Jan 8, 2008
TNR Hit Piece on Ron Paul
Well the long-awaited Jamie Kirchick hit piece on RP is up at The New Republic. The Paulites are already drilling him a new one in the comments. Kirchick argues that all of RP's old newsletters show he's a racist, homophobic, anti-semitic, cranky loon. We've been down this road before of course, and Paul and the campaign has responded to some of this stuff.
Just a few reactions of my own:
1. Like many of the RP supporting commenters, I'd like to see scans of the actual newsletters so the full context can be seen. UPDATE: the scans are here. (HT: Jason Briggeman.)
2. Some of what those newsletters say I would call racist etc., but certainly not all of it and perhaps not even the majority of it. Criticism of Israel is not ipso facto anti-Semitic and I see nothing in the piece that I would call anti-Semitic. Name calling isn't the same thing as racism - Barbara Jordan frequently did play the victim and was, arguably, a socialist. Some of what Kirchick sees as ugly is also just policy disagreement. Some of it is bad though.
3. I found it interesting that Kirchick made an explicit connection to the Mises Institute and distinguished their"brand" of libertarianism from the more"urbane" of Cato or Reason. That will increase the fund raising at the Mises Institute for sure! As someone more sympathetic to the Cato/Reason brand, I do think differentiating those products is important and I'm glad Kirchick did so.
4. Kirchick's attempt to turn the Mises Institute's work on secession into ipso facto evidence of racism is really pathetic. In and of itself, of course, secession is very much a noble libertarian tradition. I guess it's naive to think that journalists are not so simple-minded as to be unable to separate the general principle of secession from the particulars of the Civil War. A smear job is a smear job. Of course the charge he's leveled here is an obvious risk when the same organization talks about secession and then also engages in Civil War revisionism and Lincoln bashing, and offers kind words about the Confederacy and the culture of the South.
In general, this is a mostly recycled set of charges that the campaign has dealt with before. My own view is that RP is not nearly as guilty as Kirchick would have it but he's also not innocent either. If you have a newsletter with your name on it and you have byline-free commentaries, some of which say some nasty stuff, you best be prepared to be called to account for it. As I said in my earlier series of posts, RP has walked the line with this stuff for a long time, so it's no surprise that it would be fodder for smear job that mixes unfair charges with accurate ones.
Just a few reactions of my own:
1. Like many of the RP supporting commenters, I'd like to see scans of the actual newsletters so the full context can be seen. UPDATE: the scans are here. (HT: Jason Briggeman.)
2. Some of what those newsletters say I would call racist etc., but certainly not all of it and perhaps not even the majority of it. Criticism of Israel is not ipso facto anti-Semitic and I see nothing in the piece that I would call anti-Semitic. Name calling isn't the same thing as racism - Barbara Jordan frequently did play the victim and was, arguably, a socialist. Some of what Kirchick sees as ugly is also just policy disagreement. Some of it is bad though.
3. I found it interesting that Kirchick made an explicit connection to the Mises Institute and distinguished their"brand" of libertarianism from the more"urbane" of Cato or Reason. That will increase the fund raising at the Mises Institute for sure! As someone more sympathetic to the Cato/Reason brand, I do think differentiating those products is important and I'm glad Kirchick did so.
4. Kirchick's attempt to turn the Mises Institute's work on secession into ipso facto evidence of racism is really pathetic. In and of itself, of course, secession is very much a noble libertarian tradition. I guess it's naive to think that journalists are not so simple-minded as to be unable to separate the general principle of secession from the particulars of the Civil War. A smear job is a smear job. Of course the charge he's leveled here is an obvious risk when the same organization talks about secession and then also engages in Civil War revisionism and Lincoln bashing, and offers kind words about the Confederacy and the culture of the South.
In general, this is a mostly recycled set of charges that the campaign has dealt with before. My own view is that RP is not nearly as guilty as Kirchick would have it but he's also not innocent either. If you have a newsletter with your name on it and you have byline-free commentaries, some of which say some nasty stuff, you best be prepared to be called to account for it. As I said in my earlier series of posts, RP has walked the line with this stuff for a long time, so it's no surprise that it would be fodder for smear job that mixes unfair charges with accurate ones.
Addendum: at some level, the very fact that Paul has a background such that these newsletters and their comments exist is the real problem here. Imagine what a libertarian candidacy without his baggage might have done.