On Tuesday, the Washington Post ran an article by staff writer Matthew Mosk, criticizing Ron Paul for hiring family members to work on his campaign. Mosk demonstrated his woefully inept understanding of Paul’s positions as early as the lead paragraph:

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has built a national following largely by preaching an isolationist foreign policy. Stick with your own kind, says the maverick presidential candidate.

And he goes on:

And that’s more or less what he has been doing over the past few months, putting relatives in a slew of key positions and paying them a total of $169,063, according to the latest campaign finance reports.

I don’t have the energy or desire to pick apart Mosk’s entire article, when it so obviously demonstrates his distaste for Ron Paul’s ideals and, thus, reveals the motivation behind writing the shitpile article that showed up on A3 last Tuesday. But, since Matthew Mosk is an idiot, and not just somebody who disagrees with Paul, I’ll say this much:

Ron Paul does not support isolationist foreign policies. Just last week, on National Public Radio, Ron Paul reiterated his position, saying that the best kind of humanitarian aid the United States government could offer any country is this: Stop bombing people! Furthermore, Ron Paul encourages diplomacy, free trade, and non-governmental foreign assistance. None of these things would be possible in an isolationist nation.

Enlisting the help of a candidate’s family members throughout a campaign is a time-honored tradition that extends back to the early beginnings of this country. It is, in fact, expected of closer family members such as the candidate’s wife or husband. For anyone working on a campaign in a position that would be paid if the worker were not related to the candidate, it’s actually an ethical imperative that the relative be paid the same amount.

Also, of the 30+ million dollars Ron Paul’s supporters have contributed to his campaign, the $169,000 paid to six workers related to him accounts for less than one percent of that total.

Mosk later suggests that continuing to campaign until the convention when John McCain, the presumptive nominee, becomes the actual nominee, is somehow untoward as well:

Paul has received relatively few votes in his insurgent bid for the Republican nomination, but he has attracted an extraordinarily dedicated following that has flooded his campaign coffers with more than $30 million in donations. Even after releasing a video on his Web site in March indicating that he no longer expected to win the Republican nomination, Paul has continued to collect and spend those riches.

…

An added concern with the presidential campaign, Sloan said, is that Paul has fundamentally transformed his bid for the White House into something more ephemeral. Spending by the campaign has slowed considerably over the past month. Paul spent $470,862 in April, leaving him with $4.7 million remaining.

Well, the same day this article ran in the Washington Post, Ron Paul had his best performance so far in the Idaho Republican primary where he picked up 24% of the vote. Is Ron Paul going to win the Republican nomination this year? Unfortunately, no. But, has his campaign become ephemeral? Only in the weaker and willfully obtuse minds of people like Matthew Mosk.

From Ron Paul:

The Federal Reserve is killing our dollar, the war is killing our soldiers, police-state methods are killing our civil liberties, and the income tax and bureaucratic meddling are killing our economy.

If we’re not interested in stopping this, if we’re content to elect leaders only because we think they can “win", if we settle for what we’re told to do by the club we registered for the last time we renewed our driver’s license, then what is the point of voting at all? What is the point of “winning"? What will be left for us when the professional winners have taken what they want from us– the only things we have that they want– our vote and our money?

It seems that we give this great privilege of choice away too freely. It’s as if so many of us are like spoiled ex-virgin teenage prostitutes– happy to give away ourselves like candy. We’ve lost our innocence and we’ve stopped making informed decisions. Instead, we give it up to the first pimp with lots of dough and power to come along and demand it of us. We run with a crowd of disenchanted losers, doing what’s easiest, what requires the least conviction, what we can bite the inside of our cheeks, shut our eyes, and get through without crying.

I think it’s time we stop. I think it’s time we ask ourselves what’s really important to us. I think it’s time we re-examine those things we hold most dear and rediscover the deeply buried love of the principle of this country that I suspect lurks somewhere within all of us. In this age of torpor, we may be numb; but, we’ve never been more connected. We can glimpse the suffering that goes on outside the relative safety of our borders, and some part of us knows to what principles we owe our freedom– crumbling though it may be.

At any moment, we can stop this. We’re only victims of our own apathy. We can take back our independence and power by the simple act of rejecting defacto positions and spoonfed ideas. We can start thinking for ourselves. We’re individuals, and when we act like it, we become free and very powerful. Let’s do it, all of us. Who’s with me?

Despite Fox’s best efforts to mitigate and denigrate Ron Paul’s views, he handled himself extremely well. I don’t know if a truly intelligent, principled man (or woman) can actually win a presidential election. But, for those of us who desperately want such a leader who takes Constitutional responsibility seriously, Ron Paul is certainly our best hope in 2008.

I’ve neglected this blog in recent months, because I haven’t had any new insights to share regarding capitalism and culture, and even now I don’t want to deviate from the blog’s original purpose by transforming it into a Ron Paul support site. Still, this man is standing up for individual freedom and government accountability, and his views are relevant to the discussion topics of this weblog.

I have no intention of turning this weblog into a Ron Paul advocacy platform, all recent evidence to the contrary. But I found this video from YouTube very moving, and I urge you to take the next couple of minutes to watch it from start to finish.

My discussion of Ron Paul’s ideas are relevant to a weblog that discusses Capitalism and Culture, because his ideas represent a very deeply rooted and growing sense of disenchantment within the zeitgeist by the present state and direction of our government. I’ll be talking about that a lot more in future posts, but, for now, just watch.