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Entry: Who Is Matt Welch? Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/who_is_matt_welch#22352 Post contents: lester, The plug was pulled on the RP campaign the night before the NH primary as RP dissembled and stammered as Wolf Blitzer delivered the carefully prepared dagger. After scoring 8% in NH and less and less in the bigger states, the purpose of his campaign was kaput. After that, his campaign was transformed into not much more than what his 3rd party libertarian run for president was in 1988: an educational outreach effort at best and futile delusion at worst. Maybe if Ron Paul had responded more honestly to Blitzer the day before the NH primary with something like this, then he might have kept his longshot effort alive: "Yeah, us libertarians have had cranky racist bigots hanging around us from day 1. We're kind of like the ACLU. Who do the Klan and the Neo-Nazis call when they need protection for their marches in Skokie? They call the ACLU. We libertarians are sort of like that. We're the only people who defend the rights of racists to be racist, so some of the non-violent ones join the movement. To what extent they actually apply the libertarian non-violence principle is sometimes questionable, but we do have some of them come into the movement and if one isn't careful racist libertarians can end up writing some of their immoral--but not illegal--views in one's libertarian newsletter. Its the same with other non-violent libertarians who hold views outside the mainstream such as marijuana or free-sex advocates. Sometimes these activists let their personal views that I actually think are immoral get into their political advocacy." But RP didn't do that and the 8% NH result officially ended the campaign. Once the Racist Newsletter story was put out there, ALL of the left/independent cross-over support that RP's campaign depended on evaporated. All of a sudden people who had previously un-ashamedly stood up for Ron Paul had to tag qualifiers to their statements of support that acknowledged the Racist Newsletter issue (e.g. Andrew Sullivan, Bill Maher, and Penn Gillette). Actually, the Racist Newsletter issue would have been the perfect prop for RP to distinguish his campaign from the previous populist campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Alan Keyes--whose 30% early primary showings RP WAS trying to emulate, but whose dumb hick support RP should NOT have been trying capture. Unlike Welch, I remember the cozying up to the Buchananite populist period of Murray Rothbard. At the time I was sitting in on his History of Thought classes at UNLV in 1993/94 and the whole thing troubled me greatly, especially to see Rothbard contradict his earlier eloquent defenses of the anti-Berlin wall LP platform planks when people like Ed Clarke would get squeemish about such things. I also will never forget reading Lew Rockwell's LA Times editorial in 1991--post-video taping of the Rodney King beating, but PRE-riots, where Rockwell called for the police to carry out beatings/punishments on the spot similar to the Rothbard article that Welch references. I hadn't remembered that he called for outlawing video cameras as Welch says. How could these guys have thought such authoritarian positions could ever yield anything but evil down the road? And how after holding those positions and then later (re?) discovering "Red State Fascism" and becoming one of the net's top anti-police-taser-torture blog sites, could they not feel compelled to make the evolution of their thought an important issue itself. I agree with Doug Casey who said that after the U.S. government pulls its military out of the 130 countries that it occupies it should make a sincere apology to the world for all of its murder, rape, and pillage. Likewise Rockwell should apologize for advocating police beatings. Honesty is the best policy and would probably have gotten a lot better than 8% in New Hampshire. Sent at: 2008 05 16