Griz Times
columnist: Grizzle Griz

Topic: Ron Paul
Virginia Heffernan Stretches Facts to Link Ron Paul to Racism

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After Bill White's racist smear of Ron Paul was already discredited, Virgina Heffernan and the New York Times jump on the Little Green Footballs bandwagon.

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by Grizzle Griz
(Centrist)
Monday, December 24, 2007

A couple of days ago, I wrote a rebuttal to the American Thinker and Little Green Footballs smear articles about Ron Paul's imaginary meetings with white supremacists. It was enough that the "corroborating evidence" didn’t even border on circumstantial, but there have been several developments since that completely rebut the whole story. Whereas I once believed American Thinker to be unrelenting in their disdain for Ron Paul, I was wrong. In fact, they updated their post three times with information that more-or-less  disproved the original article. 

It looks as though Virginia Heffernan and the New York Times have stepped into the fray, apparently unwitting of or uninterested in these recent developments. Heffernan’s story quoted the same post by Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, which cited a forum post by Bill White, a Commander of the American National Socialist Worker’s Party and a white supremacist. Like the original American Thinker article, Heffernan ignored Charles Johnson’s and Little Green Footballs’ admonition to take everything with a grain of salt.  

Here are the alleged facts. Bill White, a persona non grata in the white supremacist movement, claimed that Ron Paul had been at some dinners that were originally organized by Pat Buchanan, where several members of white supremacist groups also attended. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it. Oh…they also met on Wednesdays. 

The only provocative part of White’s post was the tone. White claims that he is exposing Ron Paul’s "extensive involvement in white nationalism". White also states that he is upset that Ron Paul denies any affiliation with white supremacist groups. He says that Ron Paul is a white supremacist of the Stormfront-type. Finally, White claims that the Ron Paul Campaign is being ridiculous by calling "white racialism" a small ideology.

Given the excitement over the "extensive involvement" issue, one might expect to see more damning facts in White’s post. Instead, Heffernan claims that Little Green Footballs made up for this lack by starting its "due diligence". If by "started", she means "not adequately completed", then she is right. The first sentence of Johnson’s page reads "Take this one with a grain of salt, please" and it adds three links to "corroborating evidence". The links amount to nothing but an easy condemnation of White’s claim.

Here is the real damning evidence against Heffernan's and The New York Times' integrity. It comes from American Thinker’s three updates to its original smear, of all places. This is a mark of honesty on the part of the Thinker, so Lifson and the Thinker should get credit. The first update includes a quote and a link, which demonstrate that Bill White has a patchy history with the truth. The second update includes a link that disproves the Tara Thai-on-Wednesdays connection. The third is a quote from Peter Gemma, who ran the dinners. He claimed that he saw neither Paul nor White at any meetings. Unless it is an indictment to eat at a popular restaurant that a white supremacist may or may not have eaten at some other time, this whole discussion is hysterical. Thank you American Thinker for showing Heffernan what real due diligence looks like.

Being a student of a profession that uses the term ‘due diligence’ regularly, a few other legal terms come to my mind, like "libel". By ignoring Charles Johnson’s admonition that Heffernan and others take the post with a grain of salt, I believe Heffernan has come dangerously close to committing libel. While she posts under the guise of disinterested observer, she observed more than she was entitled to. For instance she says, "Ron Paul…seems to have Nazi troubles, as in they’re saying he’s one of them." Heffernan replaced singular ‘he’ with plural "they", probably to compensate for a lack of emphasis. Only one white supremacist actually made this claim: the discredited attention-mongerer. The second supremacist that she cited was Don Black, who explicitly said Paul is not "one of them". The scales of justice could tip on that alone.   

Since Heffernan saw fit to post about Paul’s ‘extensive ties’ to racism instead of his extensive abilities to raise more funds than any other Republican, I suppose I should explain that Paul is in a wonderful position to retain the most expensive libel lawyers on the planet.

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2007 Grizzle Griz, all rights reserved.
Published: Monday, December 24, 2007
Last modified: Monday, December 24, 2007

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