Ron Paul Portrays Himself as Champion of Minorities in Interview on Fox News' Neil Cavuto

He still doesn't address the core issue: Why would Ron Paul permit such inflammatory newsletters go out in his name? Paul says it's ironic he's getting hammered on this, since he's the biggest "civil libertarian" in the race, who backs the rights of minorities against government. That's chutzpah, I'll tell you. And he goes on to blow off the more incendiary charges as perhaps a failure of management. By now most people don't buy that Paul had no clue of these things, and the candidate simply keeps the discussion away from the clearly racist statements by saying that the "race war" stuff was less than 1 percent of what was published in what was basically a "hard money newsletter."

See also New York Times, "Gingrich Criticizes Paul on Newsletters and Foreign Policy."

And Robert Stacy McCain has a limited defense of Paul, seeing the newsletters as fringe fundraising classics of the pre-Internet era, "Classics of the Golden Age of Fringe, Or: Ron Paul Digs the Beatles’ White Album."

EXTRA: Ta-Nehisi Coates has a sick obsession with finding racism in every crack or crevice under the sun, so it's no surprise that the Paul letters have been a bonanza for his blogging. That said, I can't really disagree with this:

Yesteday [sic] Ron Paul claimed on CNN that he'd never read the newsletters that went out in his name. Here is Ron Paul in a 1995 video discussing the very newsletters he claims to never have read.

If you can find away to explain away a hateful newsletter written in someone's own name, it's likely you can find some way to explain this video away too. There's always a path to make yourself right, if that's your intent. Indeed, at this point it probably behooves me to stop arguing.