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.