If there isn't a single person in the western political discourse who proudly adheres to a given characterization, it's a strawman.
That's all. Meanwhile, on Ron Paul / race, that newsletter is a bit of a problem. Maybe you're too young to remember the conflation between states' rights and segregation.
I'm really interested to see what happens if he wins Iowa and comes in 2nd in New Hampshire. I do think it would be good for the Republican party.
Perhaps, but he did have a company that earned a lot of money from publishing newsletters containing racist and anti-gay passages under his name (e.g. The Ron Paul Survival Report):
> The newsletters, attributed to Paul, made statements such as "opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions," "if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be", and referring to Martin Luther King as a "pro-communist philanderer" and to Martin Luther King Day as "hate Whitey day."[72][73] An issue from 1992 refers to carjacking as the "hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos."[74] In an article title "The Pink House" the newsletter wrote that " "Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities."[73]
Of course, he distances himself from these newsletters now. Would somebody who is truly not racist and not anti-gay have such words published in their name by accident?
