Yes Virginia, Ron Paul is a Kook

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Ha ha. I was just kidding in the last post. It got cut off because, um, my cat knocked over a power line and my neighborhood lost electricity for a bit. But we’re all good now! And I’d just like to say that Barack Obama is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful president a country could ever hope to have.

Anyway. As we all know, President Obama’s most dangerous enemy is Ron Paul, and it’s now my duty to tear him down so that his siren call of freedom will never reach the American people. So here you go: a fundraising letter “written” by Ron Paul in, I guess, 1991 or so. Question: what the hell is he talking about here? He’s scared, he says, by the government’s announcement of “New Money,” which could wipe you out and leave your family destitute.

Answer: as near as I can tell, he’s babbling about the introduction in 1991 of new currency designed to be harder to counterfeit. It made his skin crawl! The bills were tinted pink and blue! And they were being printed in — a nondescript building that has security measures and three-color printing presses!

There’s also some stuff about new federal rules requiring you to report cash transactions over $10,000, and I can at least understand a guy like Ron Paul having nightmares about that.

But new currency designed to be hard to counterfeit? That’s a totalitarian nightmare? You know, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the fact that Ron Paul has a few good ideas doesn’t mean he’s not a lunatic kook. He is. He’s a lunatic kook who’s learned to speak in complete sentences1 and whose kookiness occasionally overlaps with the pet ideas of both left and right.

But he’s still a kook.

1In fairness, a lot of kooks have learned this trick recently.

UPDATE: More here. Much more.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate