What Ron Paul's 2nd Place at Ames Really Meant

I worked on the Paul campaign in 2007/2008, raising funds, organizing a 500-strong city-wide Meetup group, planning and executing rallies and marches, holding sign-wavings, renting booths at festivals, and ignoring my wife and kids while I wrote essays and articles on various blogs about how great it would be if Ron Paul were President and why I supported him.  Even though my support now comes in tapping out a few words on my laptop in the dwindling hours I have at the end of working each day, and I can't donate any money to his campaign thanks to paychecks being tighter than ever, I believe in his message.  Unfortunately, what I don't believe in are the American people, particularly the overwhelming majority American voters.

When Dr. Paul came in at a close second following the Iowa GOP straw poll on August 13, I felt a great excitement, mirroring the feelings I had watching the numbers tick higher and higher during the first completely organic money bombs of 2007, one of which actually being the origin of the name "tea party" adopted by the disgruntled wing of the Republican party.  I was, of course, frustrated, if not surprised, by the major media outlets, particularly those on television, ignoring the congressman's incredible finish at Ames, and I snickered at Jon Stewart's spot-on lampooning of his more "serious" news counterparts' willful avoidance of mentioning Ron's name and results.

Within a few days, however, I came to a startling realization.  The results of the Iowa straw poll told a different story than the one I had been imagining.  Ron Paul didn't lose by 200 votes to Michele Bachmann; he lost by 12,000 votes to the GOP.

You see, of the 16,000 voters present on Saturday, any vote that wasn't for Ron Paul was a vote for the same Neo-Conservative lies we've been hearing for decades.  DECADES.  Seventy-three percent (73%) of those in attendance preferred more warfare, more corporate welfare, more hate, more violations of civil liberties and more Wall Street banksterism in opposition to peace, individual responsibility, reason, freedom and sound money.  This is why the pundits are justified in ignoring Ron Paul.  It was no near-victory for a libertarian candidate; it was a decisive defeat of libertarian ideas.

Do I believe that active Paul supporters should give up?  No.  Do I believe the campaign should shutter its newly opened offices in Concord, New Hampshire?  Not at all.  Do I believe that the campaign should change its core values?  Heaven forbid!  What I am hoping is that if Ron Paul's supporters understand with greater clarity WHY he is being ignored by the mainstream media FOR GOOD REASON it will help to wake up the friends of liberty and the would-be supporters of Ron Paul to the reality of the world in which we live.  The American public and, based on the straw poll results, the Republican party are steeped in a powerful denial about the condition of the U.S. economy, the leviathan state, the evil of war, and how little time remains before the day of reckoning.

While Dr. Paul's showing at Iowa was impressive in comparison to four years ago, we must realize that it is only a first, and very tiny, step in the right direction. 

I'm a curmudgeon and a cynic, and although somebody, somewhere once said that these are the hallmarks of a frustrated optimist, I don't hold much hope for humanity, particularly of the American variety.  However, if YOU believe that tomorrow's history can be re-written today, if you believe that the actions of a diligent few can turn the tide of madness plaguing this present world, if you believe that peace can triumph over aggression, then now is the time to re-double and throw whatever weight you have into supporting Ron Paul and his campaign against these overwhelming odds.  Who knows?  In the Battle of Queenston Heights, the invaders outnumbered the defenders 4-to-1 and yet those same invaders were repelled successfully.

--M.A. Hargett

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

Scary Campfire Stories (or, tales the establishment tell each other at sleepaway camp)

Barry passed out the graham crackers to Nancy, Mitt, Ricky and Michele, and then fished in his knapsack for the marshmallows and chocolate. "Since you guys are from Camp Pachyderm across the lake while we're from Camp Mulesod, Nancy and I figured you'd never come to our bonfire."

Mitt spoke up first, "Well, while we're TOTALLY different from you, I like what you blue shirts did with the first aid shack, Barry.  It's kind of like what I did with first aid at Ol' Red," he pointed proudly to his red camp t-shirt.

Michele added, "Even though I didn't like the changes to first aid, I used to raise funds for camp the same way you guys do."

"I was worried that there might be girls here, so I made sure everybody had cooties shots, whether they wanted them or not!" said Ricky, the youngest of the campers.

After the s'mores materials had been distributed and everybody had eaten, Nancy pulled out a flashlight with an evil smile, "Anybody wanna tell spooky stories?"

"YEAH!" shouted all of the kids except Ricky.  He looked nervous.

"What'sa matter, Ricky?  You scared?" said Mitt.

"No!" replied Ricky.

"Maybe he wants his teddy bear, Mr. Bushie!" Michele teased.

"I do not," he said with less conviction.

"C'mon, are we telling scary stories or not?" said Barry.

Nancy said, "Since I brought the flashlight, I go first!"

Her story began, "There was this mean old doctor who lived out by the lake. Nobody knows his name anymore, because people were too scared to say it or even write it!

"So, one day a rich banker named Fred Reserve came into his office complaining about feeling depressed. The doctor took one look at him and said, 'I know just the thing,' and he CHOPPED OFF HIS HEAD!  The body wriggled and jerked for almost a minute afterward.  Then the mean old doctor took Fred's wallet and set it on fire, burning away all of his money and credit cards!"

The campers shrieked.  Of course, after a minute they all started giggling, knowing that no such thing could ever happen, all, that is, except little Ricky, who looked very frightened.

"Ooooh, Ricky!  Do you think the big bad doctor's gonna get you?" taunted Mitt.

"No," said Ricky quietly.

"My turn," said Michele, snatching the flashlight, "It's about the same doctor.

"Around the same time as Nancy's story, the doctor was visited by an attorney named Patrick O'Tact.  Pat was such a great attorney that he would go around telling the police to arrest people he thought might commit crimes and stick them in jail even if they hadn't. He kept people safe, so it was okay.

"Pat told the doctor he was just in for a checkup.  So, the doctor looked him over and said, 'Stay right here, I've got something for you.'  The doctor went to his cabinet and pulled out a vial of poison, something called habeas corpus, I think that's Latin for 'house of corpses,' filled a needle with it, and shoved it into Pat's arm.  After a few seconds, Pat's body began to shrink away until all that remained was his shriveled, mummified skin clinging to his bones!"

Another scream erupted from the campers, followed by more laughter. Once again, Ricky refrained.  He looked like he was sick.

"Ricky's so scared!  You need your Bushie bear, Ricky?" chortled Nancy.

"No.  I'm just having a bad reaction to my cooties vaccine," Ricky said, his voice trembling.

Suddenly, there was a rustling among the brush. The kids all screamed, "It's the crazy killer doctor!"

Out from the tree line emerged an old man with twinkling eyes and a kind, if crooked, smile.  The children regrouped, feeling calmer.

"It's just some old guy," sighed Mitt.

The man spoke in a gentle voice, "Alright, kids.  Playtime's over.  Time to go home."

"Awww, man!" the campers said in chorus.  They put out their fire, packed away the last of the s'mores supplies and prepared to head back to their respective cabins.

"We thought you were the mean old doctor who lives by the lake," said Ricky.

"Well, I'm AN old doctor, and I live by A lake.  So, maybe I am?" answered the man.

"Nah, those stories are made up," replied Barry.

"Are you sure?" said the doctor, with a mischievous gleam in his eye, adding, "You don't mean the ones about Fred Reserve and Patrick O'Tact, do you?"

The kids howled in terror and scrambled away as quickly as they could.

"Was it something I said?" smirked the doctor.

--M.A. Hargett