I meant to post something about them, but it looks like I've been beaten to the punch here. Basically, like Mike Konczal, I've had a hard time trying to understand what all the media folderol over Paul's newsletters has been about since (a) they're not anything that people haven't known about for years, and (b) if you strip out the overt anti-semitism and some of the more inflammatory language, they're nothing much more than a shorthand manifesto of modern-day Teabilly aspirations: Goldbug monetarism, repealing the 16th Amendment, dismantling the social welfare function of government, demonization of freeloaders (i.e., brownskins), criminalizing teh gay, etc. In other words, what's the big deal here? You hear these kinds of ideas expressed on Fox News every day.
I think this is why Paul doesn't appear to have lost any measurable support among the party base---if anything, he may have actually gained support over this flap. That's because the Paulite worldview---as with a substantial chunk of the GOP base---is so heavily informed by theories of massive Bilderberg/Rothschild/CFR/Trilateral Commisssion conspiracies of one-world government and light-bulb dictatorships that whenever some bit of unflattering news about their favorite son leaks, it's easier for them to draw the wagons around him since they already exist in a kind of perpetual survivalist Siege Mode: Someone's always about to confiscate their guns and lock them up in FEMA forced-labor camps, and negative coverage in the Times only confirms their suspicions. They're paranoids, for sure, but on the other hand, there's nothing about their paranoia that runs terribly far afield of the intellectual boundaries set by the last two decades of conservative political thought, so if the newsletters' content strikes some of our Serious Persons as extremist now, well gee, ya think it might be a reflection of a political party that has run off the rails since 1994?
I realize this is a case of "choosing sides," betraying liberal bias, etc., but it would be nice if the folks who run our major media outlets would wake up and face the facts about the current ideological state of today's GOP before we all wake up one morning to discover we're being governed by some authoritarian claque of Podunk Peronistas instead of the kind of pluralistic government we've come to know and love.
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Vitelius