Ron Paul’s racist ties get another airing

It’s good to see that Ron Paul’s dalliance with racists and anti-Semites is getting another airing. The Weekly Standard is recycling James Kirchick’s splendid New Republic article of four years ago, in which we learned that newsletters with names like Ron Paul’s Freedom Report and the Ron Paul Political Report were filled with gems such as a reference to Martin Luther King Day as “Hate Whitey Day.”

Paul, naturally, claimed to know nothing.

The New York Times gives the charges an airing today. For what it’s worth, here’s what I wrote for the Guardian in early 2008.

Jeff Jacoby doesn’t listen to Rush, either

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, in the course of thrashing Colin Powell, cites a 16-year-old William Raspberry column in which Raspberry apologized for accusing Rush Limbaugh of bigotry without having listened to him for more than a few minutes in bits and pieces.

Powell, who’s been critical of Limbaugh, must be similarly ignorant, according to Jacoby.

But wait. Has Jacoby seen the “Top 10 Racist Limbaugh Quotes”? [Link now fixed.] Two of them, at least, have been verified by Snopes, the gold standard for such things:

  • “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”
  • “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” [Spoken to an African-American woman who’d called.]

Two of the most incendiary quotes on the list — a paean to James Earl Ray, who assassinated the Rev. Martin Luther King, and a comment that the streets were “safer after dark” during slavery — appear to come from a book by Jack Huberman called “101 People Who Are REALLY Screwing America (and Bernard Goldberg is Only #73).”

I do not know the provenance of those quotes, and Wikiquote says they are in dispute because Huberman did not provide dates. So we’ll leave those in the interesting-if-true category.

On the other hand, there is no question that Limbaugh lost his gig as a football analyst after he made racially insensitive remarks about Donovan McNabb, a quarterback who’s black. And he’s had great fun with a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro,” not least because he gets to claim, over and over, that his critics don’t get it and he’s not really racist.

William Raspberry retired in 2005. But he might want to consider his 1993 apology to Limbaugh. The evidence is clear that Raspberry got it right the first time.

Racist stupidity at the New York Post

Sean Delonas’ cartoon in today’s New York Post may not be racist in intent, but it is racist in effect. How anyone — Delonas and his editors — could be unaware of the way African-Americans have historically been compared to apes in order to diminish them is beyond me.

Eric Deggans offers some insights for the St. Petersburg Times, and was especially good earlier today on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” And Romenesko rounds up coverage.

Update: Jon Keller agrees.