Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Less than a month ago, conflict erupted in the liberal blogsphere.  Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein noted that Ron Paul was a problematic defender of civil liberties because of his opposition to abortion rights as as his occasional racism and hostility towards civil rights laws.  Glenn Greenwald wrote two posts that make the 500 pages of War and Peace I have to read by February 5th look like a pamphlet, castigating Goldstein and Klein for being pro-choice fundamentalists who simply didn’t care about indiviudal rights, as evidenced by them thinking that because “Paul wants to destroy the minimum wage, dissolve Medicare, end the Constitutional right to choice, prevent gay adoptions, preserve “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell,” undermine Social Security, dismantle public education, etc, etc…  and then call it true ‘liberty’” he wasn’t the best “liberty” candidate.

Both Klein and Goldstein noted that one reason they weren’t as hot on Paul as Greenwald was because of his history of race-baiting and racist comments published in his newsletters.  Greenwald, in the course of responding to Klein and Goldstein, simply did not discuss Ron Paul and race, even when he linked to Klein’s post where he explicitly said that Paul’s troubled history with racism was all he needed to not say kind words about him.  Dana Goldstein, in her “definitive takedown“  noted the known instances of racist commentary appearing in  Paul’s newsletters.  Greenwald in his two posts responding to them, didn’t mention “race” “racism” “black” or “newsletter.”  Now, to be fair, the newsletter story was not as big then, largely because Jamie Kirchick hadn’t yet written his article exposing just how widespread the racist commentary was.

But what has Greenwald, who said that Ron Paul had a “sterling record across the board on liberty”, written now that Paul has been exposed as a racist, or at least someone who didn’t mind having racist writing published under his name? If you search Greenwald’s archives for “Ron Paul”, you’ll find one mention of him since January 8th, when Kirchick’s article was published. On January 11th, Greenwald quotes Noam Scheiber’s reporting on the South Carolina GOP debate — that’s it.
Don’t you think that a fairly prominent blogger with a large following  who impugned Ezra Klein as not willing to say positive things about Ron Paul because Klein doesn’t want to “actually have to say or do anything that Chris Matthews would find strange, offensive or out of place” should say something about the fact that his favorite Republican, his Lone Voice in Defense of Liberty turns out to be a negligent race-baiter?  Shouldn’t he at least apologize to Klein and Goldstein and acknowledge that despite “Championing Mainstream Political Thought While Pretending to Oppose it” they were both right to smell a rat when it came to Paul.