A reader writes:
The late John Robbins, who was Ron Paul’s chief of staff in the early eighties, named Lew Rockwell as the true author of the racist material in Ron Paul’s newsletters. Lew had also been Ron Paul’s chief of staff in the '70s and remains his closest adviser. In case you are unfamiliar with him, he has his own web site where he pushes nutty conspiracy theories on a daily basis. Paul has said publicly that it is the first thing he reads every day.
The honchos at the RNC-FNC machine, along with some Republican machers in Iowa, fear a Ron Paul victory. Why? Because it is asserted that Paul cannot possibly win the nomination and therefore … what, exactly? Should be ruled out of consideration in advance? Why hold a caucus at all? And Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan? They had a more solid chance of winning the nomination than Paul does today? Instead of engaging his arguments about foreign policy or domestic spending, Paul's opponents are focusing on exhausted mini-scandals from decades ago and electability. But they do have a Plan B:
Leading Republicans, looking to put the best possible frame on a Paul victory, are already testing out a message for what they’ll say if the 76-year-old Texas congressman is triumphant.
The short version: Ignore him.
“People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third,” said Gov. Terry Branstad. “If [Mitt] Romney comes in a strong second, it definitely helps him going into New Hampshire and the other states.”
A reader submits an entry in which "Romney jokes that a waitress grabbed his butt":
It actually could have been a charming moment if Mitt had not laughed so awkwardly at his own joke. More of Romney's butt-based humor after the jump:
Send more entries to andrew@thedailybeast.com
TNC takes on the controversy:
Note Paul's language: It "ended up" in the newsletter. "Other people" wrote the words. "Campaign aids" said that honesty was too confusing. No actual named person did anything.
Racism, like all forms of bigotry, is what it claims to oppose–victimology. The bigot is never to blame. Always is he besieged–by gays and their radical agenda, by women and their miniskirts, by fleet-footed blacks. It is an ideology of "not my fault." It is not Ron Paul's fault that people with an NAACP view of the world would twist his words. It is not Ron Paul's fault that his newsletter trafficked in racism. It is not Ron Paul's fault that he allowed people to author that racism in his name. It is anonymous political aides and writers, who now cowardly refuse to own their words. There's always someone else to blame–as long as it isn't Ron Paul, if only because it never was Ron Paul.
This issue comes up again and again. Paul has taken two stands on it: the first was to take formal responsibility, even though he claims he didn't know about the contents; the second was to insist he didn't write them or know who did. Some of his early responses cited by TNC do seem defensive and cranky. But the notion that he has been actively seeking victimology in all this or that he is defined by these isues seems unfair to me. I think the papers (and comments almost two decades ago) should definitely be considered, in context, when judging his candidacy, and not because the neocons are determined to smear anyone challenging their catastrophic record. But compared with Rick Perry's open bigotry in his ads, or Bachmann's desire to "cure" gays, or the rhetoric around "illegals" in this campaign, these ugly newsletters are very, very old news. To infer from them that Paul is a big racist is a huge subjective leap I leave to others more clairvoyant than myself.
But ask yourself: you've now heard this guy countless times; he's been in three presidential campaigns; he's not exactly known for self-editing. And nothing like this has ever crossed his lips in public. You have to make a call on character. Compared with the rest on offer, compared with the money-grubbing lobbyist, Gingrich, or the say-anything Romney, or that hate-anyone Bachmann, I've made my call.
A male reader adds to the white girl and gay guy versions:
My favorite so far. My boyfriend always says I have a black woman inside me screaming to be let out.
Unofficial straight dude version here. And the original girl version gets a second act:
Keith Humphreys places his bet:
Given the evident inability of any of the current candidates to generate enthusiasm in even one third of Iowa Republicans, and the fact that the caucus "winner" could well be someone that 3/4 of the voters rejected, I am comfortable predicting right now the winner of the GOP Iowa Caucuses: President Obama.
Spencer Ackerman worries about Maliki issuing an arrest warrant for his Sunni vice president, Tarek al-Hashemi, on terrorism charges:
The U.S. has its largest overseas diplomatic presence in Iraq. If it is to do anything useful at all, it has to convince Prime Minister Nouri Maliki not to arrest his vice president. I have no idea if Hashemi is guilty. But if Hashemi gets thrown in jail, it tells Iraq’s Sunni minority that they live in a predator state. It will not take much from there to convince the Sunnis that violence is an appropriate political choice. And that is precisely the kind of downward spiral that the embassy is supposed to prevent or mitigate.
Kimberly and Frederick Kagan blame the US pullout. Daniel Serwer cautions against jumping to conclusions:
The important question is not whether Maliki’s government survives but whether the current quarrels are managed peacefully and in accordance with the constitution. I know all the principals in the most recent quarrels: Maliki, Hashemi and Mutlaq. They are tough and wily, but are they murderers or dictators? I’ve learned from experience to reserve judgment until there is clear evidence one way or the other. It is too early to reach any definitive conclusions.
Is Iraq coming apart? We should not mistake the fall of a government for the dissolution of a state. It is not even clear yet that Maliki will fall. Too early to tell what is really going on.
Reidar Vissar gives some background on the recent surge in tensions.
(Photo: Light from the rising sun hits the side of a turret gun on a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division traveling towards the Kuwaiti border as part of the last U.S. military convoy to leave Iraq December 18, 2011 near Nasiriyah, Iraq. All U.S. troops were scheduled to have departed Iraq by December 31st, 2011. At least 4,485 U.S. military personnel died in service in Iraq. According to the Iraq Body Count, more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died from war-related violence. By Lucas Jackson – Pool/Getty Images)
Andrew Exum delineates our dilemma:
[T]he very source of U.S. leverage against the regimes in Bahrain and Egypt is that which links the United States to the abuses of the regime in the first place. So if you want to take a "moral" stand against the abuses of the regime in Bahrain and remove the Fifth Fleet, congratulations! You can feel good about yourself for about 24 hours — or until the time you realize that you have just lost the ability to schedule a same-day meeting with the Crown Prince to press him on the behavior of Bahrain's security forces. Your leverage, such as it was, has just evaporated. The same is true in Egypt. It would feel good, amidst these violent clashes between the Army and protesters, to cut aid to the Egyptian Army. But in doing so, you also reduce your own leverage over the behavior of the Army itself.
Marc Tracy expounds on his "Unified Theory of Hitch":
What becoming Jewish did was allow Hitchens to seize upon Judaism’s rationalist strain—Spinoza, not Abraham; Moses Mendelssohn, not Moses Maimonides (and not one-word Moses); and the Haskalah, not the Enlightenement. He was orphaned and made Jewish almost simultaneously, departing a small affiliation while joining a much larger one, and, as one can imagine Hitchens putting it with a due nod to a different Marx, joining one of the few clubs of which he may have wished to be a member.
Must Hitchens have been Jewish? Some would say no and would point as proof, first, to the fact that he lived over half his life in ignorance of his Jewishness, and second, to the fact that even the turn that defined the latter half of his career, though admittedly well-timed to his discovery of his heritage, did not contain anything explicitly Jewish about it. I would respond by gesturing at the scoreboard: Hitchens was a lifelong subversive who identified subversiveness with Jewishness; and a lifelong atheist who identified atheism with Jewishness; and, it did so happen, a lifelong Jew. That he did not know this and turned out as he did is evidence to you of chance, as it no doubt was to him, but to me it is evidence of something else.
The Dish 