Reasonable One, and somehow makes the exercise in anticipating disappointment even dumber than normal. After all, there is no Reasonable One in the modern Republican Party: an ideologically intolerant and rabid base ensures the instant punishment of the weak, the compromisers, the humanely tolerant. Worse, even if Huntsman — the aw shucks, regular guy, son-of-a-billionaire — were to govern exactly as he likes and not while fearing the teaparty lash, he's still not "The Reasonable One."

Lastly, he doesn't even have the decency to be ruggedly indifferent and overpowering. When America goes to bed with and gets used by the wrong guy, we want someone to make us feel like it was our fault afterward. Huntsman is the sort of person who'd apologize so much about having an early meeting that we'd all just beg him to leave.

Click Jon's pic below to be taken to the Vice article...


...and see for yourself what all this has to do with two porn stars and Newt Gingrich.