The Mystery of the Ron Paul Newsletters

Before it gets too much further along, Politico's Maggie Haberman has already published a piece which is intended to remind the supporters of Ron Paul of his alleged "skeletons." You know the story, the one about those old "newsletters."

In spite of my love for Ron Paul, I recognize that he has demonstrated in recent history his poor taste in choosing political advisers and staffers. Jesse Benton, his campaign-chairman-in-law, is the same dimwit who bungled many of the congressman's media engagements in 2007 and 2008. Benton's most prominent error resulted in setting up a literal "ambush interview" with Sacha Baron-Cohen's "Brüno Gehard" shot for Cohen's film in which the flamboyantly gay titular character attempted to produce a celebrity sex tape with the doctor. I doubt very strongly that this is the first time that Ron Paul has made such a mistake in hiring campaign personnel.

Having read at least one copy of the Ron Paul newsletter from PDF's I've found on the web (source and quotes below), I agree with the idea that the language does not match that of Dr. Paul. Before I get into that, however, I would like to discuss who might be responsible for the content of those letters, if it were not Ron Paul himself.

Lew Rockwell has been suggested as a possible source, but having read his work, I find it unlikely, particularly when viewed from the perspective that Rockwell himself is an academic. Gary North has also been suggested, but North's style doesn't fit either. One suspect rises to the top of my list with a link to Ron Paul via Lew Rockwell: Fred Reed.

Reed is a cantankerous curmudgeon of some notoriety. He wrote for the Washington Times as a "law-enforcement columnist," and prior to that served as a war journalist in Vietnam. His views on race relations, feminism, Israel and other hot-button issues are contrarian to say the least, and per Wikipedia, he refers to himself as an "equal opportunity irritant."

Why I suggest he might be the ghost-author comes from the fact that he and Ron Paul have similar perspectives on U.S. hegemony, war, the dollar, the economy as a whole, the two-in-one-party system and the nanny state. While Ron Paul writes books on these subjects in a plain-spoken, if sometimes dry, English, Reed peppers his prose with 10-dollar words and southern wit in an occasionally effective imitation of H.L. Mencken or Mark Twain.

Samples of Reed:
"King is a manufactured saint, as artificial as Kwanzaa, stage-managed by whites, turned by them into an impossible Father Theresa in black face to instruct me, trotted out by anchormen and anchor-bimbettes who recite their lines like bad actors who don't believe in their parts. Listen to them. Do they not sound like bored shills reading ads for a new miracle truss?
"Blacks are welcome to have a saint if they choose. I don't want him used as a moral truncheon by people who want to shape me."
--Fred Reed, "Martin Luther King"

"The platoon didn’t know why they were being picked on. If villagers didn’t want to get shot, they shouldn’t let heavily armed insurgents come into their village. At a thousand legion halls, members said war is war, people get hurt. You gotta expect it. The press are wimps, comsymps, unrealistic idealists. We need to unleash the troops, let them win."
--Fred Reed, "A Grand Adventure"

Excerpts from the Ron Paul newsletter (via LittleGreenFootballs, this is a link to a scanned PDF of one edition - big file):
"The mega-expensive stealth fighter-bombers that missed their targets in Panama, and which the government covered up, aren't so stealth either. A French newsmagazine reports that the Saudi radar can "see" the American stealth planes that are stationed there for the war against Iraq, although they are supposedly invisible to radar.

"The stealth planes can get closer (10.5 miles) than a regular aircraft before being detected, but no so close that they could avoid being shot down by an alert ack-ack crew."
--Newsletter, "Not So Stealth"

"So now even the establishment press admits that Martin Luther King plagiarized his PhD dissertation, his academic articles, his speeches, and his sermons.

"He was also a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration."
--Newsletter, "'Dr.' King"

If writing styles are like fingerprints, then certain words and patterns are like "markers." For example, the word "comsymp" appears both in Reed's article about war from 2010 and the newsletter's segment on MLK, while the Reed article on King similarly demonstrates the rather hostile tone toward the civil rights activist found in the newsletter. Further, the use of the phrase "ack-ack crew" sounds more reflective of the onomatopoeic shorthand of a former aspiring gonzo military journalist, somebody like Reed, than of the writings of a doctor-cum-congressman like Paul.

Back to the connection of Reed to Rockwell and subsequently Paul, Reed allows Rockwell to mirror selected articles on LewRockwell.com. Ron Paul, for whom Rockwell has never disguised his approval, has long-permitted Lew to publish and re-publish anything he likes.

Surprisingly, from what I have read of Fred Reed's articles, and even using the Google search option, I can find no mention or endorsement of Dr. Paul by Reed, in spite of their shared acquaintanceship with Lew, and similar views on war, drugs, etc. It doesn't simply appear to be an aversion to mentioning politicians by name, he's spoken openly about McCain, Clinton, Bushes I and II, and Obama, it appears to be a willful avoidance of Dr. Paul's existence. Why?

Perhaps the mysterious ghost-author/editor is Fred Reed, hired by Rockwell. It is plausible that Reed and Ron Paul parted ways a while back, never to mention their brief alliance due to the trouble it ultimately caused the now-candidate. So, Fred avoids discussing Ron and Ron refuses to cough-up the name of the writer of the newsletter, leaving it all to speculation, hoping that it will just all go away.

Unfortunately for the Paul campaign, certain people would prefer to discuss and write hit-pieces about some ridiculous, twenty-year-old newsletters (the ideas in which Paul has both publicly denounced and disavowed while demonstrating through his actions that he does not endorse them) instead of the major issues of America going bankrupt, the destruction of civil liberties under PATRIOT ACT and the threat of reprisal for U.S. imperial militarism.

--M.A. Hargett