(“Some On The Right Hate Ron Paul”) The Stupid and the Dishonest Join the Attacks on Ron Paul by Thomas DiLorenzo

Yet another neocon Republican establishment political hack has demonstrated ignorance, deceit, and bad manners in yet another attack on Ron Paul.

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This time it is one Jeffrey Lord, a “contributing editor” to The American Spectator magazine. Writing in a January 15 article on the Philly.com Web site, Lord feigns outrage over the fact that five years ago Ron Paul told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the Civil War was unnecessary to end slavery.

Lord is being deceitful here by taking what Ron Paul said out of context. I remember Ron Paul’s appearance on that show, and the point he was making was that all the rest of the world – the British, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, the Northern states in the U.S. – ended slavery peacefully in the nineteenth century. His point was that we should have done what the British did, and used tax dollars to purchase the freedom of the slaves and then ended it forever. That, Said Ron Paul, would have been preferable to a war that ended up killing over 650,000 Americans (850,000 according the the very latest historical research) while destroying a large part of the U.S. economy. Lord is obviously ignorant of all of this history.

Lord cites my book, The Real Lincoln, to feign additional outrage over the fact that I supposedly called Lincoln a “Dictator-President.” He apparently suffered a case of the vapors when he discovered that Ron Paul listed The Real Lincoln as “recommended reading” at the end of his own book, Revolution: A Manifesto.

I don’t ever recall ever using those exact words about Lincoln, but I do know that generations of historians have routinely referred to “the Lincoln dicatatorhip,” although usually calling it a benign dictatorship. They have done this because of Lincoln’s illegal suspension of Habeas Corpus, the mass imprisonment of tens of thousands of Northern political dissenters, the shutting down of hundreds of opposition newspapers, the deportation of opposition member of Congress Clement L. Vallandigham, the rigging of elections, and worse. (Read Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague; and Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln by James Randall). Lord is obviously ignorant of these historical facts as well.

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Jeffrey Lord is simply lying when he writes that “[Ron] Paul shares with DiLorenzo the belief that the war was not fought over issues of Union . . .” That in fact is exactly what I have argued in my writings. Southerners (and most Northern newspaper editors as well, by the way) believed that the union was voluntary, that the states that ratified the Constitution were sovereign, and that they therefore had a right to join or not join the Union. Lincoln believed that the union was a compulsory union from which there could never under any circumstances be any escape, and that he consequently had a right to wage total war on the civilian population of the South to “save the union.” I have argued that Lincoln destroyed the American union of the founders, which was in fact a voluntary union…..

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via The Stupid and the Dishonest Join the Attacks on Ron Paul by Thomas DiLorenzo.

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