Mindful of his father’s warning, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, head of the Manning Centre for Democracy and the driving force behind this week’s Manning Networking Conference, required all Reform candidates in the 1993 federal election to fill out a 40-page questionnaire detailing their private lives, beliefs, values — even relatives whose views and opinions might prove embarrassing to the new party.
Now it appears that Manning has forgotten his father’s words of wisdom. He has chosen U.S. Republican Party 2012 presidential hopeful and libertarian Ron Paul to be the keynote speaker at this week’s conference.
Manning’s 1993 gag order had mixed results. His party and its successor, today’s Conservatives, were — and ocasionally still are — bedeviled by gaffes and “bozo eruptions.” So is Paul. Whenever he’s confronted about the many politically incorrect views and opinions published over the past two decades in his widely-distributed newsletters, Paul always takes refuge in claiming he doesn’t always write or even vet his newsletters. He disavows extremists — but refuses to disavow their support.
Paul and the surrogates who write for him have left a long — and lurid — collection of racist, sexist, homophobic and intolerant comments in those newsletters. And during his run for the Republican presidential nomination last year, Paul tacitly accepted the support of many racist, homophobic and sexist individuals and organizations.
The New York Times, the International Business Times, Mother Jones and even the right-wing National Review provided extensive coverage of the bugs attracted by Paul’s bright light before and during the presidential race.
In an article published on Dec. 28, 2011, The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg and Serge F. Kovaleski point out that the American libertarian movement has two overlapping but distinct strains. One, backed by the wealthy, is focused on economic freedom and reducing taxes and regulation through smaller government. The other is focused on personal liberty and constitutional constraints on government, “which at its extreme has helped fuel militant antigovernment sentiment.”
Paul, the article continues, operates at the nexus of the two. Paul has stated publicly he would not have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing segregation because government should not dictate how property owners behave. He also has been featured in videos by the John Birch Society warning that the United Nations threatens American sovereignty.
The American Free Press, which markets books like The Invention of the Jewish People and March of the Titans: A History of the White Race urged its subscribers to help it send copies of Paul’s collected speeches to New Hampshire voters during the 2012 Republican primary, promising the book would “Help Dr. Ron Paul Win The G.O.P. Nomination in 2012!”
Don Black, director of the white nationalist website Stormfront, told the Times in an interview that dozens of its members were volunteering for Paul’s presidential campaign and a site forum titled “Why is Ron Paul such a favourite here?” had 24 pages of comments. One read: “I understand he wins many fans because his monetary policy would hurt Jews.”
Speaking at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the John Birch Society, Paul said the society was “a great patriotic organization featuring an educational program solidly based on constitutional principles … Anyone who has been in the trenches over the years battling on any of the major issues — whether it’s pro-life, gun rights, property rights, taxes, government spending, regulation, national security, privacy, national sovereignty, the United Nations, foreign aid — knows that members of the John Birch Society are always in there doing the heavy lifting.”
The International Business Times published a highly critical article about Paul on Sept. 11, 2011. “Ron Paul, the once and future Republican presidential candidate and cult hero among Libertarians has a long and disturbing history of racialism and anti-Semitism,” it wrote, noting Paul has published a plethora of newsletters over his political career.
One, entitled the Ron Paul Political Report, published an editorial in June, 1992 in the wake of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. It suggested that the looting and rioting was an inevitable consequence of the federal government providing blacks with “civil rights quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black TV shows, black TV anchors, hate-crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda … Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare cheques three days after rioting began.”
Other gems from the Paul newsletters include claims that 95 per cent of Washington’s black men are criminals, that Martin Luther King Day is really Hate Whitey Day, that the white majority is disappearing in America, that the Mossad was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, that gay men with AIDS are deliberately spreading the disease, that there existed a “federal homosexual coverup” to suppress evidence of AIDS’ impact and that would be a “race war in our big cities.”
As well, the newsletters often praised David Duke, the neo-Nazi former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
In a Dec. 30, 2011 post on his blog, prominent Canadian Conservative expatriate and U.S. Republican pundit David Frum indirectly posed some questions Preston Manning should be asking himself:
“Here’s another tragic misunderstanding of Ron Paul’s message of human freedom,” Frum wrote. “Paul has just gained David Duke’s endorsement. This week, the former KKK Grand Wizard telephoned into the radio show hosted by Stormfront founder Don Black to announce his support … Mr. Black is a former Klansman and member of the American Nazi Party who founded the ‘white nationalist’ website Stormfront in 1995. He donated to Mr. Paul in 2007 and has been photographed with the candidate …
“A politician isn’t answerable for the antics of every one of his supporters,” Frum continues. “But there’s surely a reason, isn’t there, that racists, anti-Semites, 9/11 Truthers and Holocaust deniers are so strongly attracted to the Paul campaign. They hear something. They continue to hear it too, no matter how firmly Ron Paul’s more mainstream supporters clamp their hands over their own ears.”
Are Manning Conference attendees clamping their hands over their ears? Or are they also hearing something?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Frances Russell
No comments:
Post a Comment