Video Surfaces Showing Ron Paul Touting Racist Newsletter He Now Claims He Knew Nothing About

Ron Paul's chances for being anything more than a racist footnote in history have just dropped precipitously as video has surfaced of a Ron Paul advertisement touting the very newsletters he claims he knew nothing about.

A recently surfaced video from 1995 shows the GOP presidential hopeful discussing controversial newsletters that he claimed this week he didn't even read until about 2001.

The Texas congressman has come under fire in recent days for the newsletters, called Ron Paul's Political Report, Ron Paul's Freedom Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report, which went out under his name in the late 1980s and early 1990s during his time in and out of office.

Some contained a series of racist statements, including, "We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational."

During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, another read, "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks."

In the resurfaced C-SPAN interview, Paul — then out of office and trying to return to Congress — describes the “educational” newsletters and seems to be knowledgeable of their contents.

"It covered a lot about what was going on in Washington: financial events, especially some of the monetary events, since I had been especially interested in monetary policy, had been on the banking committee and am still very interested in that subject," said the libertarian-leaning lawmaker.

Reuters unearned a racist direct mail newsletter, in which he's predicting a race war.

So, to sum up. He first admitted that he was involved in the newsletter, but denied writing the most incendiary posts. Now, as those allegations have resurfaced in the 2012 campaign, he came to deny having anything to do with those newsletters at all, even as more information has surfaced showing not only how racist and anti-Semitic those newsletters were, but that Paul actively touted them in places like CSPAN.

Yet, there's a significant number of Republicans and libertarians who tout Paul as a panacea to all that ails the nation. If they took more than a cursory look at Paul and his policies, they'd see just how of touch with mainstream America he is, to say nothing of his racist and anti-Semitic ideologies he's proffered in the past.

For instance, Paul's policy options include the following:

• eliminating FEMA (as though that's the reason that people build/live in areas that are flood/hurricane/quake zones?);
• eliminate the FDA (because anyone can come up with radium as a medical treatment, drug companies can and do try to get treatments approved that turn out to be more dangerous);
•  believes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional (apparently ignoring the Art 1, Sec. 8, Cl 1/18 necessary and proper for the general welfare);
• against the Americans with Disabilities Act; and
•  he's okay with Iran having a nuclear weapons.

So, not only does Paul have a shaky understanding of the US Constitution and has a domestic agenda that would put millions of Americans at risk, but has a foreign policy that even fellow Republicans find distasteful and dangerous. Burying your head in the sand about potential and actual threats to US strategic interests and our trading partners/allies, is dangerous to everyone. Isolationism has a long history in the US, but it's come to bite us in a big way, particularly in the massive drawdown of military resources before World War II; isolationism didn't keep us out of the war, but it delayed how swiftly we could respond with forces capable of taking a sustained fight to the Axis powers.