Ron Paul
Ron Paul & the Build-a-Burgers. Remember, You Need to Trick Him Into Saying “Luap Nor” to Get This Stuff To Stop
[ What is it with some very cool, incredible people being die-hard fans of Ron Paul? It would be smart to figure this out before Jon Huntsman pulls these people into his third party presidential bid. ]
During the 2008 Democrat primaries, I campaigned for Hillary Clinton every day for a full month in Indiana, as the city of Hammond, IN is just twenty minutes from Chicago and an easy hop over the Skyway Bridge.
One Saturday morning on such a canvassing trip, my friends Joaquin, Panda, and I were in a run-down, depressed section of Hammond where we each left the car with a sheet of addresses on the street to canvass for Hillary. When we met back at the car, Panda was missing so Joaquin and I went looking for him. We finally found the guy standing politely on the porch of a ramshackle house with a disheveled, enraged man screaming at him. When the homeowner saw us approaching, he wrapped it up and let Panda go, slamming the door and retreating back inside into what I remember clearly as a makeshift bunker.
I asked my friend what the man was yelling about and Panda said, “Hamburgers. That guy’s really mad about the hamburgers that Hillary makes somewhere. Does she own a restaurant? I didn’t know that about her. How can she be in the Senate and have a make your own hamburger restaurant”.
I had no idea what he was talking about and was convinced Panda heard the man wrong or was just imagining things while being screamed at for no reason. That man on the porch couldn’t have been angry about hamburgers, and Hillary Clinton didn’t own any hamburger stands (though, how fun would it be if she did?).
In the car, driving to the next neighborhood, Joaquin and I didn’t let it go and we kept pressing Panda for more details. Eventually it came out that the man was angry that Hillary Clinton and her hamburgers were part of the secret world government and that all of this was being orchestrated through Build-A-Burger, which Panda assumed was a restaurant franchise where people were allowed to add their own toppings to burgers and that possibly they had many gourmet toppings available, like black truffles or expensive French cheeses. The extravagance of these toppings, he reasoned, might be what upset the man in the falling-down-house so much.
“No, that’s Fudruckers,” I told him. “They have those in malls, but it’s just stuff like bacon or onions or maybe pickles, nothing very expensive that you can put on hamburgers. Build-A-Bear is where you can make your own teddy bears or Easter bunny plushies and things, but there’s no such thing as a Build-A-Burger”.
“Yes there is, and that man is angry that Hillary’s helping them. Maybe he’s afraid they’ll close down McDonald’s with the competition, but that’s stupid because there are so many McDonald’s that it would be hard to drive them out of business. I don’t know why he’s so upset about that. Maybe he should write a letter to someone”.
I asked Panda whom the man said he was voting for and learned the screaming, burger-time guy was supporting Ron Paul.
Nearly every occasion when I or any of my friends encountered a Ron Paul supporter, screaming of some sort was involved, though not always about hamburgers. Conspiracy theories were always involved, though, if only under the surface. The man in the falling-down house was more aggressively vocal about this than most, but if Ron Paul supporters out in the field were not screaming and yelling at people they were wearing those V for Vendetta masks and jumping around on street corners waiving signs decrying the coming One World Government like those crackpots in the comic strips who bemoan “The End is Near!”.
I have only met one sane, articulate, and reasonable Ron Paul supporter, and that’s my very good friend Kathleen Gee who writes often about Dr. Paul on this and other sites. I’ve long encouraged her to speak openly about her support for Dr. Paul because it fascinates me. I truly don’t understand how someone as intelligent and good at heart as she is could be included amongst the Ron Paul supporters I’ve encountered in the four years I’ve been actively covering politics via this site. One of these things is not like the other, and I’ve tried for over a year now to understand Kathleen’s strong and determined support of Ron Paul despite the way I’m absolutely horrified by 90% of what comes out of that man’s mouth (not to mention the things the great majority of his supporters scream and yell about, making themselves and Dr. Paul look incurably crazy).
It’s a situation like the one with another good friend of mine in Boston who is an avowed Trekkie — but Delphine is not a middle-aged guy with bad skin living in his mother’s basement eating hot pockets and spending all day leaving nasty, sniping comments on AintItCoolNews.com. Delphine is gorgeous, smart, and successful…and in her free time enjoys dressing up as Officer Uhura, Katherine Janeway, or something called a Seven of Nine and going to as many Star Trek conventions across the country as possible. She’s even naming her son, who is due any day now, “Jean-Luc” after one of the Enterprise captains. When I’ve engaged her on the topic of Star Trek, her eyes get this funny look in them and she’s transported to a whole other plane, so blissfully excited that she’s been invited to talk about her great passion in life, Star Trek.
I swear, even though he was yelling, that man who screamed at Panda about Build-a-Burger was downright ECSTATIC to be advocating for Ron Paul; I bet it was the happiest he’d been in months, that someone came to his door and gave him an opportunity to rail against Hillary Clinton for possibly giving people the option of adding one of several different flavors of bacon to their grilled sandwich…but more importantly, it was a chance to talk about RON PAUL.
That being 2008, iPhones weren’t around so I had to wait until I got home to look up what “Build-A-Burger” could be and why it’s upset this man so much. You can read about the Bilderberg Group here. I invite you to leave your own thoughts on it in comments below.
Through the years, I’ve known a handful of people who’ve flirted with these One World Government conspiracies and who’ve found these things exciting to rail against, like their own unique versions of a Star Trek Convention. I honestly think the people really into this stuff give the Bilderberg members much too much credit. The world is far too large to ever be controlled by one Empire, with one set of imperialists at the controls. When I was a kid, I wrote a science fiction story about an ancient giant albino spider lurking deep beneath the Vatican that used the strings of its enormous web to ring bells and pull levers to control the entirety of the political world. The nun grading that bit of creative writing hated it so much she sent it to the principal, who forwarded it to the priest in charge of the school, who sent it to my parents demanding I be punished for writing about a giant spider under the Vatican.
The nun, principal, and priest missed the part about it being a science fiction story and thought I really believed this was true; my parents thought it was funny and encouraged me to keep upsetting the nuns because they were too uptight for their own good some of the time.
This is the attitude I’ve always taken with the Ron Paul supporters, actually. I see them as people with a great deal of passion and creativity…and they have powerfully strong imaginations. They love Ron Paul and his fantastical exclamations the way Delphine loves Star Trek author Gene Roddenberry and the magical world he created for TV and the books she loves reading and re-reading over and over again.
I’ve written before that every presidential election since 1992 has had one dominant “Mr. Mxyzptlk” character who captures the imaginations of a very passionate and aggressively vocal subset of the electorate. It was Ross Perot in 1992, followed by Lyndon LaRouche in 1996, then Ralph Nader in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, and Dennis Kucinich in 2008. It’s clearly Ron Paul’s turn to be the Mr. Mxyzptlk of 2012.
By 2016, Dr. Paul will be retired and someone new will play this part. I’m secretly wishing for Cynthia McKinney to rise to the occasion, so that there can finally be a MS. Mxyzptlk for a change…and I bet she can rev the screamers and yellers and conspiracy buffs up as good as any man ever could.
I think it’s highly dangerous to dismiss the people who gravitate towards the Mxyzptlk candidates out of hand or to make fun of their passion. The reason many of them become so obsessed over men like Ron Paul is because they feel alienated and ignored by the mainstream; mocking these people makes them entrench themselves in the most fantastical things the current Mr. Mxyzptlk says. It’s like Delphine and her Star Trek fandom — part of why she goes all out and buys such elaborate costumes to wear to all these conventions is because she’s so maligned by many of her friends for being attracted to this stuff. When she’s in her full regalia, surrounded by people dressed up as Romulans or Klingons or whatever, she claims she can breathe easily for the first time in memory, relax, and be herself without any fear of attack. She finds herself “at home”, in her own words.
That’s a stark contrast to how agitated and unhinged I’ve seen Delphine get when people have even jokingly mocked her Star Trek love to try to get a rise out of her. That never goes well, and has ended on more than one occasion in screaming and yelling.You don’t even want to know what happens when someone suggest Delphine embrace the more mainstream Star WARS instead of her beloved TREK.
It’s just like with that Ron Paul supporter on his porch in Indiana screaming at Panda, and like other Ron Paul supporters I have seen who, once Ron Paul is out of the race, will more likely than not either stay home in 2012 or vote for Barack Obama because they feel so slighted by Republicans for “not giving Ron Paul the respect he deserves!”. There is a real need to understand what about Ron Paul and his professed beliefs these people are attracted to…and why they were drawn to him in the first place.
The greatest hope in the Left is that the Ron Paul zealots will bolt to a third party candidate who will split the Republican vote just enough next year to squeak Barack Obama to victory. Jon Huntsman has been promised the Secretary of State slot in a second Obama administration if he’d run third party and bring as many of Ron Paul’s voters with him as possible. He’s got the money to do this, and the Paul supporters have the passion to mount a vainglorious third party campaign out of sheer spite to pay back everyone in the conservative blogosphere who they feel slighted them and Dr. Paul.
In the years since, I’ve really liked Panda’s response to the screamer on the Indiana porch. He listened to the man and let him have his say and didn’t try to argue with him the slightest (which I would have done, as I forever tend to escalate things). Panda would have let the guy continue until he lost steam, no doubt, if Joaquin and I hadn’t walked up and caused the man to retreat inside. I think more than anything Ron Paul’s supporters want to be listened to by mainstream people, so that they aren’t just going back and forth amongst themselves in endless echo chambers. It’s a lot like the Star Trek conventions with some of the Paul supporters, where they feel at home batting a lot of these conspiracies and theories around with each other…but maybe they wouldn’t be as into this stuff if they had a little more interaction with the mainstream.
Delphine at least gets to wear her Star Trek gear at Halloween or at theme-parties where other people dress up in space clothes too. I’ve noticed she has less of a yearning to go off to a convention if she can talk about Star Trek at least a little amongst people who aren’t obsessed with it like she is.
We all know that Ron Paul will not be the Republican nominee, but we don’t know what Ron Paul’s supporters will do once he’s out of the race. A very smart move would be to start addressing Jon Huntsman’s third party ambitions and prevent him from usurping these Paul supporters and using them to create the controlled chaos that Barack Obama is counting on to squeak to re-election.
Remember: If You Want Ron Paul to POOF! Away, You Must Say His Name Backwards Every 90 Days
[ Click above to embiggen ]
Ron Paul really comes off as a sort of “trickster imp” in a lot of the things he says and does, especially in the Republican debates. He’s just the latest in a long line of these “imps” in recent presidential elections, running back to Ross Perot in 1992, Lyndon LaRouche in 1996, Ralph Nader in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, and Dennis Kucinich in 2008.
In the Superman comics, Mr. Mxyzptlk (pronounced “Mix-ush-pit-lick”) isn’t a bad man, and he actually considers himself to be Superman’s pal.
But his thought processes are rooted in a completely different dimension from our own.
Whenever Ron Paul goes off on a tangent describing his dream of withdrawing all American troops from everywhere in the world and closing down all our bases, so that Islamist theocracies like Iran (and the Islamizing countries that have radicalized under Barack Obama’s watch) will like us and drop all plans to arm themselves with nukes or obliterate Israel from the map, Dr. Paul comes across as a very naive and out-of-touch-with-reality little man who may very well hail from the Land of Zrrf somewhere removed from the visible spectrum.
During the debates, the talking-head moderators always seem to trick Ron Paul into saying something that the majority of Americans interprets as completely insane and horrifying. It’s happened at every single debate so far. Like orange clockwork.
It always reminds me of Superman tricking Mr. Mxyzptlk into saying his name backwards (Kltpzyxm) — which sends him POOF! back to the Fifth Dimension.
There was one episode of the late-90s Superman animated series where this happened over and over and over again, with Superman not having to work hard at all to make it happen.
Doesn’t that remind you of Ron Paul’s performance in the debates, where over and over again he falls for the moderators’ tricks and makes an outrageous statement about Iranian nukes or turning this country into an isolationist ostrich?
I hope at the next debate Newt Gingrich gets him to say “Luap noR” aloud so we can see what happens.
He won’t be able to participate in a debate for at least 90 days, if the comic books are right about this sort of thing (as they usually are). It takes that long for him to rematerialize from the Fifth Dimension and get up to his antics again.
Ron Paul’s Newsletters: What Should He Have Known About His Ghostwriters?
[ Ghost writers can be ghost readers too, apparitionally, but only if the ghostwriters are already dead. ]
Because Ron Paul’s leading in polls taken for the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, the Alinsky Methods Death Star’s been fired up and aimed at him by the Left and agenda-driven media. This means everyone and their elf will be talking at Christmas dinner about newsletters that were published under Dr. Paul’s name in the 1990s. Typically, the agenda-driven media’s now claiming this proves Dr. Paul is a RAAACIST.
I’ve never read the newsletters and I don’t intend to because I am already not a Ron Paul supporter – because of his stance toward cutting aid to Israel (the one country in the world I feel we have a moral duty to protect, support, and defend with all our might) and his terrifyingly naive belief that Iran should not be prevented at all costs from gaining a nuclear weapon. Whatever was printed in newsletters years ago pales in comparison to this, in my mind – since anyone who downplays the Islamic theocracy’s clear and present danger to the world has DONE LOST HIS OWN MIND.
I do, however, want you to think about just how often people are called RAAACISTS! by the agenda-driven media and how this always happens whenever these individuals are doing something that either threatens the Left’s plans or provides some sort of obstacle to a narrative the agenda-driven media itself is crafting. Twenty years have passed since those newsletters were written, so you need to ask yourself why — at this exact moment, just days away from the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire primary — are all the talking heads on almost every Leftist-supporting network working overtime to depict Dr. Paul as a foaming-at-the-mouth RAAACIST!.
One of the worst and most stupid mistakes the Republican Party forever makes is not as a giant, cohesive unit hitting the agenda-driven media back HARD whenever any Republican is called a RAAACIST! for any reason. This is the Left’s number one weapon against conservatives: false accusations of racism or threats of branding someone a RAAACIST! if he or she doesn’t shut up and go away like the Left wants them to.
The Left, the agenda-driven media, and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment all want Ron Paul and his supporters to go away, and they are honest-to-goodness terrified at the thought of Dr. Paul winning the Iowa Caucus for two important reasons:
1. These people all want Willard Mittens Romneycare to win the Iowa Caucus, not Ron Paul, and calling Dr. Paul a RAAACIST! and really amping up the attacks on him is designed to make Iowans take another look at “noncontroversial” cucumbers-and-mayonnaise Romneycare and possibly decide the only way to avoid being called RAAACISTS themselves is to vote for the bland candidate the media’s deliberately not taking any smacks at (since they want him to win the nomination before they unleash Hell on him).
2. If Ron Paul wins the Iowa Caucus, then Iowa will no longer be allowed to be the “first in the nation” in the next presidential election…and the permanent political class in both parties doesn’t feel like going through the arduous task of changing the nominating system (as many of these consultants believe they’re experts on manipulating the system in place now, so why would they ever want to change it?).
One of the most thrilling and euphoric days of my life will be the day the Iowa Caucus is tossed onto the trash heap of history. Do not believe all the lies the agenda-driven media will tell you for the next week about how “seriously” Iowans take their “first in the nation” role. I went to Iowa for eight straight weeks in the leadup to the 2008 Caucus and canvassed a dozen cities and small towns, going door to door in the cold campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I never met one of these “serious” Iowans who “followed the candidates and issues closely”.
I did, however, meet a lot of very spoiled, overly indulged, rather petty people who — more or less — seemed to vote for whichever candidate they met the most times, or which candidate actually knocked on their door personally and came in to eat cake with them.
Almost all of the people I met knocking on doors were very nice, and all were thrilled to have people knocking on their doors. Even the twenty-somethings and middle-aged people behaved like they were octogenarians in nursing homes that only got visitors every four years; at some houses, people raced to answer the door, falling over each other to have the honor of being courted by representatives of the campaigns.
I can’t remember a single Iowan having anything interesting or original to say, but I have vivid memories of how greedily they ate up all that attention and how aggressively they bragged about which candidates they met in person and how often they or their relatives had seen them at a local market or coffee shop or whatever.
The whole Iowa Caucus spectacle reminds me of going to Disneyland and seeing little kids racing around with their autograph books to meet, and get photos with, the various actors dressed up as princesses or plushy characters. While it’s not just acceptable but actually expected for small children to be so starstruck, and at times overly demanding of their favorite character’s personal attention, none of this is becoming on people in their 40s and 50s who live in places like Dubuque, Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, or wherever…and behave this way with presidential candidates.
These people LIVE for the orgy of attention they’re lavished with every four years, but it’s a damn lie the agenda-driven media propagates that Iowans take candidate vetting seriously and actually have the slightest clue what they are doing when it’s time to “caucus” (which, on the Democrat side at least, involves wandering into corners of a large room while people in their 80s or 90s attempt to count the individual bodies huddled there). Always remember this simple fact: Barack Obama is president today because his campaign gamed the Iowa Caucus through voter fraud and the general atmosphere of chaos and ineptitude prevalent in a caucus; if Obama had lost Iowa, he would not have been the Democrats’ nominee and none of the terrible things that happened in the last four years would have happened. Obama would be Vice President instead, and he’d be having a ball playing golf and saying stupid things somewhere (Joe Biden style) with absolutely no ability to do any damage whatsoever to the country. It is only because of Iowa that we are in the enormous collective mess we are in during this “The Golden Age of Hope and Change”.
While I would never vote for Ron Paul, and I certainly don’t want him to be the Republican nominee, I must admit a large part of me wants him to win the Iowa Caucus just so this will be the last time in American history that Iowans are indulged so preposterously in a presidential election year or have such opportunity to vault a candidate like Barack Obama into the White House.
If we are ever to end the boondoggle that is ethanol subsidies then we need to take the “first in the nation” rights away from the attention-seeking divas of Iowa, since neither political party will ever make a move against the ethanol scam while Iowa still holds such disproportionate sway over presidential nominations.
If Ron Paul would win the Caucus, expect to witness the full power of the Alinsky Methods Death Star aimed at him because the permanent political class will not want to allow him to make clear and obvious fools of the divas in New Hampshire as well, by winning that primary a few days later too….which, honestly, he could very well win if his fans actually turn out the votes as aggressively as they defend Dr. Paul from all criticism on the Internet.
This is all backdrop for what I really wanted to take a moment to talk about in this post because you’re going to hear a lot of people at your Christmas dinners talking about “Ron Paul’s RAAACIST! newsletters”, since that’s what the agenda-driven media and Cocktail Party GOP establishment WANT you to talk about.
I’ve seen many people commenting on various articles here and there not really understanding what a ghostwriter is or how much Dr. Paul would have known about what was being ghostwritten for him.
Well, I’ve been a professional ghostwriter for eight years now and have ghostwritten for all sorts of clients, including a few here in Chicago political circles. Mostly, I ghostwrite very detailed, time-consuming, and quite boring things like grant proposals, annual reports, and copy for different trade publications. But through the years I’ve also ghostwritten for a few people who are somewhat famous, and are thus extremely careful and conscious of their brands.
I’ve ghostwritten cookbooks for a celebrity chef, public remarks for a Chicago philanthropist, and speeches for a fairly well-known architect and artist. All three of these people watched everything I did under their name LIKE HAWKS and repeatedly sent me back to the computer to rework every draft dozens of times until they were satisfied that every single sentence, down to the period, represented them and their brands they way THEY wanted to be represented.
Even though the grants I ghostwrite are incredibly important (since the nonprofits I write for depend on them to cover the programs they’re specifically written for), in the eight years I’ve been doing this now I’ve never had a single Development Director or foundation executive micromanage me because the grants don’t have a direct and personal connection to any of these individuals. They might be signing the grants as if they wrote them themselves, and they certainly look better the more grants are accepted and the more programs are funded, but the people approving the ghostwritten grants don’t feel their PERSONAL reputations or good names are on the line with anything that’s being dispatched to a grant review board at a foundation somewhere, since these grants will never be made public and will never be published anywhere.
The cookbooks, public remarks, speeches, newsletters, and other things I’ve ghostwritten for public figures were a completely different story, no matter how laid-back or pleasant the famous person was otherwise. One of these clients was a real control freak who micromanaged everyone who worked for him, but the rest of these people were very nice and generally carefree…except when it came to anything that would be printed out and distributed to the public signed with their name. They insisted on reading each and every word, multiple times, and would never in a million years approve anything written in their voice that was not 100% factually accurate to the best of their knowledge.
I’ve told you all of this because you need to understand that I do not believe for a moment that Ron Paul did not know exactly what was in each of the newsletters that were published with his name on them, ghostwritten in his voice, and signed under his name.
The only way for anyone to convince me that Dr. Paul did not know exactly — to the period in every sentence — what was in those newsletters would be to tell me that Ron Paul has multiple personalities and “Paul Ron” approved the letters in a take on “The United States of Tara” when “Ron Paul” was unavailable and this alternate “entity” took over his body.
Granted, a politician might not read every piece of campaign material his staff writes, but I don’t believe for an instant that Ron Paul wouldn’t read everything that was written in his voice and signed with his name because recipients of those newsletters would assume they were written by him (as mot people out there have no idea how prevalent ghostwriting actually is).
I doubt Barack Obama has ever read “Dreams of My Father” (which was ghostwritten by William Ayers) or “The Audacity of Hope” (ghostwritten by the Jon Favreau who isn’t the movie director), but he is a very rare exception to the rule because his own hubris and ego preclude him from ever imagining his ghostwriters would write a single word that would disparage him…in a world where he felt certain the agenda-driven media would trumpet anything with his name on it as “the greatest autobiographical writing the universe has ever seen”.
Ron Paul, through the years, has insisted that various entities and organizations are out to get him, to stop him, or to keep him quiet about all sorts of things that Dr. Paul’s newsletters covered. I just can’t square the circle to ever conclude that a man who lacks Obama’s media protection would ever feel comfortable enough allowing controversial articles to be disseminated under his name when these articles would eventually come back to hurt him.
I once had to re-write a chapter on organically grown mushrooms something like 57 times because the chef I worked for was paranoid he’d be raked over coals for any tinge of cliche in those seven or eight pages; this man was convinced his career would never recover if an amusing anecdote I’d written about chanterelles wasn’t “him” precisely and definitively as he insisted it needed to be.
If Chef was that obsessed with my characterization of mushroom preparation and so convinced I could ruin his life and career with the smallest mistake in that ghostwriting, then I just can’t imagine a non-multiple-personality-disorder scenario where Ron Paul (or “Paul Ron”, whichever one is ultimately dominant) knowingly allowed newsletters to be written in his first person narrative and signed with his name that he didn’t personally approve line by line, sentence by sentence, down to the last period.
I truly don’t believe Ron Paul’s a RAAACIST, for the simple fact that his Congressional district is 40% black and there’s no way Democrats wouldn’t have knocked him off in an election with RAAACIST! accusations if they had anything at all to go on.
But I believe Ron Paul very much indeed read and approved every one of those newsletters, since it’s illogical to believe someone in his position wouldn’t supervise his ghostwriter(s) on a micro level like that.
Dr. Paul does himself and his fervent supporters a major disservice by obfuscating on this and giving the agenda-driven media more material to attack him with in these last few remaining days before the attention-gluttons of Iowa have their “Me! Me! Me!” fest.
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Side Note:
This is something that always makes me laugh when I see it written in reference to Ron Paul’s newsletters, but a “ghostwriter” is someone like me who produces prose for a client that the client will ultimately sign their name to and take credit for.
A “ghost writer” is someone like Agatha Christie, William Shakespeare, or Ulysses S. Grant who is a writer, dead for some length of time, and returned from the spirit world to churn out new books via seance or other paranormal means.
Ghostwriters sign confidentiality agreements with stiff penalties precluding them from ever identifying themselves as authors of the works they were assigned to write. In many cases, it would be a career-ending embarrassment for someone like Barack Obama if ghostwriters like William Ayers or Jon Favreau ever publicly admitted they authored his books (and, in my opinion, embarrasing for Ayers and Favreau since those two book are so trite and terrible).
Ghost writers don’t sign anything because their hands pass right through the pens, coating those Bics with ectoplasm while possibly giving Ray Parker Jr. false hope for a career resurgence. Who you gonna call?
If you ever see a quickie, celebrity autobiography that has “with So-and-So” written under the celebrity’s name that So-and-So writer is not a ghostwriter (or a ghost writer, either, most likely…unless it’s Shirley MacLaine we’re talking about…or, yet again, Ray Parker Jr.) but the actual author of the book who has just been paid to take a backseat on the dust jacket in order to sell more copies. The celebrity probably just had a few meetings with the writer, where the two of them talked about what the celebrity wanted the book to be about and the writer tape recorded everything and used that as an outline.
After that, it was just a matter of filling in the blanks, making the narrative flow reasonably well, and meeting the publisher’s demand for number of chapters and ultimate page count.
My all-time favorite example of ghostwriting was Fantasia Barrino’s “book” — which she claims to have “written” — soon after being a contestant on American Idol…which was a singing competition she appeared on, during which she repeatedly stifled back tears while talking about being illiterate (to gain sympathy from voters).
The book’s still on sale on Amazon (for as low as one cent), but it has no “with So-and-So” credited under Fantasia’s name. This means, quite miraculously, that an illiterate reality show contestant “wrote” a book about being illiterate when, by her own admission, she couldn’t ever read a book because of her illiteracy.
And that book is STILL probably better than “The Audacity of Hope” by “Barack Obama”.
An Open Letter to Anyone Who Complains About Ron Paul Coverage on This or Any Site: Like Him or Not, Ron Paul’s Fans Are Real and Will Be A Factor in the 2012 Election One Way or the Other
Barack Obama’s only path to re-election victory next year depends on three things working in concert:
1. Willard Mittens Romneycare becoming the Republican nominee (the only candidate that Obama is guaranteed to win against)
2. The Occupy Wall Street crowd (the Occupoopers), the Labor Unions, ACORN, and other Democrat Party goons using voter fraud and intimidation to game the system in swing states
3. Ron Paul’s fans feeling so alienated in the election that they end up voting for Jon Huntsman’s third party campaign (which Democrats are designing and running to split enough votes from the Republican nominee to secure Obama wins in swing states)
That is the only way Obama gets to 270 in the electoral college, and the White House and DNC knows this very well.
The Cocktail Party GOP establishment has suicidally committed itself to pushing Romneycare as the latest in a long string of “it’s his turn!” cucumber and mayonnaise “moderate” candidates who are doomed to be rejected by voters who just can’t trust these types of men who don’t really stand for anything besides getting themselves elected to office. Though it’s clear to a majority of Americans that Barack Obama is a disaster of a president, to get people to head out to the polls and vote they can’t just vote AGAINST Obama…they need to vote FOR someone, and they just aren’t going to ever vote FOR Romneycare.
The Cocktail Partiers are poised to squander what could be a historic rebuke of the Left, because Romneycare will have a detrimental impact on Senate and House races — and many Democrats who would have lost their seats will remain in Washington all because the Cocktail Party GOP establishment was too stupid to see the disaster that Willard Mittens Romneycare will be in the general election.
Watching this insanity unfold is like walking past the TV when an old horror movie starts playing; you know what’s going to happen, you want desperately to warn the people on the screen of their coming doom, but you feel powerless to stop any of this.
For those of you who’ve been reading HillBuzz.org since we started the site in 2008 during the Democrat primaries that year, we’ve repeatedly tried to warn the American people about the dangers Barack Obama and his Leftist acolytes posed to this country. I’ve also personally written volumes on the dangers the Cocktail Party GOP establishment poses — which in my personal opinion is even greater than the dangers of the Left, since the Left could not get away with anything in Washington without the Cocktail Party’s “let’s go along to get along” brand of enabling. Since 2008, I’ve warned against the dangers inherent in running Romneycare as the 2012 “it’s his turn!” candidate, knowing full well the entire Cocktail Party GOP establishment had decided on Romneycare for 2012 the day after John McCain conceded the presidency back in 2008. This is how the Cocktail Party works, and this is why Republicans lose so many winnable races and forever squander so many golden opportunities.
I remain heartbroken and crestfallen that Governor Sarah Palin chose not to run for the presidency in 2012; I think she missed an opportunity not only to make history, but to be the historic heroine this country needed at the time we needed her most. 2012 was her year to win, but it appears the Cocktail Party GOP establishment made it clear to her there’s no way she’d get the nomination. I respect and admire Governor Palin, but I think she was misguided and wrong not to run.
It reminds me of how I felt in 2003 when Hillary Clinton chose against better judgment not to run for the presidency herself in 2004; she was talked out of a run that year by the Kennedy Family, which told her it “wasn’t her turn” and that she should wait until 2008. We all know how that worked out. It’s soul-crushing to see this happen again here in 2011, with Governor Palin clearly promised “her shot in the future” or “her turn in 2016″ if she’d stay out of the race this year.
I really think this is why people like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry got in the race in the first place, because they didn’t want the Cocktail Party GOP establishment to have its way and give Willard “his turn” to lose to Obama without a real primary fight. Gingrich clearly never thought he’d be an actual, serious candidate and has been surprised by how well he’s done in the polls. Perry had back surgery and fumbled and bumbled his campaign launch as a result, and has always seemed to be a very good man and a decent leader who just wasn’t fully prepared to run a national campaign — but chose to do so because he saw the need for a real conservative to be in the race, no matter what it would cost him. I really respect that about Perry, though I was alienated from him long ago by the behavior of his supporters (who, most famously in the form of Erik Erikson at Redstate.com decided to declare a senseless and unwarranted war on Governor Palin’s supporters before she officially declined entry into the presidential race).
A candidate’s supporters have always had a big impact on my personal support for a candidate. Barack Obama’s acolytes in 2008 employed Alinsky Methods warfare on us Hillary Clinton supporters during the primaries, lobbing accusations of racism against anyone who decided not to support Obama. I’d never seen weaponized Alinsky smears used against fellow Democrats like that before, and I’d certainly never experienced the full Death Star-grade blasts of the Alinsky RAAACIST! attacks on a personal level before 2008. I had been a Democrat for my entire life up until Barack Obama’s primary campaign and affirm yet again that the behavior of his followers provided at least 60% of the reason for my permanent break from the Democrat Party and my ultimate decision to consider myself a Republican from here on out.
I saw there was no place in the Democrat Party for conservative, Jacksonian, Hillary Democrats with Obama’s followers calling the shots now and I can’t imagine a future where I’d ever vote Democrat again, even for people I know and like on a personal level. It turns my stomach, actually, to think of ever voting Democrat again, for anyone. Ever.
I bring all of this up today because the Democrat Party is counting on Ron Paul’s fans to similarly break from the Republican Party and vow to never vote Republican again when Dr. Paul does not become the Republican nominee.
And make no mistake about that — Ron Paul will not be the nominee and Ron Paul has only himself to blame for that, because Ron Paul is a damn fool with regards to the expression of his views on American foreign policy. People like my friend Kathleen always claim Dr. Paul is “misunderstood” or “misquoted” when he says horrifying things related to Iran, Israel, or the withdrawal of all American troops overseas. It’s indeed true the agenda-driven media and Cocktail Party GOP establishment both detest Dr. Paul, with a passion equal to that felt in support of Ron Paul by his fans.
But, in this instance at least, just because the agenda-driven media and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment detest someone doesn’t mean I naturally have to support that person even though I personally detest both the agenda-driven media and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment.
I would walk miles over broken glass and fall willingly on a sword for Governor Sarah Palin…and she’s someone both the agenda-driven media and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment detest with a passion. But the reason I support her, and the reason I wanted her to run for president and to lead our country in this time of grief and chaos, is not BECAUSE the forces I abhor in this country have aligned against her. Politics and political passion are just not that black and white, and the enemy of my enemy is not always my champion.
Ron Paul proves that.
I do not understand the support he receives from his fans, but do feel it’s the same sort of emotional support that Barack Obama’s fans give him.
I saw clearly in 2008 just how foolish it was to underestimate the destructive power of emotional support like that when employed by Obama’s acolytes; in 2012, I see the extreme dangers inherent in allowing the agenda-driven media and the Left to harness the emotional support of Ron Paul’s fans and turn it towards a third party candidacy once Dr. Paul is out of the GOP primary race.
I do not believe for a moment that Dr. Paul will run third party himself, because Dr. Paul wants his son Rand to remain a United States Senator and win re-election in the future; the Pauls know that if Ron bolts third party that Rand will suffer a consequence in years ahead, because payback is a bitch in Republican politics.
Jon Huntsman has been diluting and parroting a great many of Ron Paul’s talking points quite deliberately in recent days. The agenda-driven media keeps pushing Huntsman onto the debate stage despite him never reaching more than 1% or so in the polls (while at the same time other 1%-ers like Gary Johnson or your Aunt Sally are not allowed a place at the debates, despite having about the same level of support as Huntsman). The Left is strategically positioning this very wealthy man with an enormous ego to become a third party spoiler in 2012.
I firmly believe Huntsman has been promised the prize of Secretary of State in an Obama second term if he successfully siphons enough Republican votes to allow Obama to squeak to re-election. Whenever I write about this, I hear people claim that “Huntsman’s no Ross Perot and doesn’t have a cult following like Perot did”. Well, Huntsman’s actually richer than Perot and is more willing to spend everything he has on a vainglorious and doomed third party quest in 2012…and he doesn’t need a cult following of his own because he’s going to just co-opt Ron Paul’s.
That has always been the plan, folks. David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Donna Brazile, Howard Dean, and most importantly George Soros convened long ago in a foul-smelling room somewhere and addressed the reality that Hope!, Change!, and Unicorns! was not going to win Obama re-election. So these strategists conceived the three point plan to keep the White House in Democrat hands in 2012:
1. Ensure Willard Mittens Romneycare is the “it’s his turn!” Republican nominee
2. Deploy Democrat goon squads with weaponized Alinsky Method attacks on the ground
3. Co-opt the cult of Ron Paul and drive it toward Jon Huntsman as a third party candidate
I see what’s happening as clearly as I would see Laurie Strode or other victims of Michael Myers cluelessly wandering around dark hallways unsuspectingly when I’ve seen this movie before and know how Halloween ends.
Right around next Halloween, if Willard Mittens Romneycare’s the nominee, and if Occupy Wall Street has been deployed as domestic terrorist-grade shock troops engaging full scale Alinsky class warfare on Republicans, and if Ron Paul’s fans have been so alienated from Republicans that they’ve embraced Huntsman as a doomed third party spoiler, I’ll be horrified by the thought that Barack Obama’s very preventable and avoidable re-election might actually come to pass because the Republican Party truly and eternally is the “party of stupid”.
I’ve had friends here in Boystown who were committed alcoholics whom I watched drink their lives away; I didn’t know how to stop these people from self-destructing, and I don’t know how to stop Republicans for falling for the Democrats’ three-pronged Obama re-election strategy. Every time I read anyone out there advocate that “Romney’s the most electable!” I think, “Are these people honestly that stupid?”. Somewhere on a TV in the dark, there’s also some fool saying “I’ll be right back” as he or she wanders into the woods to investigate a strange noise. It’s horrifying to never be able to stop these people from doing themselves great harm. But the harm they cause themselves is SO PREDICTABLE to the point of being cliche.
It’s frustrating to not know the magic spell to snap people out of whatever’s making them fall into Barack Obama’s re-election trap. The Party of Stupid — with Willard Mittens Romneycare as its appointed standard-bearer — is poised to snatch Defeat from the jaws of Victory yet again. Bob Dole 1996. John McCain 2008. Mitt Romney 2012. There’s as much a pattern here as there was in the Friday the 13th films…coming next year to a polling place near you on Tuesday the 6th of November.
What’s truly maddening is seeing so many conservative political sites out there attempt to pretend the cult of Ron Paul doesn’t actually exist. My very good friend Kathleen Gee is a committed fan of Ron Paul’s. Kathleen is one of the best people I have ever known, but I think she’s out of her living mind to support Dr. Paul because I think his take on foreign policy is absurd at best and at worst pure and unadulterated madness. My boyfriend Justin insists on spending every waking minute of his free time playing some kind of “massively multiplayer online video game” called Goblin Quest (or whatever)…and for the life of me I will never understand it’s hold over him or why he can’t see there are better choices available to spend his time focused on. Justin has Goblin Quest; Kathleen has Ron Paul. I guess I used to have Vanilla Coke until its novelty finally wore off. Like bees to a blossom or moths to a flame, we all have our obsessions (and, apparently, random shoutouts to Elizabeth Taylor that all of five people will appreciate).
It seems every election there’s a candidate that I call the “Mr. Mxyzptlk Mistake”; this is an oddball supposed “outsider” who captures the imagination of everyone who has grown too disgusted with either political party to be able to support anyone else who is running for president. The Mxyzptlk Mistake takes on Goblin Quest level obsessiveness over large swaths of the politically active…though I don’t understand WHY or HOW the new Mr. Mxyzptlk is chosen every other presidential election or so.
The ORIGINAL Mr. Mxyzpltlk was a bowler-hatted impish oddball outsider from the Fifth Dimension who bedeviled Superman in the comic books; over the years, he’s reminded me of Ross Perot, Lyndon LaRouche, Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul. Because political writers deliberately avoid ever writing seriously about any of these people, I’ve never seen anyone really address the fact that EVERY FOUR YEARS there is some variation of Mr. Mxyzpltlk who draws legions of cultishly devoted followers to him (much like Justin and other “gamers” plugging into Goblin Quest like they are freebasing electronic crack). These oddball supposed “outsiders” become anti-heroes who command scores of zealots who come damn close to being anarchists; they seem to want to crash our entire political system more than they want to actually elect their candidate to national office. Defense of the latest version of Mr. Mxyzpltlk is obsessive, vociferous, and 100% emotion-based.
I can tell you from personal experience WHY political writers never want to give consistent and determined coverage to the Mr. Mxyzpltlk Mistake — whoever he might be that particular year; it’s the hatemail they’ll receive from writing about him, the threats they’ll receive from people upset that Mxyzpltlk received any ink, and the ire that will be directed at them from Mxyzpltlk cultists who don’t think their Fifth Dimensional Crusader received favorable enough coverage.
In the almost four years that I’ve been running HillBuzz.org, I’ve been subjected to about a dozen or so clearly identifiable waves of cyberstalking and hatemail because I’ve managed to tick off one fringe group or another with something that I’ve written or published on this site.
I’ve gotten death threats and AIDS-grams (a particular niche of hatemail from people who tell me they hope I get AIDS and die because I’m a gay man who doesn’t follow the gay agenda in politics) because I have never supported Barack Obama and what he’s doing to this country.
For the first year or so of this site’s existence I deliberately published HillBuzz.org anonymously because I needed to protect myself and my friends from the Alinsky Methods Death Star of attacks that come from the Left for opposing Barack Obama.
In December of 2009, I was outed by a woman named Fran Eaton at the Cocktail Party GOP establishment website Illinois Review because I opposed Mark Kirk’s nomination for the United States Senate here in Illinois. Fran Eaton worked on John McCain’s presidential campaign with me in Illinois and published my name as the creator of HillBuzz.org because the Cocktail Party GOP establishment wanted to punish me for speaking the truth about Mark Kirk and the fact that as a Senator he would be another Lindsey Graham-style closeted Republican in national office who did the Left’s bidding whenever ordered to do so (lest his blackmailers out him, the way the Left always outs gay Republicans who cross the line and oppose the Left at some crucial juncture). Fran Eaton didn’t just out me as a political writer who tried to remain anonymous so I could have a nonpolitical career, but she also outed me as gay to a national audience when I was (and remain) a private citizen and not an elected official or member of any elected official’s staff. Since then, the Cocktail Party GOP establishment has attacked me on a personal level for opposing Willard Mittens Romneycare’s nomination as much as the Left continues to attack me for opposing Barack Obama’s re-election.
There’s great truth to what Governor Sarah Palin says about the permanent political class on both sides of the aisle reading from the same playbook, engaging in the same tactics, and ultimately having the same agendas.
At various points through the years, something I’ve written has given various other groups with disparate agendas assorted opportunities to launch new attacks on me on personal levels that have impacted my health, my relationships, and even my ability to feed, house, and support myself. I’m currently suing two of these cyberstalkers for engaging in an orchestrated campaign that was designed to make me unemployable. One of these people actually used her employer’s computers to cyberstalk me from her office while billing clients for the time she spent doing this; I’ve named her employer and those clients in the lawsuit as well…and am quite looking forward to traveling to Indiana next spring to begin depositions on that case. Supposedly this woman didn’t like an essay I wrote last year and — despite a dozen fan letters she’d written me through the years claiming I was one of her favorite writers — decided she needed to start hating me and spending her time at work, using her employer’s work machines and other resources (while billing clients for her time), cyberstalking me.
These are the kinds of things I have to deal with to this day because in 2008 I created a little Hillary Clinton-supporting website that opposed Barack Obama and has continued to opine on American politics to this day. I came close to dying this year because the stress and grief heaped on me because of HB so adversely impacted my health that my body nearly gave out on me. Every day, someone out there is mad about something. Every day, someone who claims to have been a fan for years decides today is a great day to go bipolar and become a new nemesis. Every month or so, I max out another credit card or have to borrow from friends to pay the bills that keeps this site alive…because I’m repeatedly told that if I ever stop and if I ever just shut it all down that I “let them win”, whoever “they” are.
My number one cardinal rule in running a political site is to never, ever allow any of the hatemail to impact my decisions on what to write about. I have also NEVER censored any of the people I’ve hand-selected as contributors to the site. There have been people who’ve been a part of HB in the past who are no longer on the team because we came to differing opinions on certain topics and didn’t agree on the direction I took politically. I’m sure in the years ahead, this will be the case as well. I’ve never let a threat from any of them to never write another article here or to break off and start their own site affect my own writing or decision making — and I certainly don’t allow the hatemail from random strangers to decide courses of action for me either.
I will continue to allow my good friend Kathleen Gee to write about Ron Paul as much as she wants. I will continue to allow my other good friend Bridgit Casey to write about how crazy she believes Ron Paul is as much as she wants. Ron Paul, in my personal opinion, is ultimately irrelevant but HIS SUPPORTERS are going to play a crucial factor in the 2012 election. I honestly feel the same emotionally about Ron Paul as I did about Lyndon LaRouche, Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich: these are all Mxyzptlks to me and I will never understand the emtional pull they have on their followers.
BUT I recognize the importance that emotional pull plays on a significant number of voters who can be used by the Democrats in the next election to secure a sneaky, squeaky win for Barack Obama. Pretending the Mxyzptlks of politics don’t exist is folly. I’d give anything to find a way to trick them all into saying their names backwards and pop them all back into the Fifth Dimension where they belong, but absent that magic in years ahead, after Ron Paul’s last hurrah, there will be another Mr. Mxyzptlk to deal with in 2016…and in 2020…and in all the presidential elections I’ll witness with whatever time I have left on this Earth.
People like Kathleen who are fans of Mr. Mxyzptlk might think I’m from another dimension myself, because I can’t understand their zeal for a person I think is dangerously naive or downright nuts on foreign policy. But I need to acknowledge that a good portion of the hatemail I still get every day is from people who have an obsessive and never-ending hatred of Hillary Clinton and are still upset that I worked for her 2008 campaign back when I was a Democrat. Then there’s the people who hate me because I support Governor Sarah Palin, or the ones who hate me because I wanted Governor Palin to be a candidate for president this year and they’re upset she decided against running (which is somehow my fault).
Every day, someone will be upset about something. I am horrified to imagine what it must be like to be someone like Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Miller, Andrew Breitbart, or Ann Coulter and receive the volume of hatemail THEY must get from all the various fringes out there who decide to engage in two-minute-hates on a given day.
I have to say, I’m very disappointed whenever I see someone chime in with a “I have been reading you for years but because you don’t censor Kathleen I’m never going to read you again and now I’m going to get on my computer at work while I’m billing clients for my time and I am going to write to magazines and journals and tell them to never hire you as a writer so that you can’t buy food or pay your bills because I don’t think you should let Kathleen have an opinion that is different than mine”.
Let me be very clear: the reason I’m disappointed in reading that is because I never wanted a person like that as a reader in the first place, so I wish when we started this site I had some way of screening these sorts of haters out to begin with. I used to think the absolute worst people to ever deal with were the ones who complained about their comments not posting immediately (which is a major pet peeve of mine), but I have to admit that the “I’m never reading you again because I don’t agree with Kathleen” people are worse.
I don’t agree with Kathleen either, but I’m not going to censor her. If you disagree with her, debate her point by point and prove her wrong. I grant you that debating a Ron Paul supporter and addressing his foreign policy stances in particular is like trying to draw many in Hollywood away from Scientology, but if you can’t conduct or express yourself without stooping to expletives or threats — or, worse, without becoming a cyberstalker that I’ll have to file a lawsuit against in years ahead to get your harassment to stop — then please stop reading this site.
I’ve gone into massive debt keeping HB alive. It has long since ceased being something I enjoy doing. There are many days when I absolutely hate myself for ever creating this site, because it has brought me relentless attacks and the wrath of committed emotional terrorists for going on four years now. If you don’t like what you read here, then don’t read it. Save us the bandwidth costs by going elsewhere to hate or complain every day.
But don’t kid yourself that Ron Paul supporters are not out there, and that the nebulous Mxyzptlk cult that reforms every four years around an “oddball outsider” like him won’t continue to play its strange, spoiler role in presidential elections for years to come.
If you become unhinged and irrationally angry because Kathleen Gee wrote an article you didn’t like about a man you’ve never met but don’t like, then you should consider looking at the bigger picture and come up with a way to address whatever emotional pull Mr. Mxyzptlk has on people like Kathleen.
Use the intellect and imagination God gave you so solve the Mxyzptlk dilemma we seem to always face, so that the line of Mr. Mxyzptlks that’s run through LaRouche, Nader, Dean, Kucinich, and now Paul at last comes to an end.
SOMEONE out there will figure this out, in time, I’m sure. Just as Superman always found a way to get his own “oddball outsider” to say Kltpzyxm in every cartoon and pop him back into the Fifth Dimension.
What’s “Ron Paul” backwards again?
Luap Nor!
How’s that for a simple rallying cry the next time you disagree with Kathleen or any other Ron Paul fan. Just write LUAP NOR! LUAP NOR! LUAP NOR! as shorthand and I will definitely know what you mean.
An Open Letter to Bridget about Ron Paul’s “Skeletons”
Hi Bridget,
I love you girlfriend, but you’re seriously drinking some DNC-controlled-media Kool-Aid when it comes to your take on Ron Paul. 
I’m serious…I think you’re a wonderful woman, I agree with you on 90% of the issues, and I think you’ve been had. You’ve been lied to. But we all have. I just have more incentive to research things about about Ron Paul than you do, or most readers of HillBuzz.org. And that’s why you don’t know the facts about the newsletters written by ghostwriters and published by a company under Ron Paul’s masthead over 20 years ago.
If you’re not a Ron Paul voter like me, you probably don’t know that Ron Paul scores highest among minorities in a head-to-head matchup against Barack Obama, according to the latest CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday. Ron Paul gets 25% of the vote amongst non-whites, whereas Romney polls at 20% and Gingrich gets only 15%.
H/T TheLibertyVoice.com
I’m also sure you haven’t read this Open Letter to the Media by a black man, who points out that even if Ron Paul actually believed everything written by the ghostwriters (which, clearly, he doesn’t),
Pursuing [Ron Paul's] platform of limited government against a hostile bipartisan congress will be hard enough, why would he use his 4 year stint to bring back Jim Crow? Does anyone realistically think he would try to reshape America into some postcard of the antebellum south with black people working in cotton fields and white masters in palatial mansions? Really? [...]
Despite anything Ron Paul could say or do in office he couldn’t use his mandate to change who we are. I have more faith in the American people. How quickly we forget that a majority of white people in America chose an unknown largely untested black man over a seasoned, white war hero in 2008. Four years is not enough time to fundamentally change who we are as a society. Americas political structure wouldn’t permit Ron to create a “Racist States of America”. Not within a 4 year term, even if he were 100% in favor of it.
You probably also didn’t read the commentary from Black Entertainment Television, which pointedly does not label Ron Paul as a bigot (which is what one might assume from BET.com). Instead, the writer notes,
“Paul has since come out and said he only lent his name to the newsletters, and that he never actually wrote the content in them. Business Insider suggests there’s reason to take him at his word on this one, but even if we do there’s still the case of Paul’s views on civil rights. To that I’d say that Paul is a true libertarian, and being a true libertarian means believing that the government shouldn’t have the right to meddle in people’s lives, regardless of whether those people hold abhorrent beliefs.
A lot can be said about Paul, but one thing you can’t say about him is that he’s an ideologically inconsistent politician who lies and changes his mind constantly in order to court votes. What’s sad about American politics is that this is somehow considered tremendously virtuous, and not just the status quo.”
So…let’s think about those ghostwritten newsletters for a minute.
You and I both have the ability to log into HillBuzz and write whatever we like, don’t we?
Has Kevin ever told either of us what we could or could not say?
Has he ever demanded that we censor ourselves, or write for or against any topic?
I can’t speak for you, of course, but I believe Kevin has given every HillBuzz contributor free reign to express ourselves, even when he strenuously disagrees with us.
Because the views of the contributors are not necessarily the views of Kevin DuJan.
But here’s the interesting wrinkle. Because I have administrative access, I can, at this very moment, post an article with ANY byline I choose. I could post under your name, my name, Kevin’s name, Megan Fox’s name…anybody’s. I could create a totally new author account and post under that name.
So let’s say I log in under NewtLove’s name and I put up a post that says “Hitler had the right idea” or some b*llsh*t like that, would that magically transform Newt into a Nazi? Would that actually change who Newt is or what he believes? Would Newt suddenly behave differently? Would he start goose-stepping his way through life? Of course not. Newt stays Newt.
This is basically what happened with Ron Paul’s newsletters. Dr. Paul got out of Congress, went back to running his OB/GYN practice full-time, and gave up day-to-day control of the company that published several different newsletters with his name in the masthead. There were several different newsletters, with a series of editors. And they were written by ghostwriters with an occasional article by Ron Paul thrown in the mix.
Here’s my take on the Ron Paul newsletters, as a professional ghostwriter. It explains how ghostwriting works, and why Ron Paul probably couldn’t ever publicly identify the ghostwriters involved, even if he knew who they were.
This non-controversy has been resurrected time and again by Dr. Paul’s political opponents, and debunked time and again. Here’s what Ron Paul had to say about it during the last election cycle:
And why has this story popped up again, two weeks before the Iowa Caucus? Well, Ron Paul is polling at #1 in Iowa, has the best campaign, a ton of money, and the most energized and loyal supporters.
And he’s been running an ad that points out Newt Gingrich’s serial flip-flopping pretty much non-stop on Iowa TV (it has almost a million views on YouTube as well.)
Newt Gingrich doesn’t have much money, and he has no ground game. And his support is weak. But he does have one ace up his sleeve…a hack writer and Cocktail Party GOP/John McCain supporter named James Kirchick, who’s a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.
And guess who else is involved with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies? Why…Newt Gingrich. He sits on its Leadership Council.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies apparently lobbies heavily for Israel and against Iran…and since Ron Paul wants to cut all U.S. foreign aid (including that to Israel) and doesn’t want to bomb Iran into the stone age without a Congressional declaration of war, it puts Ron Paul at odds with the group, with Newt, and with Mr. Kirchick.
So, conveniently, just as Newt started to plummet in the Iowa polls, Kirchick re-ignited the non-controversy with The Company Ron Paul Keeps – Meet Alex Jones.
Ron Paul has never, not once, spoken a bigoted comment, or advocated a discriminatory policy. In fact, we libertarians don’t view people as members of groups. We judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We see people as individuals. Libertarianism and collectivism (racism, sexism) are polar opposites.
If there was ANY audio or video of Ron Paul–oh, I don’t know–calling Barack Obama “clean and articulate” for a black guy (like Joe Biden) or saying Barack Obama is appealing because he’s a light-skinned black who can switch in and out of black dialect at will (like Harry Reid), don’t you think we would have heard it by now?
Let’s contrast Ron Paul’s views on racism with these choice comments by DNC-media darling The Reverend Al Sharpton, in a speech at King’s College:
“White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires … We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”
Wow! Racism AND homophobia in one sentence. Way to go, Reverend Al!
Later in the same speech, Reverend Al gave some background on America’s founders, whom he described as “the worst criminals, the rejects they sent from Europe and sent them to the colonies.”…“So [if] some cracker,” he continued, “come and tell you ‘Well my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,’ you better hold you pocket. That ain’t nothing to be proud of, that means their forefathers was crooks.”
So, my 13-year-old ancestor, Mary Chilton, was a “crook” who was “sent” here? Gosh, I thought the Pilgrims came here because they were fleeing religious persecution. I guess that shows you what I know about my own family tree!
This is what real-live racism smells like, Bridget. This is the real deal in all its disgusting “glory.”
But because he’s a Democrat–and a liberal one at that–a real live in-your-face, caught-on-video racist like Al Sharpton doesn’t just get a free pass from the media…he gets his own TV show on MSNBC!
That’s right…if you’re a Republican, you can be accused of RAAAAAACISM and anti-Semitism and burned at the stake by the DNC-controlled media for words you didn’t even say and don’t believe…despite a complete lack of evidence…despite the fact that your heroes are Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Gandhi, and Jewish economists Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises and despite a 35 year track record of voting against racism and collectivism in all its forms.
But if you’re an authentic, confirmed, proven, on-the-record Jew-hating, cracker-hating racist whose words caused a riot that killed a few people in a Jewish-owned clothing store in Brooklyn, you get your own TV show.
I have some serious questions for you, Bridget.
Are you really going to allow yourself to be manipulated by the same DNC-controlled media who destroyed Sarah Palin’s character because she “could see Russia from her house?”
Are you going to believe the same DNC-controlled media who smeared Newt Gingrich by reporting that he “served his dying wife divorce papers in her hospital bed?”
Are you going to believe the same DNC-controlled media who took down Herman Cain with completely manufactured charges of “sexual harassment?”
Are you going to believe the same DNC-controlled media who claimed that Kevin DuJan was “rigging the votes for Bristol Palin” on Dancing With the Stars?
If there was any video or audio of Ron Paul saying anything even remotely questionable, don’t you think it would be starring in a Mittens Romney commercial already? Don’t you think you would have seen it in any of Ron Paul’s 12 congressional campaigns or his two previous presidential campaigns? He has been elected to office 12 times from a district that is approaching 40% minority population.
Do you think a district that’s nearly 40% minority would elect Ron Paul to Congress 12 times if they thought he was a racist?
Bridget, if you think Ron Paul is a racist, it’s because you’ve been played, and the DNC-controlled media and Cocktail Party GOP are counting on the fact that you won’t make any effort to discover the truth for yourself.
I respectfully request that you examine the links I’ve provided and look at this smear campaign with an open mind.
Very sincerely,
Kathleen
The Skeletons in Ron Paul’s Closet
Last week, someone posted in the comment section of one of the Hillbuzz articles that we had turned into a Ron Paul site so I thought I would chime in and make a correction. I am not a fan of Ron Paul. I have never taken him seriously as a GOP contender and always just thought of him as an annoying distraction. Until now. If the polls are to be believed, he could very well win Iowa. Disturbing. It would most likely end there for him (hopefully) but it does make you sit up and take a healthier look at him and what he believes and some very disturbing things are bobbing to the surface. Like any candidate that is taking a lead in the polls…media scrutiny is part of the territory. I have to say that I agree with his general theory that less government is ideal. I know that Ron Paul wants to get rid of many (or most) of the government agencies and for that I applaud him but his foreign policy views scare the hell out of me. Islam is a very big threat to the United States…Iran is a very big threat to the United States…we can’t ignore them and leave them alone. A nuclear attack from Iran would change life as we know it. Like it or not, the world counts on us… and our current president wants to weaken us to the point that we are no longer able to protect those who want to live free. In the words of the great Ronald Reagan…
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”
So, like all the other candidates, Ron Paul is having to answer questions about his past and there’s plenty of skeletons to dig out of his closet. Here are a few things you may (or may not) know about Congressman Paul.
1. Did you know that Ron Paul endorsed Cynthia McKinney in 2008 as the Green Party candidate? Yep…you read that right. Instead of endorsing McCain/Palin (or remaining silent) he actually endorsed one of the looniest humans to ever walk the Earth…Cynthia “I love Muammar Qaddafi” McKinney.
2. I know this has been covered on here before but did you know that Ron Paul thinks that Bradley Manning is a patriot? Yep…the Bradley Manning who gave stolen classified military documents to Wiki-leaks to be exposed to the world? How could an American presidential candidate actually voice support for someone who knowingly put our troops lives in danger?
3. Did you know that in the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s, Congressman Paul had a monthly newsletter called Ron Paul’s Freedom Report? This newsletter made very controversial anti-gay, anti-Semitic and anti-black statements. One newsletter claimed that gays were trying to infect other Americans with AIDS by compromising our blood supply. Another stated that order was established during the LA riots only because the blacks had to go pick up their welfare checks. Paul has tried to distance himself from the newsletters by saying that he did not write the articles but they were written in the first person (as if by him) with no other name in the byline and Mr. Paul profited over a million dollars from the newsletters. Whether he wrote all the newsletters or only some of them, he should have been aware of what was being written in his name. He has been given a free pass on these newsletters because no one has taken him seriously as a presidential candidate but in light of his poll numbers in Iowa…he has some explaining to do.
Whether you love Ron Paul or hate him…you have to ask this question…
If Ron Paul is so libertarian that he won’t even police people who use his name, if his movement is filled with incompetents and opportunists, then what kind of a president would he make? Would he even check in to see if his ideas are being implemented? Who would he appoint to Cabinet positions?
For the record…Kevin and I have discussed at great lengths the current GOP field and agree that currently Newt Gingrich would be the best man for the job (unless Sarah decides to jump in and save the day…how wonderful would that be?). Rick Perry is also a good man but may have done too much damage to himself during the debates to recover fully. We both were greatly disappointed by the demise of Herman Cain, who clearly was not ready for prime-time. I am almost completely burned out by this political roller coaster and we haven’t even begun the primaries yet. The people that I used to admire and respect (Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Ann Coulter, Nikki Haley etc.) have really let me down and have proven to all be establishment cocktail party hacks. I’m not sure where the Tea Party is in all of this mess. Who are they supporting? Have they made any statements? Will we be stuck with Romney? Will Ron Paul launch a 3rd party bid should he not be the GOP nominee or will he accept defeat so as not to damage his son Rand’s political career?
What are your thoughts?
Ron Paul Warns Town Hall Audience About NDAA
I watched this Town Hall event online last night instead of sleeping. It’s what I do nowadays. I spend 4-6 hours a day working on HillBuzz, about 11 hours a day on my real job, and about 3 hours a day volunteering for Ron Paul’s campaign. So sleep has become optional.
Anyway, I watched this Ron Paul Town Hall meeting on C-SPAN last night, and was excited to witness someone going through the same process I went through when I first started realizing that things just weren’t adding up for me anymore.
In this video, you witness a citizen discovering that his Congressman has lied to him about the NDAA. He was so angry that he provided his Congressman’s letter to his local paper (see the link below to watch the video and download his Congressman’s response.)
Although it was the last question of the night during a Monday night campaign stop at the Executive Court in Manchester, it was the one Ron Paul took the most time to explain – what is the National Defense Authorization Act and what should people understand about changes made for 2012.
The question came from Alex LaRoza of Bedford, a homeschooled high school student who asked Paul for his take on the controversial military spending bill. [...]
See the video to find out Paul’s answer, and what got Keith Myrdek of Manchester so upset with his Republican Congressman [Frank Guinta], after hearing Paul’s answer….Myrdek says he now believes Guinta misled him about the substance of the NDAA.
VIDEO: Ron Paul on NDAA: ‘Biggest Story’ Nobody’s Talking About
I’m always excited to watch the light bulb come on for someone. That’s why I really enjoy teaching people about media bias and how the Cocktail Party GOP works.
Check it out.
You can watch the whole event here: Ron Paul Town Hall meeting on C-SPAN
