“Murray had some great ideas but he also had some real zingers. His contemporaries routinely had to edit out racist comments from his minor works.”

That may or may not be true, and if evidence surfaces that proves that beyond a reasonable doubt I’ll admit I was wrong, but the speculation over the author’s identity is a blatant witch hunt until a) the author comes forward or b) somebody with first hand knowledge of the author’s identity comes foward. All that’s going to happen until that point is a lot of people are going to get their names and reputations unjustly smeared and libertarians are going to end up looking petty and stupid. And that’s not going to help anybody.

I respect where you’re coming from on this but I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

I agree with you about the Martha Stewart analogy on some of it (because allegations of racism often are overblown or inaccurate), but I think we both drew very different meanings from those articles and since it doesn’t actually change my intention to vote for Ron Paul I don’t think it’s going to be productive for us to go back and forth on an issue that’s really subjective.

Ron Paul’s vehement condemnation of these letters and the beliefs they push also speaks against your point and renders this something of a moot argument.

Not at all, they can be objectionable without being racist. Just because Ron Paul condems the newsletter doesn’t mean he is doing so because he views them as racist.

One article of this sort may be nothing more than an anomaly…more than that over an extended period of time represents a disturbing pattern

Yes, I think the article about the LA riots is the one article, and all the rest are smoke and mirrors. I haven’t been through 100% of them yet, but 100% of the ones I have been through fall waaaaay short of being racist.

This is a lot like arresting Martha Stewart for insider stock trading, and then only charging / convicting her of ancillary charge “lying to the FBI”. In this case there is one substantial charge (the LA riot excerpt) and all the rest are smoke and mirrors and simply added to make the whole mass look bigger than it really is.

Murray had some great ideas but he also had some real zingers. His contemporaries routinely had to edit out racist comments from his minor works.

“There is no criticism of Dr. King’s movement or ideas, the only criticism is ad hominem”

I see where you’re coming from but the ad hominum attack was designed to undermine King’s credibility to lead such a movement and by extension attacked those aspects of the civil rights movement led by Dr. King. You didn’t see these guys going out of their way to blast Barry Goldwater (a libertarian icon whose approach was far more checkered because he excused, however grudgingly, states that statutorily discriminated against minorities’ rights)…they targeted the high-profile black guy. And the comments about blacks being docile after the 1992 riots after they got their welfare checks indicated that this was not a mindset isolated to one topic in this newsletter. One article of this sort may be nothing more than an anomaly…more than that over an extended period of time represents a disturbing pattern.

Ron Paul’s vehement condemnation of these letters and the beliefs they push also speaks against your point and renders this something of a moot argument.

The King Story may have libelous, but where is the racism? You, yourself ascribe a motive “the letter writer felt compelled to disseminate them to grind an axe against Dr. King’s movement” (emphasis mine) which I don’t get from the article. There is no criticism of Dr. King’s movement or ideas, the only criticism is ad hominem (and as such, is wrong – I 100% agree.)

That sorry ad hominem attack is used to discredit, not Dr. King’s message peace and equality but, setting up a new federal holiday in honor of Dr. King.

The only reason that anyone is calling this “racist”, is because Dr. King is black. If this were anyone else that charge would not be made. That is, itself, a form of racism.

And I am not sure that a private newsletter need meet the standards of libel that a public newspaper does, but I could be wrong on that, but IANAL.

Later.

The King story was racist because the pedophile allegations were unsubstantiated by facts yet the letter writer felt compelled to disseminate them to grind an axe against Dr. King’s movement (a movement that Ron Paul supported). The FBI report did not have any evidence that Martin Luther King engaged in those activities so it was libel for the newsletter to claim them as fact. It was a hit piece, it was wrong, and in case you’ve missed today’s news Ron Paul has condemned it as such.

You can argue over whether Ron Paul is responsible for what somebody else wrote in his newsletter, but there’s no real case for defending the King letter or the letters about the L.A. riots. They were racist and unacceptable in a libertarian publication.

Answer,

That’s one of the least believable allegations I’ve heard. Unless you’ve got information that proves the identity of the author conclusively or have more solid evidence than what you’ve presented you really ought to quit tossing out off-the-wall speculation. Frankly I’d find it more likely that you were the author of those letters than Murray Rothbard.

Everyone on the inside knows it’s Murray Rothbard but no one will say it because Ron Paul’s campaign is all about the message; exposing Rothbard as a bigot would hurt the message more than it would help Paul.

    From a Libertarian standpoint, forced integration is no better than forced segregation – both are evil.

“Dr.” King
    So now even the establishment press admits that Martin Luther King plagiarized his PhD dissertation, his academic articles, his speeches, and his sermons.

    He was also a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.

    King, the FBI files show, was not only a world-class adulterer, he also seduced underage girls and boys. The Rev. Ralph David Abernathy revealed before his death that King had made a pass at him many years before.

    And we are supposed to honor this “Christian minister” and lying socialist satyr with a holiday that puts him on a par with George Washington?

    Congratulations to Arizona! Who could doubt that the result would be exactly the same if the other 49 states could also vote on a holiday for this affirmtive-action saint?

Can someone please tell me what is racist about this? Where’s the beef? I know calling Dr. King a commie sympathizer is a little below the belt, but it’s hardly racism.

I think I could probably go through all their examples and find similar out-of-context BS but I don’t really have time. Just because TNR alleges that it’s racist, that doesn’t make it racist.

Even if Dr. Paul wrote this (which I doubt, because on-line text analyzers show significant differences between the writing style of these items, and other items which we know were written by Dr. Paul) there is no racism here.

Nowhere in this short article is Dr. King ridiculed or demeaned. Not for his skin color, nor for his ideas of equality. Certain “facts” are repeated without regard to their accuracy. (relying upon an FBI file is a little dicey for a Libertarian, but it’s hardly racist.) But no tie-in is ever made to Dr. King’s race or ancestry.

I can see enforcing them in the short run, but a long term enforcement of positive rights of any faction is instituting racism or collectivism.

The Duke’s Victory
    David Duke received 44% of the vote in the Senate primary race in Louisiana, 60% of the white vote and 9% of the black vote!. This totaled 100,000 more votes than the current governor when he won.

    Duke lost the election, but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment. If the official Republican hadn’t been ordered to drop out, he might have won. Certainly there would have been a run-off.

    Duke’s platform called for tax cuts, no quotas, no affirmative action, no welfare, and no busing. “Tonight, we concede the election”, he said. “But we will never concede our fight for equal rights for all Americans.”

To many voters, this seems like just plain good sense. Duke carried baggage from his past, but the voters were willing to overlook that. and if he had been afforded the forgiveness an ex-communist gets, he might have won.

    Liberals like Richard Cohen of the Washington Post say he got so many votes because Louisianians were rascists and ignorant. Baloney.

    David Broder, also of the Post and equally liberal, writing on an entirely different subject , had it right: “No one wants to talk about [race] publicly, but if you ask any campaign consulltant of pollster privately, you can confirm the sad reality that a great many working-class and middle-class white Americans are far less hostile to the rich and their tax breaks than they are to the poor and minorities with their welfare and affirmative action programs.”

Liberals are notoriously blind to the sociological effects of their own programs. David Duke was hurt by his past. How many more Dukes are there waiting in the wings without such a taint.

This is the very first piece of evidence that TNR trots out for us. Can someone please point out a single kind word for Duke? or a single racist thought or word. I don’t see it.

I suspect that each link will be likewise lacking (except for the previously released LA riots BS)

later,

http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?item.1297.1

You might want to check out this link and the PDF document linked therein:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/01/09/quot-the-duke-s-quot-campaign-advice.aspx