I disagree with socialism and the idea that government can morally or effectively provide for our needs from cradle to grave, but I am willing to discuss and debate the matter with earnest proponents of that idea. I have no patience, however, for race-baiters. Gratuitously throwing around accusations of racism is a token of bad faith and a tactic of intellectually dishonest brutes.
The success of the piece that I published over the weekend entitled "The Ron Paul newsletter controversy is a textbook liberal smear campaign" is evidence that I'm not the only one who's tired of this garbage.
At The Daily Caller, my op ed was published as the opposition piece to a hit piece entitled "Ron Paul is a bigot," written by David Cohen, a former White House cabinet official-- George W. Bush's Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior.
As of this writing, my Daily Caller piece has been recommended on Facebook 727 times (wait-- just refreshed the tab, and it's jumped to 732 since I started typing out this post). The former White House official has only been able to muster 39 measly Facebook recommendations. Mine was tweeted 233 times. Cohen's 14. I'd love to see The DC's traffic stats on the two pieces. Even the version of the op ed I published here at The Humble Libertarian has gotten more Facebook recommendations at 95 than Cohen's screed of scurrilous accusations.
Meanwhile, Judge Andrew Napolitano took notice and featured my oped on his Facebook page, to the fanfare of nearly a thousand likes and over 200 comments and shares:
Meanwhile a trusted source tells me that Ron Paul's numbers haven't been affected by the newsletter controversy. I guess the voters aren't buying into this bilge either. They care about the actual issues. Speaking of actual issues, Jack Hunter has my back on the DC's opinion pages, writing in a piece entitled, Why the establishment really fears Ron Paul:
As Ron Paul has risen in the polls, so has the frequency of attacks against him. “Any stick will do to beat a dog” goes the old saying, and the whacks against Paul range from reasonable to ridiculous. Expect the attacks to continue. Expect them to get more ridiculous.
And expect the worst attacks to come from Republicans.
Let’s cut the crap. The GOP establishment’s main beef with Ron Paul is his foreign policy. This ideological chasm is the subtext to most attacks on Paul from the right. To their credit, some of Paul’s critics are man (or woman) enough to confront the congressman on this subject directly. Paul welcomes these challenges and wants his fellow Republicans to debate what a true conservative foreign policy should look like. But the members of the Republican establishment do not want any such discussion. In fact, they fear it.
Most of the 2012 Republican presidential contenders subscribe primarily to a neoconservative foreign policy — the reflexively pro-war, world-police dogma that has been the dominant view in the Republican Party for at least a decade. When Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” in October, “Would you describe yourself as a neoconservative then?” Cain replied: “I’m not sure what you mean by neoconservative … I’m not familiar with the neoconservative movement.” Cain was being honest — he simply knew how most Republicans viewed foreign policy and generally agreed with them. What was this “neoconservatism” Gregory spoke of? Said Cain: “I’m a conservative, yes. Neoconservative — labels sometimes put you in a box.”
“Neoconservative” certainly is a label that puts you in a box. The prefix alone invites curiosity (which is why neoconservatives don’t like it) and the term itself suggests that it represents something different from plain old conservatism (which is why neoconservatives really don’t like it). Neoconservative Max Boot outlined the ideology in 2002: “Neoconservatives believe in using American might to promote American ideals abroad … [The] agenda is known as ‘neoconservatism,’ though a more accurate term might be ‘hard Wilsonianism’ …”
And that brings me to my final point: in addition to the popularity of this oped, it has definitely received a lot of criticism from Ron Paul supporters everywhere I've seen it published or featured for framing the issue in terms of left and right. Sympathizing readers have pointed out in comment threads everywhere that Republicans are leading this smear campaign, not the liberal media. To quibble, I'd say that liberal media outlets like CNN and ThinkProgress are definitely leading this smear campaign and that some Republicans are just piling on to their own shame and detriment.
But more importantly: if, as I claim, this race-baiting smear is a favorite tactic of the big government left, what does that tell you about the neoconservative Republicans who are using it? They are revealing their true colors and their leftist pedigree as Trotskyite transplants from the radical left who migrated to the Republican Party to hijack its name and brand for their own political purposes of infiltration and deconstruction of the American political system created by our Founding Fathers. My friendly critics say: "It's not just liberals who are doing this, Wes! Conservatives have been the worst offenders!" My reply is: "Those are not conservatives. They are big government liberals and they always have been."
I stand by what I wrote. This newsletter controversy is a textbook liberal smear campaign by big government leftists. And it's not working.
Wes Messamore,
Editor in Chief, THL
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