Thankfully, most of the rationalization is dumb. Let's take a look:
1. "You're saying this to defend Murderer Obama, who you will never criticize!"
God help you if you can figure out what this has to do with anything. You don't have to turn around and badmouth Guderian for there to be any validity to saying that Patton was a dick for smacking a soldier around. Similarly, Ron Paul's volumes of racist bile don't disappear just because an author fails to bring up the racial attitudes of people totally unrelated to him. Besides, good luck finding a kind word about Obama in these pages in the last year or more.
2. "Ron Paul was totally endorsed by the Texas head of the NAACP!"
Have fun with that one, since it's wrong. (That's a link, Ron Paul fans. If you click it, it takes you to something that substantiates that point.) Finding someone dumb, naive or cynical enough to support things against their own racial interests isn't especially difficult — we must confront the reality of Alan Keyes — and the testimony of an individual against thousands of pages of documents published voluntarily over the course of a decade is materially worthless. Shit, out of over 31 million Iraqis around the globe and despite independent intelligence analysis, Ahmad Chalabi thought that whole invasion thing was a baller idea. By that criterion, Ron Paul's opposition to the War in Iraq is wrong: why else would one person come forward and express so unpopular an opinion if it weren't compellingly, overwhelmingly correct? It was an Iraqi calling for bombs, for God's sake.
3. "Ron Paul said he isn't racist, and it's even on Youtube, so he's not racist."
Water wet, grass green, sky blue, racist person asserts to the press that he's not racist. There's a tremendous upside to advocating racist policies and vociferously denying your own racism, because the contradiction allows your supporters to rationalize the discrepancy and confuses the incurious with mixed messaging. Besides, when push comes to shove, lazy people are usually happy to assume that the ("liberal") press got the story wrong. Explicitly owning your own racism is only a losing gambit: undeclared racism already nets you the true believers, but whipping out rhetorical swastikas only alientates those who were perplexed by the ambiguous. Besides, you open yourself to litigation, prosecution or restraint. Did you know that career Holocaust denialist David Irving believes he's not an anti-semite despite the fact that he likes to imply that the Jews brought pogroms and a genocide on themselves?
4. "Well, Ron Paul can't be racist, because racism is a form of collectivism."
Good idea. People can't have irrational beliefs or undertake irrational actions because they believe in political abstractions that they superimpose on those beliefs/actions and zap them out. It's like playing Missile Command, but in your brain, with philosophy. For instance, I forcibly penetrate women with my penis until I ejaculate. But I can't commit rape, because I'm a Communist: rape is theft, and I don't believe in private property.
5. "Yeah, well, you don't have any proof of his racism anyway."
This is always fun. For a group of people who believe in rational-actor theory and count many Objectivists among their ranks, Ron Paul fans sure seem to consider debate reality-optional. Invariably, documented and verifiable evidence is wholly unnecessary to substantiate a point they're making and woefully insufficient to back up anything their opponent might suggest. Despite citing Barron's, The New Republic (home of our publisher Marty Peretz), David Neiwert, ABC News, GovTrack.us, DailyPaul.com, The Ron Paul Archive and even Libertarian online clubhouse magazine Reason, I apparently either had no sources or just had "bullshit" sources. Okay.
By now, you might have noticed that each paragraph in this column is separated by an embedded image. Each comes from the June, 1992 issue of the Ron Paul Political Report's "Special Issue on Race Terrorism." (Open each in a new tab to embiggen.) Perhaps these sources will count, because they come from Ron Paul. They present the Unerring Word of Paul, or the endorsement of the Unerring Paul. Again, as explained in the Vice article, Ron Paul supporters must confront a very limited number of interpretations of the above data. Either their chosen candidate wrote this racist excrement; or he endorsed someone else's writing this racist excrement and knowingly published it under his own name; or, over the course of thousands of pages and roughly a decade, he was such an incompetent manager of his own profit- and brand-making communications enterprise — and evidently too lazy or stupid to bother reading a dozen pages per month — that this kind of unforgivable shit went out in his name, proving that he isn't even electable as the treasurer of his local Klavern, much less the leader of the fucking free world.
But let's not kid ourselves. Even though Reason published an article showing his defense of the newsletters, the fact that he later repudiated the opinions in them, under the heat of a national campaign, will be enough. What strength can Ron Paul's printed words and spoken statements have next to the power of stuff He said later? In the defense of liberty, we cannot risk doubting the inerrancy of The Leader, especially when He has told us to ignore the other thing He said, for the opposite thing He said.
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