Paul?s ?unsavory associates? panned

To the editor:

I have received a number of solicitations to support Ron Paul. But when I cite my objections to his candidacy, these ideologues, like Paul himself, essentially say, ?don?t bother me with the facts, my mind?s made up.?

But as a Ronald Reagan said, ?Facts are stubborn things.?

The most recent egregious example was in early December when Congressman Paul said: ?Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the [Bush] administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat.?

?Glee?? Now this kind of serious accusation against any American administration, especially after we had been attacked, demands either evidence or an apology. Ron Paul provided neither.

Of course, this is par for the Ron Paul course, as he is a Republican in name only. For instance, at the 2008 Republican Convention, where was Ron Paul? Giving a counter-convention, featuring Jesse Ventura spouting conspiracy theories about 9/11.

Paul bad mouths our first Republican President, Lincoln (?determined to fight a bloody civil war? to ?prove that we had a very, very strong centralized federal government,?) and Reagan (?? has given us a deficit ten times greater than what we had with the Democrats. It didn?t take more than a month after 1981, to realize there would be no changes.?)

Is Ron Paul a Conservative? Bill Buckley had a  ?3-legged stool? of conservatism: Social (defending and perpetuating traditional institutions), Economic (free enterprise, free trade, free markets) and a strong National Security/Foreign Policy. Ron Paul is wobbly standing on 1 and 1/2 legs (his amoral social policy equates prayer to prostitution and drug use; his National Security stand is ?Blame America first?).

Is Ron Paul even a Libertarian? The latest issue about Ron Paul to re-surface is his denial of knowing who authored a series of bigoted articles in his own newsletters. A conscientious, libertarian-leaning magazine, Reason, exposed this in a January 2008 article: ?Ron Paul doesn?t seem to know much about his own newsletters? says he was unaware, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of the bigoted rhetoric about African Americans and gays that was appearing under his name??

As Calvin Freiberger cites in newsrealblog.com, ?Paul has been endorsed and aggressively supported by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Holocaust denier Hutton Gibson (yep, Mel?s dad), the white supremacist American Nationalist Union, the Communist newspaper People?s Weekly World, scores of authors and commentators on various other racist websites, and the white supremacist Stormfront.org.  In particular, Stormfront founder Don Black donated $500 to Paul, and when pressed on whether or not the money would be returned, the Paul campaign was non-committal...? Some live and let live libertarian.

As many decent Americans were appalled by Barack Obama?s relationship with the anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and terrorists Bill Ayers and Khalid Rashidi, I urge Iowans not to let our caucus be the launching pad for yet another ideologue with unsavory associates.

? H. Ben Winkler, Fairfield