Ron Paul and the GOP Crackup

23 December 2011 |permalink | email article

RON PAUL is near the top in the Iowa caucuses’ race but it’s been a tough week. All his conservative rivals are in an attack mode, and now the conservative press has joined the pile on. The Conservative Standard has a piece about the racist language contained in newsletters issued under his name in the 1980s and 1990s. The well read RedState posted that “Ron Paul Hates Republicans and Everything They Stand For.” Paul, a libertarian, refused to endorse GOP presidential candidate John McCain in the 2008 election. And the conservative National Review on its blog, The Corner, said that Paul “has never been able to distinguish between fringy cranks and above-board purists,” and thus “at times has associated himself with loons and bigots.”

Quotable

Obama is rising in the polls “because the American people see that he’s the person interested in improving the economy and crating jobs. Boehner has gone from being the speaker to being a ventriloquist for the tea party.”—Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, about Obama’s vacation calculation in Politico.

As Michael Lind has noted, today’s Tea Party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority—predominately Southern and mainly rural—that has repeatedly attacked American democracy in order to get its way.”—Robert Reich, a public policy professor at UC Berkeley. 

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