Why scandal won’t sink Ron Paul

David Weigel

Slate.com

Ron Paul’s supporters are so enthusiastic, said David Weigel, that they cheerfully ignore “everything that makes him look bad.” Throughout his presidential campaign, Paul has insisted he knew nothing about the wildly racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic rants that filled his Ron Paul newsletter in the 1990s. But The Washington Post last week provided new evidence that Paul has been lying.

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His former secretary, Renae Hathway, told the Post that Paul “always got to see the final product,” while other aides and allies said Paul deliberately used an “outreach-to-kooks-and-bigots strategy” to solicit donations from white supremacists. So his newsletters stated, for example, that the 1992 Los Angeles riots ended “when it came time for blacks to pick up their welfare checks,” and that society was better off when homosexuals “were forced to hide their activities.”

If Paul were a real contender, this bile would end his campaign overnight. But Paul’s ragtag coalition of “Old Right conservatives and young liberal college students” could care less. They just want to keep their “anti–drug war, anti-tax spokesman on the debate stage next to Mitt Romney.”