Ron Paul Retrenchment

In the course of defending his Ron Paul reporting against a criticism from Virginia Postrel, David Weigel calls me "excitable," and claims:

[T]he Paul pile-on is starting to get ridiculous. You can blame Paul and the ghostwriters for some of this, for keeping what was in the newsletters so quiet, but simply because so many of them are now out I'm seeing "damning" quotes that pad the lists without making Paul look out of line…[some of the quotes] wouldn't sound out of place, frankly, in a conservative blog or in National Review. For example:

Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country.

This is something Herman Cain says once or twice every hour.

The Earth Summit is the creepiest meeting of politicos since the first gathering of Bolsheviks. Officially known as the UN Conference for Environment and Development, it will be held in Brazil in June; bad guys from all over the globe will attend.

Silly, but sounds like something John Bolton would say.

Well, here's the thing. Not all the Paul quotes are equally repulsive, and there is nothing objectionable about taking exception to the earth summit, nor necessarily about observations of black political uniformity. But the former comes in the context of heaps of crazy rambling about one-world government conspiracies — indeed, in the context of speculating that a literal "Trotskyite-Maoist" conspiracy is poised to take over the world. Therefore it seemed fairly clear to me that the term "Bolshevik" was not merely a hyperbolic rhetorical point, but another datum of paranoid conspiracy-mongering. In context, remarks about secretive one-worldist meetings are not benign. Likewise, the claim about black political uniformity comes in a discussion of the feral qualities of blacks and how they are brainwashed by their leaders to commit violence. Furthermore, the repetitive incantation of the word, 'black' this, 'black' that, 'black' the other thing, is indicative of an attitude in the same way that saying 'Jew,' 'Jew,' 'Jew' would be.

In any case, there are pages upon pages of damning material — the stuff I posted at Jewcy isn't any less disgraceful than what I posted at PJM (arguably more), it's just that I didn't yet have access to all the documents — and what we've got represents a very small tranche out of twenty years of Ron Paul Freedom/Political/Survival Reports. Somehow, because a few of the pull quotes, interpreted a certain (incorrect) way, would not be terribly damaging, it's a pile-on to interpret them in context and grasp their full noxiousness?

I'll be on a radio show in Texas, I think in Paul's home district, to discuss this stuff at 11:20. You can listen here and decide if I'm excitable.