Ron Paul Flip Flops On His Newsletter

Ron Paul, in an interview with Dave Wiegel for Slate.com, now admits that he did contribute to his own bigoted newsletter:

CALLER: Dr. Paul, how confident were you at the time that the newsletters that bore your name were representative of your views on taxes, on monetary policy, the Second Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, all the things that you hold dear? How confident were you that the newsletter accurately portrayed your views on those things?

PAUL: Well, the newsletters were written, you know, a long time ago. And I wrote a certain portion of them. I would write the economics. So a lot of what you just mentioned… his would be material that I would turn in, and it would become part of the letter. But there were many times when I didn’t edit the whole letter, and things got put in. And I didn’t even really become aware of the details of that until many years later when somebody else called and said, you know what was in it? But these were sentences that were put in, a total of eight or ten sentences, and it was bad stuff. It wasn’t a reflection of my views at all. So it got in the letter, I thought it was terrible, it was tragic, you know and I had some responsibility for it, because name went on the letter. But I was not an editor. I’m like a publisher. And if you think of publishers of newspapers, once in a while they get pretty junky stuff in newspapers. And they have to say that this is not the position of that newspaper, and this is certainly the case. But I actually put a type of a newsletter out, it was a freedom report, investment, survival report — every month since 1976. So this is probably ten sentences out of 10,000 pages, for all I know. I think it’s bad that happened but I disavowed all these views, and people who know me best, people of my district, have heard these stories for years and years, and they know they weren’t a reflection of anything I believed in, and it never hurt me politically. Right now, I think it’s the same case, too. People are desperate to find something.

CALLER: But Dr. Paul, many of the newsletters are filled with conspiracies. You had one newsletter from start to finish with fear that the $50 bill, because it was going to be made pink, and it was gonna have all kinds of things that can track us down, so we should all be afraid that maybe tomorrow they’re gonna require us to turn in all of our old money.
PAUL: The paper money now is pink, you know? No, we haven’t had runaway inflation, but I still fear that.

Just a few days prior to this admission to Dave Weigel, Ron Paul said that he contributed absolutely nothing to his own newsletter: 

Now, Paul says he had nothing to do with the contents of the newsletters published in his name.

"Why don't you go back and look at what I said yesterday on CNN and what I've said for 20-something years, 22 years ago?" Paul said on CNN Wednesday. "I didn't write them. I disavow them. That's it." Paul then removed his microphone and abruptly ended the interview.

Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said the congressman was practicing medicine at the time the newsletters were published and "did not write or approve the incendiary passages and does not agree with them."

Ron Paul's confession is analogous to a suspect who first confessed that he was not in the room when the victim was killed and then admits to being in the room when the victim was shot but not shooting the gun. 

This is a flip flop of the worst kind.

Its impossible to believe that Ron Paul contributed so little to his own newsletter despite being knowledgeable about the questionable facts and statistics that newsletter uses to promote the bigoted articles that were published in his name and has defended it when confronted with it. 

Its also impossible to believe that Ron Paul just stuck with writing purely about economic issues while other unnamed people wrote the bigoted articles. Even if we are to believe that he wrote the good stuff but didn't write any of the bad stuff in his newsletter, he probably let Lew Rockwell or Murray Rothbard ghost write these articles. Both of these men are known for spouting racist and anti-Semitic views in other forums. 

Ron Paul can deny all he wants that he has nothing to do with bigoted parts of his own newsletters, and merely wrote about economic issues, but as one blogger points out:

"Rep. Paul is trying to say that the words above weren’t written by him (but rather someone else helping him with his newsletter), but c’mon. Let’s be serious. If they appeared in his newsletter attributed to him then he’s responsible."

With the Republican caucuses only a few days away, can people afford to elect a man initially denied but now admits that was in the room when the bigoted pieces were written but that he didn't touch the typewritter on any of those articles?