Looking at the Washington Post and Rare, one has to wonder if today is Lie about Ron Paul in Headlines Day.
First, the Washington Post published an article with the headline “Ron Paul thinks drug use is rampant inside prisons. He’s wrong.” That is a rather provocative claim. But, the claim is not at all backed up by the article. Paul, who is the chairman and founder of RPI, is quoted in the article’s first sentence:
In his final speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Ron Paul opined that reducing access to drugs in society was hopeless because “the authorities can’t even keep drugs out of prison.”
Of course, saying that drugs cannot be kept out of prison is not the same as saying drug use is rampant in prison.
The article presents statistics suggesting people dramatically reduce their drug use while in prison. Yet, the article fails to mention an obvious reason for any reduction in drug use in prison: Drugs cost money, and people tend to have less access to money to pay for drugs while they are in prison.
Prisoners may also seek out creative alternatives to alter their consciousness in prison that both are more affordable than the drugs they would be able to purchase should they have income and are not discoverable in prison drug tests.
Next, Rare published an article today titled, “Ron Paul had the best plan to save the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls.” That is intriguing. What is Paul’s plan? If you read the article, you find out that it is the article’s author W. James Antle III—not Paul—who has the supposed best plan.
After mentioning Paul’s US House of Representatives bill HR 3037 from October of 2001 that would have authorized issuing letters of marque and reprisal targeted in response to attacks in the United States a month earlier, Antle opines that the marque and reprisal approach “may be more appropriate to the situation in Nigeria” even though Antle concedes Boko Haram does not even “directly threaten U.S. vital interests.” Stepping things up, Antle promotes the US government also use marque and reprisal against other groups around the world as well. Here is Antle’s proposal in his own words:
Letters of marque and reprisal are clearly insufficient for dealing with state-sponsored terrorism or acts of war carried out by nations. But they could be a solution to dealing with criminal bands like Boko Haram. And with any luck, they could strike a blow against smaller groups of terrorists and pirates at a fraction of the cost of war.
Despite what people may infer from the misleading headline, Paul, who is known for supporting a noninterventionist foreign policy, has not endorsed Antle’s proposal.
