Steven Walters in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reveals today that "(f)ormer Republican presidential candidate U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas will keynote Saturday's session of the 50th anniversary of the Appleton-based John Birch Society."
The John Birch Society, dating back to the 1950s, is infamous for its conspiracy-minded, anti-Semitic, Joe McCarthy-supporting whacks.
Writes Kirchick in the January 8, 2008 The New Republic on Paul:
Finding ... (Ron Paul's) pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. ... (Ron Paul's) The Freedom Report's online archives only go back to 1999, but I was curious to see older editions of Paul's newsletters, in part because of a controversy dating to 1996, when Charles 'Lefty' Morris, a Democrat running against Paul for a House seat, released excerpts stating that "opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions," that 'if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be,' and that black representative Barbara Jordan is 'the archetypical half-educated victimologist' whose 'race and sex protect her from criticism.'
