What a bizarre article about Dr. Paul from the National Journal! Beginning from the title, the piece read like something from a high school newspaper.
Does a publication playing the role of the grown-up voice on Capitol Hill really publish a piece titled “Ron Paul Is Putin’s New Best Friend“?
And it goes downhill from there.
In the article, author Lucia Graves starts by accusing Dr. Paul of “blaming America first” because in his weekly column on Sunday he pointed out that we have seen this movie before: the US government has brought us to war (Iraq, Libya, etc) and nearly brought us to war (Syria) on information it swore was the absolute, indisputable truth at the time but which turned out to be lies and propaganda.
She had not heard of this before?
Maybe this will refresh her memory.
Paul cautioned skepticism about Obama and Kerry’s claims that they know exactly what happened with the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 before the investigation had even begun, much less concluded.
After all, they assured us they were certain that Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack on Ghouta in Syria last summer. They had all the evidence, they swore, but they couldn’t show the rest of us. And it turns out they lied.
Paul’s crime, it seems, is that the Russian media re-published his article which suggested that we wait to blame Russia (or Ukraine, or the rebels) until an investigation can be concluded.
Here is what Dr. Paul wrote that was so outrageous to her:
[i]t is entirely possible that the Obama administration and the US media has it right this time, and Russia or the separatists in eastern Ukraine either purposely or inadvertently shot down this aircraft. The real point is, it’s very difficult to get accurate information so everybody engages in propaganda. At this point it would be unwise to say the Russians did it, the Ukrainian government did it, or the rebels did it. Is it so hard to simply demand a real investigation?
Because the Russian media re-published the article, Paul was “Putin’s best friend.”
His other great crime, this writer asserts, is that his piece was devoid of conspiracy theory! That made it so cleverly seductive!
She wrote:
Politically, it’s a much sounder line of argument for protecting Russia from blame than what’s being reported on Russian TV (much of which is funded by the Kremlin), where conspiracies theories abound.
Yes how dare he stick to facts!
Sticking to facts, avoiding outlandish conspiracy theories, and cautioning against taking the word of the US government on matters of foreign policy make Dr. Paul “Putin’s best friend,” she avers:
With his cool, dispassionate rhetoric, Paul seems to be just about the best voice for Putin’s interests anywhere—and better, surely, than Kremlin TV.
Is this how serious journalists write? Ironically, it reads more like a denunciation piece in some 1950s publication of the Bulgarian Communist Central Committee: “Comrade Borissov’s lack of deception made him all the more suspicious!”
Does anyone need more explanation as to why people are abandoning the mainstream media in droves?
