Ron Paul can't keep dodging.

  

   Anyone who has kept up with recent presidential campaign politics is aware of the controversy about the Ron Paul news letters from previous decades. They were sent to subscribers and contained numerous offensive, racist, and nutty ideas. The New Republic has links and summaries of them here. I was aware of them during the 2008 election but I bought Paul's excuse that they were written by a ghostwriter and that he had little involvement in them. I still buy that, but a recent revelation (for me at least) has made me reexamine whether that explanation is enough.

  Some of the newsletters make it very clear from the way they were written that the author is supposed to sound like Paul. They are written in the first person  in a kind of "from the desk of..." style. My impression had been that all of them were written as random unsigned articles under the heading of the Ron Paul Newsletter. The fact that some were written in his voice and that some even bore a signature, makes me question his judgement. Even if he didn't write them, I question why a person would think such words are the sort of thing Paul would endorse. Paul needs to answer to these emails with a fuller explanation.

   If he didn't write them, then, to put it bluntly, the media will need a scalp. Whoever did write them needs to be offered up. If he did write them, then he needs to admit it and then get out of the race. Those are the only options. As much as I can't stand her, I think about how much more extreme the response would be against a Michele Bachmann if she had published similar articles under her name. Fairness dictates that Paul must answer for this, no matter how much I appreciate his dissenting views on foreign policy and the war on drugs.

GOP presidential candidate preference in descending order.

The candidates that this blog likes (or could live with) at this moment:

1. Jon Huntsman-a great background with experience as a governor, businessman, and ambassador. And a foreign policy that isn't neoconservatism but hasn't embraced isolationism either.

2. Gary Johnson-a very popular (in his state at least) former governor of New Mexico. Ron Paul with executive experience and less crankiness.

3. Ron Paul- just for the grand experiment his presidency would be. I predict a lot of gridlock, but maybe some meaningful reevaluation of our country's place in the world.

4. Mitt Romney- has definitely let a little bit of the meanness of the rest of the GOP field into his campaign, but at least he doesn't seem to preoccupied with Muslims, gays, or our "anti-colonialist" president.

Rick Perry enters pander mode.

In recent weeks we have witnessed two examples of a candidate drowning and grabbing onto anything that can pull his numbers up. That candidate is Rick Perry. Okay okay. I know this blog is sympathetic to Huntsman, and I'll admit that his numbers are low but at least they're so low that any movement has only been up (in New Hampshire at least). Perry's fall has been something to behold. He's even tied at 3 percent in some state polls with Huntsman. Perry's candidacy has been just as embarrassing and silly as Herman Cain's. But on to the panders...

Pander #1: this one hasn't gotten as much attention because of pander #2, but Perry recently went anti-Wall Street in a recent speech, which is fine and dandy for this blogger. But it's pretty hard not to see this as an attempt to grab some of the anti-Wall Street sentiment that is even on the right. After all, you'll see a few Ron Paul supporters and libertarians mixed in Occupy Wall Street crowds.

Pander #2: This is the biggie. In case you haven't seen the horrendous video, please enjoy:

 

I won't bore anyone trying to explain the BS and logical fallacies of this ad (The Daily Dish does a much better job of it here). But in putting the ad together it's as if the campaign put a list of hot button items that bother the most extreme cultural conservatives, threw darts at the list, and then picked the ones that the darts hit.  Thud (War on Christmas). Thud (prayer in schools).  Thud (gays in the military). Thud (Obama isn't really a Christian). 

Anyone who reads even just a little bit about Rick Perry would have a hard time believing that either pander #1 or #2 are very close to his heart.