Not a bigot… but a person who doesn’t care about bigotry & thinks bigots make some valid points regardless of context

Michael Tomasky takes on “hipsters” who like Ron Paul:

Hilariously, he said on CNN that King and Rosa Parks were heroes of his because they “practiced the libertarian principle of civil disobedience,” which meant that they were “trying to get the burden of government off their backs.” Putting aside the question of what exactly it is about civil disobedience that’s libertarian, it is quite true that King wanted Bull Connor off his back, but he rather strongly wanted the federal government to be the instrument of Connor’s removal. So even if Paul is not a racist, he is on this point a complete idiot or propagandist or both.

Meanwhile, Paul now says that his newsletters, having supposedly read them for the first time, contain only “a total of about 8 or 10 sentences” of “bad stuff.” He is on this point a propagandistic liar or a complete idiot about radicalism and racialism and various kinds of bigotry.

This lack of understanding of the dehumanizing and illiberal things put in the newspapers portrays a man not only unfit to lead this country, or any country, but unfit for the congressional seat he now holds.

And yet the Daily Dish continues to maintain that these newsletters were from “years ago” and represent the words of Lew Rockwell et al, a fact which Paul only needs to make explicit to regain Andrew Sullivan’s full-throated endorsement.

Even worse: Andrew is cynically suppressing the accounts of Ron Paul having read over all the newsletters as he made constant additions via fax machine, and the names of the former aids who can corroborate or deny this.

If he does allude to staff accounts, Andrew will have to acknowledge in conditionally backing Ron Paul, for the regaining of the “conservative soul” by the Republican Party, the Dish delibertely set aside the plausible allegations by former Ron Paul aid Eric Dondero–and the responsibility to fact check them–

(1) that Paul is against the United States entry into WW2 with the declaration of war against the Germans;

(2) that Paul wishes the Jewish state did not exist in the Middle East and thinks its absorption by Arab powers is sensible;

(3) that Paul believed the United States should not have struck back against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11 and caved into vote at the last minute

(4) that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Paul insisted on the strong possibility that the CIA committed the atrocity and not radical Islamists

(5) that it took the implicit threat of resignation by all his staff and the indignant urgings of his own family members for Paul to change his mind at the last minute and vote for military action in Afghanistan.

The author of The Conservative Soul, the defender of the conservative disposition as an important quality in politicians (to be lauded in Barack Obama), vouches for the usefulness of Ron Paul to modern conservatism and the American political landscape.  Andrew is a charlatan, whose political values are clay sculpted by his resentments.