Since I sometimes have trouble cramming in a few minutes or hours for blogging, Random Observations is hardly your one-stop-shop for late-breaking news. (Unless you consider the attack on Fort Sumter a current event.) But I think this is relevant enough to the blog that I need to mention it here.

While "Doc W" and I were hashing it out about Ron Paul a few days ago (Doc was insisting it was somehow unfair for me to point out that Ron seems a bit, uh, fixated on Israel and "the Jewish lobby") The New Republic was busy exposing racist dirt they'd uncovered in Ron Paul's 1990s newsletters.

Given TNR's leftist slant, it's a bit funny, at times, reading breathless revelations that Ron Paul's writings contained "distrust of a federally regulated monetary system" (no!), that Jimmy Carter's Panama Canal giveaway was a an idiotic idea (never mind that the Chinese now control it), and complaints that AIDS-related issues were being disproportionately funded because gay rights groups are politically effective.

But then there some stuff which isn't amusing in the slightest, about which liberals, conservatives -- and one would hope also libertarians -- should rightly be disturbed:

While bashing [Martin Luther] King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a passage titled "The Duke's Victory," a newsletter celebrated Duke's 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Senate primary. "Duke lost the election," it said, "but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment."

Not to mention a large warmed-over dollop of Charlie Manson's "Helter Skelter" race war narrative:

This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities".... Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter's author--presumably Paul--wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming."

And of course the usual obsession with the Bilderbergs, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Affairs, (yes -- I was sooo wrong to imply Ron Paul was a "conspiracy theorist"!) -- but also, no shock, an intense fixation with one particular nation:

The newsletters display an obsession with Israel; no other country is mentioned more often in the editions I saw, or with more vitriol. A 1987 issue of Paul's Investment Letter called Israel "an aggressive, national socialist state," and a 1990 newsletter discussed the "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise." Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newsletter said, "Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little."

The Paul camp is, of course, claiming Ron didn't write this stuff himself. But TNR and others wonder how it could go out under his name, in his own newspaper for nearly a decade. And I'd also add: If Paul's past words and positions aren't his own, then how can we also know who's really pulling his strings now?

No offense, but given similarity with his own stances today, it's at least deceptive to imply he's innocent because he didn't write it, and, frankly, it wouldn't shock me to learn his assertion of uninvolvement was an outright lie, like many of the personal attacks he's leveled against others. (I say this based on my own direct research of his writings; I am not repeating second-hand claims here.)

The real shame here is that this had to be exposed by the left, in a way which allows them to conflate reasonable criticism of special interest groups (including those with racial and sexual affiliation) with a personal hatred for blacks and gays; to conflate valid criticism of government excess with the kind of loony conspiratorial thinking ("the proof is that there is no evidence!") which is more common to the left today.

The very people who are out there supporting Ron Paul -- many of them good Christians and conservatives, people who claim people with their views or affiliations were responsible for ending slavery -- should have been the first people willing to listen to and even dig into these sorts of allegations.

Instead, they were out there reflexively supporting a guy who seemed a bit too good to be true, and told them everything they wanted to hear. You do that, you become a tool of the devil, mark my words.

(The key points to look out for, again, are blame-America-first thinking, conspiratorial thinking, and an obsession with Jewish influence. Please, people, let's learn something from prewar Germany. Any time your writing begins to resemble the state-run Arab-language press, you need really need to step back and rethink.)

To her credit, Virginia Postrel posts a letter from one repentant couple:

My wife and I were big Ron Paul supporters (until yesterday, in fact). We're also 29 and 30 years old, which means we weren't paying attention to Ron Paul in the 90's. We donated money to the campaign, and I suppose we failed to do the due diligence on Paul, as we didn't dig through archives of his old newsletters. We feel terrifically betrayed, not only by Ron Paul, but by older libertarians like yourself for not publicly warning us about him. If you knew he was such bad news and that he was becoming one of the biggest mainstream representatives of libertarian thought, why didn't you warn us? I've been reading your work for about ten years, and I consider you a very fair and smart writer and if you had given a public warning about Ron Paul, I, for one, would have listened. But now my wife and I and probably thousands of other young libertarians and libertarian sympathizers have been tricked into supporting something that sickens me... I'm stunned by what Ron Paul turned out to be...

(He also seems surprised that "even" Andrew Sullivan was taken in, indicating he's still got a lot to learn about judging character.)

Friends, I'm probably as big a critic of leftism as anyone you'll ever meet, but we should be far more offended by misbehavior among the people who are allegedly numbered among us. Such people can do far more damage to your cause than your enemies ever will.