Isn’t it interesting that the person who seems least concerned with tracking down the “real” author behind the Ron Paul newsletters is Ron Paul? On CNN yesterday, the presidential candidate looked honestly dumbfounded when anchor Ali Velshi pointed out that Paul could just put this issue to rest by asking his former newsletter employees whether any of them wrote the controversial articles (via Matt Welch at Reason):
Ali Velshi: Are you comfortable in telling us who did write them? You haven’t been able to sort of tell us specifically who wrote them.
Paul: No. I don’t, I really don’t know. Twenty years ago I had six or eight people helping with the letter, and I was practicing medicine, to tell you the truth, and, I do not know.
Ali Velshi: Well, we could find out. Because you had six or eight people, is it one of those six or eight people?
Paul: [extended pause] Well, possibly, I could, but …
Ali Velshi: I guess, as you get closer to being president of the United States, folks will want to know that you don’t really dislike black people or people with AIDS, and things like that.
Paul’s answer here stretches credulity: You mean just flat-out ask the eight people who were writing the newsletter at the time which one of them wrote the racist comments? Well, possibly I could, but…
But what? Why hasn’t that already been done? It seems like a fairly simple way to get to the bottom of this.
Amazingly, Paul’s fans also seem to have little interest in clearing his name. While many of them acknowledge that the content in the newsletters was abhorrent, they also dismiss it as something that happened “twenty years ago.” But there’s no statute of limitation on racism for politicians, and Paul has voiced his controversial positions on civil rights and the Jewish state throughout his career.
It shouldn’t be difficult to track down the six or eight people who allegedly worked for Paul’s newsletters in the early 1990s. If Paul hasn’t questioned them yet, it probably won’t be long before someone in the media does this for him.
